From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

The Limits to Capital

Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Reacting to critiques that the smart city is overly technocratic and instrumental, companies and cities have reframed their initiatives as ‘citizen-centric’. However, what ‘citizen-centric’ means in practice is rarely articulated. We draw on and extend Sherry Arnstein’s seminal work on participation in planning and renewal programmes to create the ‘Scaffold of Smart Citizen Participation’—a conceptual tool to unpack the diverse ways in which the smart city frames citizens. We use this scaffold to measure smart citizen inclusion, participation, and empowerment in smart city initiatives in Dublin, Ireland. Our analysis illustrates how most ‘citizen-centric’ smart city initiatives are rooted in stewardship, civic paternalism, and a neoliberal conception of citizenship that prioritizes consumption choice and individual autonomy within a framework of state and corporate defined constraints that prioritize market-led solutions to urban issues, rather than being grounded in civil, social and political rights and the common good. We conclude that significant normative work is required to rethink ‘smart citizens’ and ‘smart citizenship’ and to remake smart cities if they are to truly become ‘citizen-centric’.

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Being a ‘citizen’ in the smart city: up and down the scaffold of smart citizen participation in Dublin, Ireland

Constructions of Neoliberal Reason

The current economic crisis – the ‘great recession’ – raises numerous questions about neoliberal
ideas and practice, not the least of which is whether (and if so, how) neoliberalism can survive it.
Our paper takes on these issues using the case of Ireland. This is the first proper neoliberal crisis
in Ireland. From the early 1990s to 2008, Ireland was held up by many neoliberal champions as a
place that gained from deregulation, openness to inward investment, and low corporation tax
rates. But the build-up of contradictions in Ireland exploded rapidly in 2008, when its property
bubble burst and private banks and government finances collapsed. Rather than examining what
caused Ireland’s crisis, we look at what has happened between 2008 and 2013. We focus on
structural adjustments regarding the property, finance, and labour markets and then on the
government’s austerity programme as a whole. In addition to demonstrating how these
adjustments have been an attack on workers and ordinary citizens, we identify some particularly
striking elements, which we use to argue that a new phase of disturbance and restructuring is
deepening and extending neoliberalism’s influence in Ireland.

/pdf/deepening-neoliberalism-via-austerity-and-reform-the-case-of-5186uzo4iz.pdf

Deepening neoliberalism via austerity and ‘reform’: The case of Ireland

In this paper, we explore successive waves of neoliberalization in Ireland. We contend that neoliberalization remained largely “invisible” during the Celtic Tiger because a property bubble permitte...

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Topologies and topographies of Ireland's neoliberal crisis

Neoliberal Urban Policy and the Transformation of the City

Recent scholarship has insisted on conceptualising neoliberalism as a return to hegemony of finance (Dumenil and Levy, 2004; Arrighi, 2010; Harvey, 2010). This conceptualisation views finance-driven capitalism as a new phase of accumulation born out of the 1960s-1970s crisis of production, in which the solution to declining profits, the overproduction of goods and falling real wages was found by extending credit in ‘weird and wonderful’ ways to increase overall demand. Indeed, financial liberalisation formed a key pillar of the ‘Washington Consensus’ and informed many of the market-led solutions and policy measures espoused by neoliberal doctrine from the late 1970s onwards (Peck, 2013). The key principles of neoliberalisation have involved the freeing up of capital controls facilitating the unfettered movement of capital across space, the application of market solutions to public goods and a re-articulated role for the state focused on guaranteeing the value of money while vesting private-sec tor actors with greater ‘freedom’ to innovate and act. This chapter examines the transformation under neoliberalism of Irish financial regulation since the 1980s from one of close control over international capital flows to an environment of ‘light-touch’ regulation. The freeing up of controls over capital movement permitted greater inward flows of funds seeking high returns from Irish economic growth of the late 1990s.

Light-Touch Regulation: The Rise and Fall of the Irish Banking Sector

The city can be read as the nexus of global change and daily life—a site of contestation in the flux of economic imperatives, urban policymaking, and local needs and values. Just as importantly, the key general processes at work—economic restructuring, flows of capital through the built environment, and the like—have proceeded most unevenly, as reflected in local problems of job loss, displacement, poverty, and a whole range of attendant urban struggles and social tensions. In particular, the processes of uneven development and globalization in the city have generated new and complex patterns of growth and inequality, raising important analytical and policy challenges. For example, recent years have seen the realignment of the state and the evolution of new forms of urban governance under conditions of flexible production, international competition, mobile investment, the restructuring of global commodity chains, and emergent consumption trends and lifestyle changes. All of these issues are relevant across different regions worldwide and at different points on the global urban hierarchy (from so-called world cities to “ordinary” cities), and thus remain the subject of important theoretical and political debates. Specifically, we are faced with conceptual and empirical questions about the processes and contradictions of this current period of flux, as well as practical questions about how societies and states should most effectively deal with the resultant social tensions and economic challenges.

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Sinéad Kelly

Papers

Deepening neoliberalism via austerity and ‘reform’: The case of Ireland

Topologies and topographies of Ireland's neoliberal crisis

Neoliberal Urban Policy and the Transformation of the City

Light-Touch Regulation: The Rise and Fall of the Irish Banking Sector

Uneven Development, City Governance, and Urban Change—Unpacking the Global-Local Nexus in Dublin’s Inner City