Selling Interdependence: From Collective Management to Neo-liberalism

Ori Tamir, University of California, Davis

Following the collapse of the Bretton Woods system governing international economic relations in 1971, there was a scramble to develop a successor. 'Collective Management' was one solution posed by a group of American economists and international relations scholars, developed for a world they saw as becoming increasingly 'interdependent'. Rising in popularity in the 1970s, it eventually gave way to a 'neo-liberal' model of international economic governance in the 1980s. This paper traces the emergence and decline of Collective Management through a biographical account of its major proponents, and argues that it was not successfully implemented because the dynamics of knowledge-production in the space of foreign policy think-tanks left its proponents vulnerable to the conservative turn in American politics. The failure of Collective Management contains lessons for understanding the neo-liberal transition, as well as for the current moment of crisis.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 212. Global Money, Finance, and Neoliberalism