Since the 1980s, International Political Economy (IPE) as a discipline was preoccupied with how international economic organizationsâsuch as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the OECDâfacilitated and imposed an ambitious project of creating a global economy in which states would be mere locations for global commodity chains, and be at the mercy of institutional investors who are able to transfer money across borders instantaneously, destabilizing whole societies (GĂ©linas 2000). The organizations referred to the process as âglobalizationâ and as a reflection of traditional free trade theories and promised that the proposed policies such as deregulation, liberalization, austerity, tax cuts, privatization, and capital mobility would solve the debt crisis and economic stagnation (Paquin 2008). Given that the main goal of these policies has been to shift power from the public to the private, the neo-Gramscian perspective used the term âprojectâ to describe neoliberal globalization (Carrol 2007, p. 36; Gill 1994; GĂ©linas 2000; Overbeek 2004). That there was a coherent and interrelated set of policies has now been recognized even by IMF economists (Ostry et al. 2016). The key goal of this project was to reduce state intervention in markets and to encourage deep integration into the larger global economy based on existing economic specialization (Rodrik 2011). While earlier, states were encouraged to improve their standing in the global division of labor through more protectionist industrial and welfare policies, now these were denounced as inefficient and responsible for stagflation and debt. As neoliberal globalization was resisted by a whole array of counter-hegemonic movements but also took hold in countries at different times (Carroll 2007; Munck 2006), the project shifted in scope and ambition. All of which explains the unevenness of its application and the different national trajectories.
The main story of this ground-breaking book is that the neoliberal globalization project was not only facilitated or supported by economic but also by religious actors while other religious actors resisted or at least sought to mitigate some of the more egregious effects of neoliberal globalization. The crucial and important insight of the book is that it shows how religious activists are a constitutive part of neoliberal globalization but also of its contestation. While most religious studies researchers analyze how neoliberalism has changed religion (see for example Martikainen and Gauthier 2016) the novel proposition of this book is that religious activists were central to the very creation of neoliberal globalization, especially in the United States. A further major argument is that a large majority of religious activism is actually geared toward the direct or indirect support of a market economy. Following a cultural studies perspective from religious studies, an interpretivist and neo-Gramscian approach from IPE, âReligions in a global economyâ proposes the disaggregation of religious traditions into reactionary fundamentalist vs reformist and progressive religious activism as a starting point for the study of religions in IPE. This perspective was crucial for the research in this book in that it allowed me to highlight how religious activists align with the political force field of their respective societies, and their global and national context when they enter politics and make claims based on specific interpretations of their own religious tradition.
After forty years of neoliberal globalization, we need to distinguish different periods (Davies 2016, p. 124ff). There was an initial preparatory stage between 1971 and 1989, when the project was pushed onto societies by the Thatcher and Reagan governments, and through structural adjustment policies in the Global South due to the debt crisis often after military coups. The second period was the globalization and full-scale application of neoliberalism after the end of the Cold War (1989). This period culminated with Chinaâs entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. In this period, a more âprogressiveâ neoliberalism under Clinton and Blair emerged which was more focused on creating global governance mechanisms to manage globalization (Fraser 2016) but the new constitutionalism according to Gill (1995) still implemented a disciplinary form of neoliberalism even under this more âprogressiveâ version. The International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (created in 1995) were all focused on implementing different aspects of the neoliberal agendaâto create equal access for goods and services and to create common standards for firms and banks in order to fashion a global marketplace (Wade 2003; Rodrik 2011). These processes generated a planetary economic system, and a limited form of political integration governing it, based not only on great powers but also on international organizations and a host of civil society organizations (McGrew 2014). In the history of state-building, this is a tremendous achievement, given that the political and economic integration of the whole world in one economic system had never before been attempted. It created a global middle class, increased economic power in Asia, and to a lesser extent in Africa and Latin America, leading to speculation about a multipolar order. The third period of neoliberal globalization started in 2008 and saw austerity now also applied to countries of the center. There was something paradoxical after the Great Financial Crisis: while the general sense was that the economic model had failed, the political responsibility was put on the states that had to bail out the banks; bail-outs that were financed by austerity programs for the general population while the bonus payments for bankers were largely left untouched; a fact commented upon critically even by conservatives (Moore 2011).
Today, the problems and contradictions involved in creating a truly global economy threaten to undermine the project in its entirety, as happened already in the 1930s. Inequality, both globally and within nations, is at levels not seen since the 1930s, when the first market-based globalization came to an end and led to the Great Depression, the Second World War and genocide (Milanovic 2016; Ruggie 1982). Financial crises have increased in number, severity, and geographical scope, with the 2008 financial crisis nearly threatening the survival of the global economy itself (Tooze 2018). Despite progress in terms of poverty reduction and other measures through the United Nationsâ Millennium Goals, there is now evidence of backsliding, with extreme forms of poverty increasing again. The high or even increasing number of fragile and failing states has led to an increase in migration, especially refugee migration; and there are still about 800 million starving people worldwide. In the developed world, the increase in inequality has been accompanied by wage stagnation since the 1970s and a rise in household debt, leaving many people poor despite working full-time. Suicides among older white men and mental health problems are on the rise while life expectancy in the United States is decliningâsymptoms of inequality and its consequences (Wilkinson and Picket 2011). In addition, the climate emergency, the extinction crisis, and the job crisis created by the fourth industrial revolution which will also increase inequality, add several additional layers of complications (OECD 2014, p. 18). Global governance mechanisms have not developed to deal with these complex issues and at the national level, the political processes have been captured by the power elites and democratic processes are under threat (Shipman et al. 2018; Engelen et al. 2012; Moore 2011).
Since the 1980s, these dysfunctions in the global economy have led to the creation of left- and right-wing populist movements. The left populists were first to protest against global economic restructuring; their protests culminated in the creation of the World Social Forum (WSF) in 2001 in a challenge to the Davos World Economic Forum (Ayres 2004). The latter is a meeting place of the global power elite (Carroll 2007). The creation of the WSF came after a decade of realization among activists that economic globalization creates problems for all new social movements and is an obstacle to womenâs rights, the peace movement, the environmental movement, and the civil rights movement (Lynch 1998). These movements consequently demanded that the rules governing the economy be reformed with regard to trade, debt, investment, and the environment. Their protests led to the creation of debt forgiveness programs by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, but otherwise were largely ineffective. The 2008 financial crisis led to a revival of the progressive movement in the Occupy Wall Street protests, which pushed the idea of a wealth tax onto the larger agenda. In addition, the Green New Deal may be sign of things to come. Today, even defenders of the globalization project question whether it might have gone too far (Rodrik 2011; Soros 1997). Economists from the IMF have admitted that neoliberal policie...