Ever since the PNC government signed on to the IMF Structural Adjustment Program in 1989, we have been enmeshed in a neoliberal paradigm that has become “common sense”. However, with its failure in the US that promulgated it as the “Washington Consensus” and their willingness to make fundamental changes in some of its premises, it behooves us to rethink the bequeathed model. The following is one critique based on human rights by Iona Cable of the London School of Economics.
“The human rights framework is heralded as an emancipatory apparatus to promote equality, peace, and representation, based on the assumption that all humans have certain unalienable rights by virtue of being born. Belief in the inherent goodness of human rights has preserved the notion that this framework exists in a celestial vacuum, unsullied by global hierarchies. On the contrary, rights are deeply embedded in power structures, and the perception that they are neutral disguises their role in the perpetuation of injustice. Human rights language has been used to globally disseminate neoliberal economic policies which maintain inequality, forcing postcolonial states into the global market and prohibiting development. Can human rights be redeemed?
Neoliberalism holds that the global competitive market would be the most effective method to ensure international economic harmony, and therefore the role of government was confined to creating and defending markets. There is an emphasis on individual responsibility based on the belief that if everyone has unimpeded access to the market, everyone would benefit equally from it. These neoliberal ideas spread through the West and became the central principle of political and economic government.
The human rights framework emerged following the Second World War, with the creation of the UN and the signing of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and is based on principles such as freedom, equality, and peace. Neoliberals, predominantly Western leaders and economists, were wary of this framework, as they viewed it as a potential threat to the global economic order. Hayek criticised the UDHR for including social and economic rights, arguing that no declaration of rights should guarantee a standard of material welfare. Historian Quinn Slobodian suggests that, “rather than reject human rights outright, the neoliberal tendency has been to undermine social democratic interpretations of human rights and international law while simultaneously co-opting them to cover clearly capitalist prerogatives”.
This co-option of rights was particularly pervasive during the period of decolonisation, when many states were emerging from colonial domination, and had been economically bankrupted by their rulers. Neoliberals saw the potential for postcolonial states to employ the framework of human rights to pursue economic equality and redistribution of resources, and they sought to create a global economic order that would curtail these demands. They reformed certain rights to fit their agenda; for example, the right to economic equality was construed as the right to preserve unequal wealth in the face of demands for redistribution. As political theorist Jessica Whyte argues in her book “The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism”: “The language of human rights offered them a means to legitimise transformative interventions and subject postcolonial states to universal standards aimed at protecting the international market.” The expansion of the human rights regime internationally has assisted in globalising this economic system, in which some states continue to benefit from the exploitation of others.
The global dissemination of neoliberal values is also prevalent in the sphere of development and foreign aid. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) promoted “Structural Adjustment Programs” (SAPs) from the early 1980s, purportedly with the goal of promoting stability and economic growth. Through the SAPs, countries receiving foreign aid from the World Bank and the IMF were required to minimise the role of the state, privatise state enterprises, and implement fiscal austerity and trade liberalisation. Receipt of foreign aid was therefore dependent on the introduction of neoliberal economic policies that benefitted rich countries and further bankrupted poorer nations, forcing those countries to become reliant on imports from abroad and thus perpetuating poverty and dependency.”
Guyana now has the wherewithal to extricate itself from this “matrix”.
