Cornel Ban
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780190600389
- eISBN:
- 9780190600419
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190600389.003.0009
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Economy, International Relations and Politics
The interplay between external structural constraints, domestic institutions, and domestic ideological debates explains the resilience of disembedded neoliberalism in Romania after 2008. IFIs and ...
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The interplay between external structural constraints, domestic institutions, and domestic ideological debates explains the resilience of disembedded neoliberalism in Romania after 2008. IFIs and transnational firms with political leverage knocked on an open door when they demanded deep austerity and neoliberal structural reforms. However, it was local intellectual innovations that explain why policy leaders at the highest levels outbid these demands with a blend of libertarian, conservative, and ordoliberal theories about the state and society. Benefiting from a period of institutional cohesion, many of these ideas jelled into policy. Although technocrats less committed to neoliberalism took up top posts in a new cabinet after 2012, their ideas had a limited reach in the policy process because of the constitutionalization of fiscal policy by the EU, the conditionalities of the Troika, the pressures of foreign capital, and the institutional fragmentation of the policy process.Less
The interplay between external structural constraints, domestic institutions, and domestic ideological debates explains the resilience of disembedded neoliberalism in Romania after 2008. IFIs and transnational firms with political leverage knocked on an open door when they demanded deep austerity and neoliberal structural reforms. However, it was local intellectual innovations that explain why policy leaders at the highest levels outbid these demands with a blend of libertarian, conservative, and ordoliberal theories about the state and society. Benefiting from a period of institutional cohesion, many of these ideas jelled into policy. Although technocrats less committed to neoliberalism took up top posts in a new cabinet after 2012, their ideas had a limited reach in the policy process because of the constitutionalization of fiscal policy by the EU, the conditionalities of the Troika, the pressures of foreign capital, and the institutional fragmentation of the policy process.