Globalists

1. Neoliberalism seeks to encase markets with laws, not liberate them from the state.

The neoliberal proj ect focused on designing institutions— not to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy, to create a framework to contain often-irrational human be hav ior, and to reorder the world after empire as a space of competing states in which borders fulfill a necessary function.

Enclosing the market. Contrary to popular belief, neoliberals did not advocate for a completely unregulated, self-correcting market that exists in a vacuum. Instead, they realized that the market is a fragile construct that cannot survive on its own. It requires a robust, protective legal and institutional framework to shield it from political interference and democratic redistribution.

Inoculating against democracy. The core of twentieth-century neoliberal theory is the design of extra-economic conditions to safeguard capitalism. Rather than shrinking the state to nothingness, neoliberals sought to repurpose state power to enforce market rules. Key institutional mechanisms include:

• Insulating central banks and judiciaries from voter pressure
• Establishing international investment treaties to protect private property
• Creating parallel legal systems that bypass national courts

A constitutional framework. This perspective redefines neoliberalism as a project of active statecraft and legal engineering. The goal is to construct an "economic constitution" that places the rules of property and contract beyond the reach of democratic majorities. By doing so, the state becomes the ultimate guarantor of market discipline rather than an instrument of social welfare.

2. The Geneva School focused on global order rather than national laissez-faire.

Globalizing the ordoliberal princi ple of “thinking in orders,” their proj ect of thinking in world orders offered a set of proposals designed to defend the world economy from a democracy that became global only in the twentieth century— producing a state of affairs and a set of challenges that their pre de ces sors, the classical liberals, could never have predicted.

Ordoglobalism over Chicago. While the Chicago School of Milton Friedman focused on domestic deregulation and monetary policy, the "Geneva School" looked at the world as a single, integrated system. This group of Central European thinkers, including Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Röpke, and Friedrich Hayek, realized that capitalism required a global framework to survive. They shifted the focus of neoliberalism from national laissez-faire to the creation of a supranational legal order.

A Central European perspective. Coming from countries without vast domestic markets or secure empires, these thinkers were uniquely sensitive to global interdependence. They viewed the world economy as a delicate, unified entity that could easily be shattered by national protectionism. Their intellectual journey led them to design global institutions that could:

• Enforce uniform rules of property and contract across borders
• Limit the capacity of sovereign nations to disrupt trade
• Insulate global commerce from domestic political pressures

The spiritual capital. Geneva, as the home of the League of Nations and later the WTO, became the geographic and intellectual hub for this movement. The Geneva School transposed the German ordoliberal concept of the "economic constitution" to the global scale. Their project was not to eliminate the state, but to bind all states to a higher, supranational economic law.

3. Modern capitalism operates in a doubled world of political states (imperium) and private property (dominium).

Over, under and beside the state- political borders of what appeared to be a purely po liti cal international law between states, spread a free, i.e., non- state sphere of economy permeating every thing: a global economy.

The dual spheres. Drawing on Roman law and the insights of Carl Schmitt, neoliberals conceptualized the world as being divided into two overlapping realms. The first is imperium, the world of political states, where governments rule over citizens within bounded territories. The second is dominium, the world of property, where individuals own assets, land, and capital that flow freely across those same borders.

Preserving the balance. The primary objective of neoliberal globalism is to maintain a strict separation between these two spheres. If the political realm of imperium is allowed to encroach upon dominium, the result is economic nationalism, expropriation, and the collapse of the global division of labor. To prevent this, neoliberals sought to:

• Ensure that political borders do not obstruct the flow of capital
• Protect private property from being seized by sovereign governments
• Establish international laws that treat foreign investors as immune to local politics

A global orange. This doubled world means that while the earth is politically fragmented into many nations, it must remain economically unified as a single market. The most important border is not the one that divides nations, but the one that separates the political state from the private economy. Neoliberalism is the project of policing and maintaining this vital boundary.

4. Decolonization and the end of empire triggered the neoliberal quest for global governance.

Decolonization, I argue, was central to the emergence of the neoliberal model of world governance.

The post-imperial crisis. The collapse of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and British empires in the twentieth century created a profound crisis for global capitalism. Under the old imperial systems, free trade and property rights were guaranteed by imperial might and the gold standard. The rise of national self-determination threatened to carve the world into self-sufficient, protectionist enclaves.

Taming the new nations. As new nations emerged across the Global South, they sought not just political independence, but economic autonomy. They used their sovereign power to erect tariff walls, nationalize foreign assets, and demand a redistribution of global wealth. Neoliberals realized they needed to find a way to:

• Grant political independence while stripping nations of economic sovereignty
• Replace the physical coercion of empire with the legal coercion of global treaties
• Bind postcolonial states to the discipline of the international market

Decolonizing without autonomy. The neoliberal solution was to decouple political citizenship from economic ownership. While new nations could have their own flags, languages, and cultural policies, they had to remain embedded in a global institutional framework that protected foreign capital. In this way, decolonization was managed to ensure that the global division of labor remained intact.

5. The global economy is an ineffable system of signals that cannot be planned or represented by numbers.

Hayek began to realize in the 1930s that the dispersal of knowledge throughout an entire market economy was so complete that no individual could ever gain a functional overview of it.

The limits of knowledge. In the 1930s, neoliberals abandoned the belief that the global economy could be fully measured, mapped, or planned. Friedrich Hayek argued that economic knowledge is inherently dispersed among millions of individuals and can never be centralized in a single planning board. The market is not a machine to be engineered, but a spontaneous, self-organizing system of communication.

The sublime market. Because the global economy is too complex for the human mind to comprehend, any attempt to plan it from above is a "pretense of knowledge" that leads to disaster. Instead of trying to measure the economy with statistics and business barometers, neoliberals focused on protecting the price mechanism. Prices act as essential signals that:

• Transmit vital information about scarcity and demand across the globe
• Allow individuals to adjust their behavior without central direction
• Coordinate the activities of millions of disconnected economic actors

A negative theology. This insight turned neoliberalism away from economics and toward statecraft. If the economy is sublime and unknowable, the task of the intellectual is not to plan economic outcomes, but to design the legal framework that protects the price system. The global economy must be encased in rules that ensure its signals can be transmitted without political distortion.

6. Supranational federations serve to "deplan" and discipline the interventionist nation-state.

What we need and can hope to achieve is not more power in the hands of irresponsible international economic authorities, but, on the contrary, a superior po liti cal power which can hold the economic interests in check.

The federalist solution. In the 1930s and 1940s, neoliberals like Lionel Robbins and Friedrich Hayek proposed supranational federations as the ultimate tool to neutralize economic nationalism. They envisioned a "double government" where national states retained control over cultural and local affairs, while a central, federal authority governed the economy. This structure was designed to strip national governments of their power to plan, tax, or regulate.

The mechanism of deplanning. By opening borders to the free flow of goods, capital, and labor, a federation subjects all member states to the relentless discipline of competition. If a state attempts to implement high taxes, social welfare programs, or labor protections, capital and businesses will simply migrate to more hospitable regions. This dynamic forces states to:

• Dismantle national marketing boards and monopolies
• Roll back social services and welfare benefits to remain competitive
• Submit to the anonymous discipline of the global market

Too big to plan. A large, diverse federation is politically impossible to plan from the center because its citizens will never agree on a single plan for redistribution. Therefore, the federal government is restricted to a purely negative role: saying "no" to trade barriers and protecting private property. Federation becomes a constitutional straightjacket that locks in free-market principles.

7. Neoliberals pioneered "xenos rights" to protect foreign capital from democratic sovereignty.

Exchange control in time of peace should be considered an act of aggression and a violation of human rights in international law.

The rights of capital. In the postwar era, neoliberals actively opposed the expansion of social and economic human rights, such as the right to employment or healthcare, which they saw as socialist delusions. Instead, they championed a parallel regime of "xenos rights"—the individual right of a foreign investor to safe passage, unmolested ownership, and the free movement of capital across any territory.

Outlawing capital controls. Neoliberals like Philip Cortney and Michael Heilperin argued that the right to emigrate is meaningless unless individuals can also take their property and capital with them. They sought to elevate the freedom of capital flight to the status of a fundamental human right. To secure this, they worked with the International Chamber of Commerce to:

• Draft international codes to protect foreign investments from expropriation
• Outlaw exchange controls and capital restrictions in national constitutions
• Establish bilateral investment treaties that bypass local courts

A capitalist Magna Carta. This legal offensive culminated in the creation of the modern bilateral investment treaty regime. By granting corporations and foreign investors the right to sue sovereign governments in international tribunals, neoliberals successfully insulated private property from democratic oversight. The investor, rather than the citizen, became the primary rights-bearing subject of the global order.

8. Protecting the market requires constraining democracy and limiting the power of the masses.

If democracies do not limit their own powers, they will be destroyed.

The democratic threat. Neoliberals did not view democracy and capitalism as synonymous. In fact, they saw mass democracy as a constant threat to the market order, as it allowed organized interest groups, trade unions, and the working class to demand redistribution, price controls, and social safety nets. To protect the market, democracy had to be strictly constrained and subordinated to the rule of law.

Constrained democracy. In response to the rise of universal suffrage, neoliberals advocated for "constrained democracy" or "militant globalism." They argued that the power of majorities must be checked by constitutional limits that prevent them from interfering with the price mechanism or property rights. Key strategies to limit democratic power included:

• Implementing weighted franchise systems based on property or tax brackets
• Insulating economic policy-making from electoral politics
• Using supranational courts to override national legislation

The consumer's plebiscite. For neoliberals, the ultimate form of democracy was not the ballot box, but the marketplace. They contrasted the "political democracy" of voting, which they saw as biased toward collectivism, with the "consumer's democracy" of the market, where every penny spent represents a vote. In this view, wealth is the legitimate result of a continuous, global consumer plebiscite that must not be overturned by political majorities.

9. The World Trade Organization represents the ultimate realization of a global economic constitution.

The long intellectual prehistory of the high point of the Geneva School of neoliberalism shows that, at its origins, neoliberalism was not only a philosophy of free markets but also a blueprint for double government in capitalism’s doubled world.

The crowning victory. The creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 represented the culmination of the Geneva School's seventy-year intellectual project. The WTO succeeded where earlier international organizations had failed by establishing a binding, supranational legal framework that could enforce market discipline on sovereign states. It realized the ordoglobalist dream of an economic constitution for the world.

Enforcing the rules. Unlike the loose, diplomatic structure of the original GATT, the WTO was equipped with a powerful Dispute Settlement Body and Appellate Body that could authorize sanctions against nations that violated trade rules. This structure successfully insulated global commerce from domestic political pressures by:

• Overriding national health, safety, and environmental regulations that acted as trade barriers
• Enforcing intellectual property rights as basic individual rights globally
• Subjecting both rich and poor nations to the same strict trade disciplines

The crisis of legitimacy. Despite its structural success, the WTO's very visibility triggered a profound crisis of legitimacy, culminating in the Seattle protests of 1999. By placing the rules of the global economy so clearly above national sovereignty, the WTO exposed the undemocratic nature of the neoliberal project. The ongoing struggle over global trade rules shows that the conflict between the world economy and the world of nations remains unresolved.