Neoliberalism in the contemporary era, is the key issue bolstering the unequal power relationships and wealth inequality that drives political discontent, which now engulfs the western world. Presently, to comprehend the origins of neoliberalism, the appeal to history must begin with a powerful simplification: colonialism. Colonialism is the subjugation by physical and psychological force of one culture by another through military conquest of territory and caricaturing the relation between the two cultures (Marks, 2002). A dominant perception under the European countries was the belief among Europeans that non-European native people or colonial subjects were “backward” and merely trapped in their tradition, unable to move forward and progress.
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As Robert Marks has made clear, the concept of the rise of the West provides support twofold: One as a rationale and justification for colonialism and two, as a storyline that purports to explain not just the modern world, but why it is defined by primarily European features. Marks elaborates to illuminate that the idea behind the “rise of the west” is actually quite simple and emerged shortly after the Spanish conquest of the Americas, during the Italian Renaissance of the sixteenth century. The Spanish and the rest of the west, utterly ignorant of western disease wiping out nearly 90 percent of the central Mexican population to western diseases such as smallpox and influenza, allowed Spain and subsequently the rest of Europe, to first attribute their superiority to their Christian religion. Then, as the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries transmogrified the contemporary world, classical British political economists (Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo) created a “new page” for the narrative rise of the West: the ideas of capitalist development as “progress,” the West as “progressive,” and Asia (and by implication, Africa and Latin America, too) as …show more content…
The Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank and International Monetary Fund) maintained stable exchanges of currency between trading countries (McMichael, 2016). To accomplish this stability, the American dollar served as the international reserve currency, with the multilateral financial institutions and the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank making disbursements in dollars. At the same time, fixed currency exchanges stabilized countries’ domestic interest rates and, therefore, their economies. Governments could thus implement macroeconomic policy "without interference from the ebb and flow of international capital movements or flights of hot money," said J. M. Keynes, father of Keynesianism and architect of the postwar world economic order (McMichael, 2016). Although, as the mid 1970’s approached, Keynesian policies began to break down and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, creating an optimal venue for neoliberal ideas to enter the mainstream. Elements of neoliberalism, especially in its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the United States (U.S.) and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain. Regrettably, once Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took control, the bulk of the Washington consensus
As Robert Marks has made clear, the concept of the rise of the West provides support twofold: One as a rationale and justification for colonialism and two, as a storyline that purports to explain not just the modern world, but why it is defined by primarily European features. Marks elaborates to illuminate that the idea behind the “rise of the west” is actually quite simple and emerged shortly after the Spanish conquest of the Americas, during the Italian Renaissance of the sixteenth century. The Spanish and the rest of the west, utterly ignorant of western disease wiping out nearly 90 percent of the central Mexican population to western diseases such as smallpox and influenza, allowed Spain and subsequently the rest of Europe, to first attribute their superiority to their Christian religion. Then, as the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries transmogrified the contemporary world, classical British political economists (Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo) created a “new page” for the narrative rise of the West: the ideas of capitalist development as “progress,” the West as “progressive,” and Asia (and by implication, Africa and Latin America, too) as …show more content…
The Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank and International Monetary Fund) maintained stable exchanges of currency between trading countries (McMichael, 2016). To accomplish this stability, the American dollar served as the international reserve currency, with the multilateral financial institutions and the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank making disbursements in dollars. At the same time, fixed currency exchanges stabilized countries’ domestic interest rates and, therefore, their economies. Governments could thus implement macroeconomic policy "without interference from the ebb and flow of international capital movements or flights of hot money," said J. M. Keynes, father of Keynesianism and architect of the postwar world economic order (McMichael, 2016). Although, as the mid 1970’s approached, Keynesian policies began to break down and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, creating an optimal venue for neoliberal ideas to enter the mainstream. Elements of neoliberalism, especially in its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the United States (U.S.) and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain. Regrettably, once Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took control, the bulk of the Washington consensus