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4 Neo-liberalism imposed We cannot fully understand societal and economic development in Serbia without assessing the role of external agencies. Most notably, the international financial institutions (IFIs) have influenced economic policy in both the old Yugoslavia and then Serbia for more than three decades. We have shown elsewhere the debt burden gathered in Yugoslavia under the Tito and Marković regimes and how commentators have suggested that this debt burden was a major cause of the subsequent break-up of Yugoslavia into separate states (Woodward, 1995
The popular cultural ubiquity of the zombie in the years following the Second World War is testament to that monster‘s remarkable ability to adapt to the social anxieties of the age. From the red-scare zombie-vampire hybrids of I Am Legend (1954) onwards, the abject alterity of the ambulant dead has been deployed as a means of interrogating everything from the war in Vietnam (Night of the Living Dead, 1968) to the evils of consumerism (Dawn of the Dead, 1978). This essay explores how, in the years since 9/11, those questions of ethnicity and gender, regionality and power that have haunted the zombie narrative since 1968 have come to articulate the social and cultural dislocations wrought by free-market economics and the shock doctrines that underscore the will to global corporatism. The article examines these dynamics through consideration of the figure of the zombie in a range of contemporary cultural texts drawn from film, television, graphic fiction, literature and gaming, each of which articulates a sense not only neo-liberalism itself has failed but simply wont lie down and die. It is therefore argued that in an age of corporate war and economic collapse, community breakdown and state-sanctioned torture, the zombie apocalypse both realises and works through the failure of the free market, its victims shuffling through the ruins, avatars of the contemporary global self.
This book considers the underlying causes of the end of social democracy's golden age. It argues that the cross-national trend in social democratic parties since the 1970s has been towards an accommodation with neo-liberalism and a corresponding dilution of traditional social democratic commitments. The book looks at the impact of the change in economic conditions on social democracy in general, before examining the specific cases of Germany, Sweden and Australia. It examines the ideological crisis that engulfed social democracy. The book also looks at the post-1970 development of social policy, its fiscal implications and economic consequences in three European countries. It considers the evolution of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) from its re-emergence as a significant political force during the 1970s until the present day under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The book also examines the evolution of the Swedish model in conjunction with social democratic reformism and the party's relations to the union movement. It explores the latest debate about what the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) stands for. The SPD became the role model for programmatic modernisation for the European centre-left. The book considers how British socialist and social democratic thought from the late nineteenth century to the present has treated the objective of helping people to fulfil their potential, talents and ambitions. It aims to contribute to a broader conversation about the future of social democracy by considering ways in which the political thought of 'third way' social democracy might be radicalised for the twenty-first century.
In this book scholars from across the globe investigate changes in ‘society’ and ‘nation’ over time through the lens of immunisation. Such an analysis unmasks the idea of vaccination as a simple health technology and makes visible the social and political complexities in which vaccination programmes are embedded. The collection of essays gives a comparative overview of immunisation at different times in widely different parts of the world and under different types of political regime. Core themes in the chapters include immunisation as an element of state formation; citizens’ articulation of seeing (or not seeing) their needs incorporated into public health practice; allegations that development aid is inappropriately steering third-world health policies; and an ideological shift that treats vaccines as marketable and profitable commodities rather than as essential tools of public health. Throughout, the authors explore relationships among vaccination, vaccine-making, and the discourses and debates on citizenship and nationhood that have accompanied mass vaccination campaigns. The thoughtful investigations of vaccination in relation to state power, concepts of national identify (and sense of solidarity) and individual citizens’ sense of obligation to self and others are completed by an afterword by eminent historian of vaccination William Muraskin. Reflecting on the well-funded global initiatives which do not correspond to the needs of poor countries, Muraskin asserts that an elite fraternity of self-selected global health leaders has undermined the United Nations system of collective health policy determination by launching global disease eradication and immunisation programmes over the last twenty years.
In Cairo collages, the large-scale political, economic, and social changes in Egypt brought on by the 2011 revolution are set against the declining fortunes of a single apartment building in a specific Cairo neighbourhood. The violence in Tahrir Square and Mohamed Mahmud Street; the post-January euphoric moment; the increasing militarisation of urban life; the flourishing of dystopian novels set in Cairo; the neo-liberal imaginaries of Dubai and Singapore as global models; gentrification and evictions in poor neighbourhoods; the forthcoming new administrative capital for Egypt – all are narrated in parallel to the ‘little’ story of the adventures and misfortunes of everyday interactions in a middle-class building in the neighbourhood of Doqi.
, neo-liberalism seemed to yet again defy its contradictions. It was able to overcome the paradox of belief in the free market and the minimal state and the actual practice of major state intervention to prop up collapsing financial systems. Moreover, the costs borne by states have been subjected to what Blyth ( 2013 :73) describes as ‘the greatest bait and switch in modern history’. Financial market failure has been transmuted into a problem of state over-spending, for which there is no alternative cure but austerity, with Ireland again featuring as a prime example
redistribution, quantitative easing, a tempering of austerity measures and the defence of the welfare state have been consistently identified as part of a centre-left, social democratic response to the crisis that could and/ or should be adopted as a means of tackling the clear examples of market failure witnessed over the past decade. This, so the argument goes, represents a viable alternative to the current range of policy responses – which essentially (especially in the European context) amounts to a neo-liberal remedy to cure a crisis caused by neo-liberalism. On the other
strong, dirigiste (interventionist) state, since then much has changed. Indeed, in the face of what is often seen as the worldwide neo-liberal onslaught that has taken place since the 1980s, many specialists of France label the succeeding period a ‘retreat from dirigisme ’ ( Gualmini and Schmidt 2013 : 347). However, too often research has tended to both overstate the mutations in societal structures and modalities of political work that have actually taken place and, moreover, attribute this change directly to the rise of neo-liberalism ( Culpepper et al ., 2006
universalism and the promotion of democracy – is governed by its colonialist impetus and bent on suppressing the Arabo-Islamic humanist tradition; and second, an Islamic reactive religious fundamentalism that goes counter to that which constituted this tradition – that is, its openness to, and translation of, other cultures. A cautionary remark is needed against the caricature – now so prevalent now in the West – demonizing this tradition. This reactive religious fundamentalism developed in tandem with globalization and arguably as a consequence of neo-liberalism. As has
’Toole in Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sunk the Celtic Tiger (2009) that bad political culture and bad public morality were to blame.1 Such narratives, O’Riain argues, really tell us little: the standard account they present tends to reduce Irish political and economic failures to the greed, opportunism and incompetence of individuals. Neither does he think that blaming neo-liberalism – a term that O’Riain for the most part avoids – somehow explains the Irish case.2 Instead he focuses on the characteristics of Ireland’s political economy and its often