Introduction

Abstract

Is economic globalization irresistible? Its agenda of insulating markets from politics, associated with the rise of neoliberal politics, has taken root in almost every part of the world. It is not that states simply have disintegrated under the excessive weight of market ideology. States continue to perform critical functions in maintaining public infrastructures, facilitating economic flows, and policing dangers of various sorts. Rather, the principal aim of economic globalization appears to have been to establish mechanisms of security for property, financiers and investors, shielding them from consequences issuing out of democratic processes deemed out-of-sync with the imagined or expressed interests of powerful economic interests. Democratic processes yielding results inconsistent with those interests are labelled extreme or declared out of bounds. Democratic processes, moreover, must get out of the way where markets fail and business firms require backstopping by states, as happened in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis.