in the European Union, where neoliberal ideology, corporate privilege and market orthodoxy were embedded ever more deeply into each treaty revision, the result was ruinous. The combination of a liberalised banking system with an undemocratic, lopsided and deflationary currency union that critics (on both left and right in this case) had always warned risked breaking apart without large-scale tax-and-spend transfers was an economic disaster waiting to happen. The crash of 2008 then provided the trigger for what would become the pulverising economic and social crisis of the eurozone.30
The meltdown at the heart of the global economic system, described by Bank of England governor Mervyn King as the worst financial crisis in capitalism’s history, turned a powerful case against the neoliberal order into an unanswerable one. It was after all the deregulation of financial markets, the financialisation of every part of the economy, the pumping up of credit to fill the gap left by stagnating wages and the loss of state leverage from mass privatisation that triggered the crash and turned it into a prolonged crisis – and all these flowed from the heart of the neoliberal system and its ever more dysfunctional operation.
The governing elites who had championed it, including King, had been shown to be disastrously wrong: not only about the economic and social impact of the ‘free market’, but about how it actually functioned in reality. Critics understood well before the crisis became a crash that its failure would bring about an ideological sea change, while the political and corporate establishments would throw everything into the attempt to put back together a broken model with which their own interests were so tightly bound up.31
The case against neoliberal capitalism had been overwhelmingly made on the left, as had been the opposition to the US-orchestrated wars of invasion and occupation across the Muslim world. But whereas the political right had for decades not hesitated to proclaim ideological victory even on the shakiest grounds, the left was strikingly slow to capitalise on its vindication over the two central global controversies of the early twenty-first century. That’s hardly surprising, perhaps, given the loss of confidence that flowed from the defeats and retreats of the left in the late twentieth century – including confidence in its own social alternatives. But driving home the lessons of these epoch-shaping developments – the disaster of the West’s wars of intervention and the failure of its economic system – was essential if they were not to be continued, repackaged or repeated.
The Iraq and Afghanistan occupations may have been widely understood to have been bloody and calamitous failures. But the war on terror was still pursued and even expanded across the wider Middle East and Africa, in covert operations and campaigns of civilian-slaughtering drone attacks from Pakistan to Somalia. Despite Western public scepticism or hostility towards armed adventures in the Arab and Muslim world, the Nato powers intervened militarily to support rebel forces in Libya and played the decisive role in the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime. The operation was carried out in the name of protecting civilians, who then died in their thousands in a Nato-escalated civil war, while conflict-wracked Syria was threatened with Western intervention and Iran with all-out military attack by Israel or the US.
And while the free-market model had been discredited, it was very far from being abandoned. Rather the opposite. Latin America had turned against neoliberalism and China demonstrated the powerful role of publicly owned banks and enterprises in driving growth against free-market dogma. But across the Western world, governments used the fallout from the crisis, shock doctrine-style, to try to reconstruct and further entrench the neoliberal system.32 With the alibi of austerity to pay off the costs of slump and bank bailouts, not only were jobs, pay and social benefits cut as never before, but privatisation and corporate-controlled markets were extended still further into the remnants of the public realm. From Lisbon to London, the rollback of the state that had fuelled the crisis was accelerated still further.
Being right was, of course, never going to be enough to shift the entrenched vested interests that depended on rebuilding the status quo. What was needed was political and industrial organisation and social pressure strong enough to turn the tables of power. Public revulsion against a discredited elite and its failed social and economic project steadily deepened in the aftermath of the 2008 crash. And as the burden of the crisis was loaded onto the majority throughout the advanced capitalist world, and the gap between the richest and the rest grew ever wider, the spread of strikes and protests, along with electoral upheavals, demonstrated that pressure for genuine change had only just begun.
* * *
The seeds of the crisis in the economic and international system were sown in the 1990s; its unravelling in the following decade came in several distinct phases, which provide the framework for this book. The New World Order was given a liberal veneer by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and a retinue of European post-social-democratic camp followers. The last years of the twentieth century marked the high tide of both free-market globalisation and liberal intervention, which so strikingly echoed the liberal imperialism of the late nineteenth century. Privatisation and deregulation were let loose across the globe, from Moscow to Mumbai, while corporate-tailored triangulation set tight limits on redistribution and social reform in what had once been the heartlands of Western social democracy.33
In the aftermath of the catastrophic Western-sponsored breakup of Yugoslavia, the Anglo-American appetite to intervene militarily around the world under the banner of human rights grew steadily, while a murderous sanctions regime was enforced on Iraq over ‘weapons of mass destruction’ it no longer possessed. Liberal interventionism reached its hubristic peak in Nato’s self-proclaimed ‘humanitarian war’ against Yugoslavia over the rebellion in Kosovo in 1999. The Nato bombing campaign, without UN support, increased both the scale of ethnic cleansing and repression it was supposed to stop, and only secured Serb withdrawal through Russian pressure. But it was hailed as a great success by its architects (and created a precedent for the illegal invasion of Iraq four years later).34 So was the British intervention in Sierra Leone’s civil war in 2000, which Blair insisted had saved ‘democracy’, though the decisive role in bringing the war to an end two years later was played by the UN and regional African forces.35
At home, Blair and Clinton’s lurch away from ‘tax-and-spend’ social democracy, their embrace of private wealth and corporate power and refusal to act against escalating inequality laid the ground for a crisis of political representation. Even as New Labour carried out modest redistribution and boosted spending on health and education, privatisation and competition were promoted as the only route to reform, while working-class living standards stagnated. With communism officially declared dead and class politics banished from the mainstream, only the rise of the anti-corporate movement, spasms of protest against Europe’s political establishment and the first political eruptions in Latin America gave any sense that there might be a political or social alternative at all.36
That was the context in which the war on terror was unleashed in 2001. Far from coming out of a clear blue sky, as claimed at the time, the 9/11 attacks were the product of decades of US and Western military intervention and support for client dictatorships in the Middle East; unwavering sponsorship of indefinite Israeli occupation; the US and British-led asphyxiation of Iraq; and the garrisoning of US troops in Saudi Arabia (as well as blowback from the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan). Those were the grievances that attracted recruits to al-Qaida and sympathy across the region. But for the US Republican hawks, the neoconservative moment had arrived: an opportunity to give a global demonstration of US ‘full spectrum dominance’ and unilateral military power, and to impose its will on a recalcitrant Arab and Muslim world.
The invasion of Afghanistan was launched on a wave of liberal interventionist rhetoric about democracy, women’s rights and development. The ease of the Taliban’s overthrow fed Western triumphalism, while supporters of the new imperialism tried to rehabilitate the original model – from right-wing historians like Niall Ferguson to New Labour politicians such as Gordon Brown.37 But the slaughter of Afghan civilians and restoration of warlord rule quickly exposed the campaign’s grim
