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Chapter 4 - State in Africa under Neo-liberalism
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133 Chapter 4 State in Africa under Neo-liberalism Overview Africa has been an important laboratory for the implementation of neoliberal policies under the patronage of Bretton woods institutions. Since the 1980s most African countries have been submitted to structural adjustments aiming at cutting their expenses in education and health, at privatizing their public assets, and at liberalizing their economies. Following the failure of this development strategy, they were further pushed, from the 1990s, to make new institutional reforms promoting decentralization, good governance, and an attractive environment for business. Introduction Neoliberalism has shaped African development for several decades. As such, it is not an economic ‘shock’ or a ‘structural adjustment’, but rather a historic shift in Africa’s development politics and policy. This chapter explores the ways in which African countries have experienced the neoliberal project, highlighting how this project has gone beyond economic liberalization and towards a bolder social transformation. As an ideology, neoliberalism projects an end-point not simply of a market economy but of a market society in Africa. Aid disbursement, technical assistance, and conditionality have been used to force African countries to cleave to neoliberal directives. Hence, neoliberal ‘progress’ in Africa is notably limited in spite of the resources behind it and the lack of alternatives to it. In other words, this chapter will attempt to seek answer to the following crucial questions: Does the observation of a neoliberal impact indicate that the African continent is neoliberal? What does it mean to be neoliberal? Can we talk about neoliberalism if one observes that Africa is at the heart of logics differing from other continents? Is there a neoliberal governmentality in Africa? Is there a specificity of 134 neoliberalism in Africa? How far political actors and civil servants actually implement neoliberal policies imposed from above? Should we reduce neoliberalism to the implementation of such policies? How are discourses about the virtues of good governance, competition, and entrepreneurship produced, understood and appropriated in Africa? Are they to be associated with new forms of subjectivity? To what types of inequality and exclusion do neoliberal policies lead in this context? And to what forms of resistance are they confronted? Background Neoliberalism was launched in the 1970s as a response by economic and political elites to the threat posed by the growing strength of organized labor in the industrial countries and the drive for a more autonomous post-colonial development path in the less developed countries. In the former case, the widespread adoption of incomes policies, moves to regulate labor markets and the extension of the welfare state threatened to undermine the postwar revival of economic liberalism represented by tariff reductions, the rise of transnational corporations and the liberalization of capital flows. In the latter case, the success of OPEC from 1973 in repatriating a growing proportion of oil rents exemplified the wider drive towards national control of resources, and the unification of the Third World begun at Bandung in 1955 culminated in the campaign for a New International Economic Order. In this typical view of the genesis of neoliberalism, there is an asymmetry in the respective accounts for developed and less developed countries. In the 1970s, in the former case even mainstream approaches, notably pluralism and neo-corporatism, took for granted that the politics of economic management centered on the conflict between capital and labor. However, in the latter case not only the mainstream, but also progressive and even Marxist approaches such as dependency and world systems theories, were still centered on the national struggle against colonialism and neocolonialism. Naturally, for countries and regions perceived as being at an intermediate level of development–the semi periphery (Radice 2008b)–both analytical axes [3.236.252.14] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:47 GMT) 135 could be applied: in the Latin American case, long histories of class struggle in terms of both economic and political contestation had shown, at least since the 1930s, considerable similarities with those of more advanced capitalist countries, interwoven with patterns of agricultural exploitation and international trade that resembled more the experience of colonial and postcolonial Africa and Asia. A common feature in the analysis of all cases was the reluctance of scholars to abandon methodological nationalism (Gore 1996) and appreciate the increasing salience of global relations of accumulation and class struggle. By the mid-1990s, a double process of unification and convergence seemed undeniable to many: the Washington Consensus, although initially formalized in relation to what was still called the Third World, could be seen to...