Post Neoliberal Trade Law
This essay surveys a trend in trade law scholarship, emergent mostly out of the United States over the last decade, that can be best described as “post neoliberal.” Across academic disciplines, there is a shared sense now that the last decade has witnessed the demise of an assemblage of ideas we were used to describing as “neoliberal.” Economists have noted how once heterodox ideas are receiving serious reconsideration. Law and policy reform proposals are being published with explicit reference to their “post neoliberal” orientation. Research funding has been dedicated over the last decade to consecrate post-neoliberalism as an intellectual paradigm. And importantly, critical questions have already been raised as to whether “post-neoliberalism” truly marks a sharp break, or whether, it has devolved into an attempt at forging an “irenic” new consensus, as if to meet contemporary Gramscian right-wing politics in the middle. But whatever one may say about how the birth of a new intellectual paradigm is being midwifed, there is little doubt that the last decade is a period ripe for intellectual historical investigation, as a time that has been narrativized as a passage from neoliberalism. And the ideas emergent in trade law serve as an excellent entry point to this period, given that it was through a crisis in the international trade regime that questions about neoliberalism’s ideological decline first appeared sharply on the intellectual horizon, and it is in the context of international trade that post-neoliberalism appears durable.
About the International Law Workshop
Michigan’s International Law Workshop engages with cutting-edge scholarship in the field, focusing in particular on current challenges to the international legal order. The workshop is open to the academic community, and no rsvp is required. Professors Julian Arato and Kristina Daugirdas organize the workshop. If you would like to receive workshop announcements, please contact Alex Wroble ([email protected]) and ask to have your name added to the workshop’s email list.