Tom Chodor

Donald Horne famously called Australia ‘the lucky country’. So how did we become the locked-up country and how might the future look different? Australia has changed enormously since Horne’s 1960s, but its response to the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates the enduring truth of his thesis that our ‘luck’ was undeserved and wouldn’t last. By closing its borders and imposing a nationally coordinated lockdown, Australia unexpectedly eliminated COVID-19 in 2020, achieving one of the world’s lowest excess mortality rates. But as governments proceeded to bungle key planks of the pandemic response, by mid-2021, Australia was ‘locked up’ – closed off to the world and fragmented along state and territory borders, with its major cities enduring repeated and extended lockdowns. It soon became clear that Australia’s regulatory state had let us down. But these failures were not inevitable, and we can manage future crises more successfully. In The Locked-up Country, political experts Tom Chodor and Shahar Hameiri identify the source of Australia’s recent challenges and suggest a better way forward

Chodor examines the struggles against neoliberal hegemony in Latin America, under the 'Pink Tide' of leftist governments. Utilizing a critical International Political Economy framework derived from the work of Antonio Gramsci, he looks at its two most prominent members – Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and Brazil under Lula and Dilma Rousseff. The author argues that Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution represents a counter-hegemonic project that seeks to construct a radical alternative to neoliberalism, while the Brazilian project is better understood as a passive revolution aiming to re-secure consent for neoliberal hegemony by making material and ideological concession to the Brazilian masses. Despite their differences, the two projects cooperate at the regional level, driving the process of regional integration that aims to make Latin America more politically, economically and ideologically autonomous in the neoliberal world order. The book suggests this process opens up opportunities for a fairer, more prosperous and more democratic Latin America in the 21st century, challenging American hegemony and its neoliberal project in doing so.

Mercosur has undergone numerous transformations, from a customs union to an organization promoting development and consulting civil society. Recently, there has been a backlash against such 'politicization', and an attempt to return Mercosur to its origins. At each of these phases, Mercosur was plagued by questions about its legitimacy and purpose, and its leaders reached out to different types of actors to legitimize it. This article argues that each phase of Mercosur's evolution represented the ascendancy of a constellation of social forces, which sought to shift the governance of particular issues beyond the national scope, to secure their interests. In this context, the different legitimation processes and changing actors involved in them represent different balances of forces within Mercosur. The article traces the evolution of Mercosur and its legitimation processes, identifying the social struggles behind them, and the different conceptions of legitimacy constructed and contested as part of this process.

The growing significance of rising powers has led to debates about their role in global economic governance, with expectations they will either challenge its neoliberal agenda or become ‘responsible stakeholders’. However, the reality is that the role of rising powers is inconsistent: in some areas they accept the neoliberal consensus, while in others they contest it. This article utilises the State Transformation Approach to explain the inconsistent positions of Brazil: its support for free trade at the WTO, and its contestation of capital account liberalisation at the IMF, followed by a reversal and acceptance of it after 2014. The article argues this inconsistency can only be understood by analysing the domestic context of foreign policymaking, particularly the fragmentation of its state and the balance of forces in its political economy. In relation to trade, the fragmentation of the state enabled the agro-export sector to dominate formulation of policy. In finance, on the other hand, the greater autonomy of policymakers, and a balance of forces favouring intervention enabled the promotion of capital controls. However, this was a contingent outcome of socio-political struggles, and once the balance of forces shifted from 2014, financial forces reasserted themselves provoking a return to the orthodoxy.

With global governance experiencing a democratic deficit, the G20's formalized engagement with civil society – the C20 – seems to be an anomaly. However, there is a gap between the G20's rhetoric and practice, with the C20 incorporating civil society organizations (CSOs) into the G20, while also limiting their ability to contribute to its agenda. This article attempts make sense of this gap by analysing the C20 through the modes of participation framework, arguing it represents an attempt to organize and manage social conflicts emerging from civil society, but do so in a way that constrains its ability to contest G20 policy. The article analyses the ways in which the C20 is designed to do so, as well as CSO strategies to overcome these constraints. While these strategies increase CSO's leverage and independence, their effectiveness remains shaped by G20 practices and the underlying political economy structures of the global economy.

The trans-pacific partnership (TPP) has been hailed as a bold step in trade diplomacy, a gold standard agreement which not only opens markets but also boosts labor and environmental protections. Despite its future being put in doubt by the US’ withdrawal, the TPP continues without it, touted as a ‘model’ agreement to shape trade politics in the coming years. To understand the rise and fall and rise of the TPP, this article analyses it through the framework of ‘new constitutionalism’: a set of judicial and institutional mechanisms that insulate transnational capital from democratic accountability, while also opening up new spaces for accumulation and co-opting resistance. Within this framework, the TPP is understood as an instrument of crisis management, attempting to preserve the rights of capital and stimulate accumulation in response to the post-2008 crisis, while also seeking to quell the backlash against free trade by addressing labor and environmental concerns. It is this duality, however, which undermines the success of the agreement. While on the one hand the TPP aims to foreclose progressive options for governance, at the same time, it opens up spaces from which neoliberal hegemony can be contested, empowering a diverse coalition to challenge the agreement.

This article analyses the sources of gridlock in the G20 since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). It engages with this question through Beeson and Bell's framework which identifies two processes of socialisation operating concurrently within the G20: hegemonic incorporation and collectivist cooperation. Whilst hegemonic incorporation seeks to socialise the rising Southern powers into the US-led world order, their inclusion over time drives the G20 towards more collective and cooperative forms of global governance. The article argues that the GFC has altered this equation in two ways: by accelerating the shift of economic power from the North to the South, and by undermining the hegemony of neoliberalism in the South. These two developments have made the US less willing to offer the concessions necessary for hegemonic incorporation, while at the same time bolstering the confidence of the Southern powers. Consequently, the article proposes, both hegemonic incorporation and collectivist cooperation are undermined, leading instead to gridlock and fragmentation. The article illustrates this argument through a case study of the gridlock surrounding the issue of global imbalances.

This article offers a Gramscian response to the theory of post-hegemony, suggesting that its rejection of Gramsci rests on misrepresentations of his work. Through a closer engagement with this work, the article outlines the ways in which Gramscian analysis can in fact complement the insights of post-hegemony in analysing the ways in which the social order is secured and the strategies of resistance to this order. This combination of Gramscian and post-hegemonic insights, the article argues, offers a more nuanced and comprehensive insight into power, radical politics and resistance in the twenty-first century, an insight
which risks being lost in post-hegemony’s rejection of Gramsci and his work. The utility of this combined approach is illustrated via four short vignettes from contemporary Latin America: the emergence of the student protest movement in Chile since 2011; the Caracazo in Venezuela; the Argentine crisis in 2001; and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela.

This chapter examines the politics of crime, law and development. It argues that combating crime and legal reform have been part of the development agenda since its inception after World War II, as development actors sought to create the legal system necessary for capitalist development in the periphery while also addressing the criminogenic consequences of this development. Throughout this period, the understandings of the 'crimedevelopment nexus' were framed by the dominant development theories of the time, but the overriding concern remained the same: to remake the Global South in the interests of the Global North. The chapter explores the politics of crime, law and development during the three eras of development-the Cold War, the neoliberal period, and the current era of human development-outlining the evolution of the crime-development nexus and the ways in which it shaped development projects.

This chapter explores the tensions and contradictions of oil based development, with a particular focus on Venezuela. Challenging the conventional analyses of the ‘resource curse thesis,’ the chapter argues that the failures of oil-based development need to be understood in the larger context of the dependent insertion of oil nations into the global economy, and the role of foreign oil companies in facilitating and perpetuating this dependence. In this context, the case of Venezuela offers useful insights not only into the pitfalls of oil-based development in the 20th century, but also into attempts to construct alternative forms of it in the 21st. Accordingly, the chapter firstly explores the country’s post-war ‘Punto Fijo’ development model, which sought to capture a ‘fair’ share of revenues from the foreign oil companies and plough them back into industrial development, while avoiding any radical initiatives which would threaten their interests. In this sense, the Punto Fijo model was akin to ‘magic’ in Coronil’s terms, in that it represented the oil economy as a means to Western modernity, without the need for radical changes. However, by the 1980s, the failure of this model sparked a series of social struggles in the country, in which those associated with the oil industry used the resource curse thesis to explain the failures of development and further align with international interests, while a growing popular protest movement resisted this process, identifying Venezuela’s dependent insertion into the global economy and its social structure built on centuries of exclusion and domination as the source of the country’s problems. This protest movement culminated with the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998, and the inauguration of the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ which sought explicitly to address both of these issues through an alternative model of oil-based development. The chapter analyses the key external and internal aspects of this model, including attempts to re-establish control over the oil industry and orient it towards nationalist goals, as well as utilising oil income to radically transform the domestic social order by empowering the marginalised sectors. This includes efforts to promote self-determination amongst the popular sectors and experiments with a social economy, as well as promoting greater economic sovereignty through diversification and the facilitation of South-South linkages. The chapter concludes by exploring the tensions within the Bolivarian model, including the difficulties of pursuing socialist experiments within a domestic and global capitalist context, and the continuing reliance on oil income. Despite these, the chapter argues, the Bolivarian Revolution stands as an example of the possibility of alternative models of development in the era of globalising capitalism, the power of which can be seen in the resurgence of resource nationalism across Latin America.

In a world of rising powers, declining superpowers, economic breakdown and crises of democracy, theories of hegemony have become fashionable, as scholars ponder the nature of global politics in the 21st century. And yet, as Owen Worth points out in his new book Rethinking Hegemony, many scholars ‘lack a clear understanding of the term when engaging with it’ (xvii) leaving students ‘bombarded with a variety of different applications and understandings of the term, but without clarity of the term being put across’ (171). Accordingly, Worth sets out to provide some clarity on the issue by examining how hegemony has evolved in historical and theoretical terms, so that it can better inform analysis in the current context. This is certainly a laudable goal, and one which the book largely lives up to, though not without some problems along the way.

Read more at:

http://www.e-ir.info/2015/09/14/review-rethinking-hegemony/