The European Union as a Global Conflict Manager, by Richard Whitman and Stefan Wolff, eds
| Date | 01 March 2014 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702014521967 |
| Author | Nino Kereselidze |
| Published date | 01 March 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
were incubated in the womb of laissez-faire failure. Most importantly, many
succeeded at expanding the realm of freedom beyond the narrow preserve of the
extremely affluent.
The record shows that laissez-faire, too, has typically depended upon force.
Closer to our times, there is the case of Chile and the Latin American dictator-
ships of the 1970s, whose historical experience debunked the myth of democratic
laissez-faire. That White fails to even mention Chile is all the more curious since
that country served as a laboratory for neoliberal experimentation (a term White
specifically avoids) in which many of the book’s protagonists happily saw their
ideas come to life through the ruthless shock therapy of the Pinochet dictator-
ship. As the great dictator terrorized the population, Chile gave lie to the claim
by Friedman, Hayek, and others that theirs was a vision of a society based on
freedom. Chicago school graduates advised not only the dictatorship in Chile, but
also those of Argentina, Brazil, and several other Latin American countries
(Friedman himself visited Pinochet to advise him). Nor does White refer to the
lacklustre results of neoliberalism in the Americas throughout the 1980s and
1990s.
2
It’s as if the Washington Consensus—and the backlash it engendered in
the 2000s in a replay of Polanyi’s spontaneous demand for regulation—never
happened.
3
Lesser omissions are equally conspicuous. The issue of inequality and its rela-
tionship to laissez-faire is entirely absent. The debates surrounding the Great
Recession and the role of financial deregulation in crystallizing the crisis go unmen-
tioned. Finally, there is scarcely a word about the ecological destruction that
threatens the future of humanity—and whether the concept of consumer sover-
eignty extolled by White can serve as an organizing principle of the economy
beyond the current generation. While White may provide a powerful critique of
the pitfalls of planning, the stark utopia of the market to which he would have us
return provides no solution to the challenges of the future. If we don’t find an
alternative, we’re all in big trouble.
Richard Whitman and Stefan Wolff, eds
The European Union as a global conflict manager
London: Routledge, 2012. 254pp, $39.95 (paper) ISBN 978–0–415–52872–6
Reviewed by: Nino Kereselidze, University of St Andrews
In recent years, the European Union (EU), as an established regional institution,
has taken steps to become a global actor in conflict management. EU foreign policy
2. For a full account of the role of Friedman and the Chicago Boys in advising Pinochet and the
ultimate failure of their experiment, see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2007).
3. Insofar as the Global South figures at all in the narrative, it is merely to expose the weaknesses of
development economics in India and to chastise that country for not going far enough in the liberal
reforms of the past two decades.
Book Reviews 125
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