DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH - THE NEW RIGHT AND THE POLICING OF THE INTERNATIONAL DEBT CRISIS

This paper explores the ways in which a climate of ideas associated with the New Right has enabled the policing of the developing countries' debt crisis to proceed in a manner which is (by other lights) unstable and unjust. Its point of focus is a body of work which encourages us to see the debt crisis as a punishment visited on countries which have departed from the norms of economic and political liberalism, and which proposes to treat such countries accordingly. Particular attention is paid to the linguistic tropes by and through which the New Right has diagnosed and proposed to correct the debt malaise. This paper comprises five sections. After a brief Introduction, Section 2 considers how the discourse of development studies has begun to succumb to a set of ideas and policies associated with the New Right: the so-called counter-revolution in development theory and policy. Section 3 examines the importation of these ideas in the debates on LDC debt and on the debt management policies enacted by the creditor powers and institutions. Particular attention is paid to questions of economic forecasting and equilibrium models, to the theorem of the second-best, and to the notion of just deserts. Section 4 presents an internal and an external critique of New Right perspectives on the debt crisis. Section 5 concludes this paper. It reflects upon the power of ideas in contemporary economic and political life; it also commends the formation of ideas and policies which set themselves against the punitive disciplines of the New Right.