Ban’s Ruling Ideas Reviewed by EU Visions
Ruling Ideas: How Global Neoliberalism Goes Local, the latest book by Cornel Ban, Assistant Professor of International Relations and Co-Director of the Global Economic Governance Initiative, was recently reviewed by EU Visions.
The review, entitled “Absorb, Co-opt and Recast: Global Neoliberalism’s Resilience Through Local Translation,” was published on March 3, 2017.
From the text of the review:
Ideas are important. If such sentence rightly seems the apogee of banality, in reality the study of why and especially how ideas are being translated from textbook theory into practical policy has often escaped political scientists, who more often than not focus on two more tangible aspects of policymaking, that is, on institutions and interests.
Already in their 1985 classic study of Keynesianism, which basically launched the new institutionalism, Margaret Weir and Theda Skocpol stressed the importance of how “policy-relevant intellectual innovations” are both influenced by “state structures and policy legacies” and at the same time they steer the “activities of politicians and officials”. However, going from words to deeds is easier said than done, and the systematic research of ideas is a daunting endeavour. Cornel Ban picks up the gauntlet by studying what he calls the “local translators” of global neoliberal economic scripts, who fundamentally alter these textbook paradigms not only to fit them to the domestic reality, but also shape the policies according to their Weltanschauung. Ban’s book proceeds in classical, yet sophisticated neo-institutionalist manner, trying to bridge its historical, rational and sociological branches.
First, it stresses the importance of historical legacies, which shape the pace of the transition to neoliberalism. Domestication is inherent to the local ideational legacies, where policymakers had different familiarity with the ancestors of modern neoliberal theory. Here the permeability of the state to foreign ideas, which is intimately linked with the degree of academic and intellectual freedom granted to individuals, is crucial.
Ruling Ideas challenges conventional explanations of the global diffusion of neoliberalism and emphasizes the agency of local translators. Ban theorizes and empirically tests for the first time the mechanisms that make neoliberal ideas become more radicalized in some countries and more moderate in others and examines how neoliberal hybrids survive crises.
The book covers the Franco period in Spain and the Ceausescu period in Romania, discusses the economic integration of these countries into the EU and continues through Europe’s Great Recession and the European debt crisis. The broad historical coverage enables a careful analysis of how neoliberalism rules in times of stability and crisis and under different political systems.
Cornel Ban is the author of ten peer-reviewed articles on economic policy strategies in Southern Europe, Eastern Europe and Latin America, professionals and economic policy, the politics of IMF fiscal policy advice and European financial crisis management. His most recent book was published by Oxford University Press and deals with the local adaptation and crisis resilience of global economic paradigms in Spain and Romania. Learn more about him here.