Freedom Sorbara Student #: 260612710 Date Due: 12/04/2018

The State, Citizenship, and the Economy: A Path to Neoliberal Isolation

Neoliberal logic reconfigures and reorients every field it touches towards connection to,

and reliance upon, the economy and economic growth. The result of this neoliberal reorientation

is a profound change in the scope and direction of state sovereignty and state activity. By

connecting all things to the economy, neoliberalism severs the relationships between citizenship

and the state, isolating both. Through their respective research, Wendy Brown and Aihwa Ong

both explore the effects of neoliberalism on the state, focusing on different geographic regions.

Both researchers trace the loss of the connective relationship between the state and the citizenry

as the neoliberal ideas of self-responsibilization and unfettered entrepreneurialism cut the ties of

reciprocal responsibility between the state and the citizen. Brown, in her book ‘Undoing the

Demos’ traces the uncoupling of the rights of political citizenship from the state in the Euro-

Atlantic. Ong traces a similar story of the decoupling of state sovereignty from jurisdiction over

the wellbeing of the citizenry within national borders throughout Asia in her work

‘Neoliberalism as Exception.’ Both of these facets of state reconfiguration isolate the state from

the citizenry which should sustain and motivate it, connecting both state and citizenship instead

solely to the economy, and ultimately placing the survival and wellbeing of both upon their

precarious connection to economic forces.

In her book ‘Undoing the Demos,’ Brown traces the way in which the pervasive

economization of neoliberalism weakens and destroys collective political action and the political

nature of individuals and their relations to the state. Neoliberal logic dictates the minimization of

state involvement in social infrastructure and the reduction of all state expenses, at the same time

encouraging individual self-reliance and entrepreneurial self-investments, reducing state

participation and public political life.

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Freedom Sorbara Student #: 260612710 Date Due: 12/04/2018

“Neoliberalism generates a condition of politics absent democratic institutions

that would support a democratic public and all that such a public represents at its best:
informed passion, respectful deliberation, aspirational sovereignty, sharp containment of
powers that would overrule or undermine it.” (Brown 39)

Although the political apparatus of the state still exists, the connections and infrastructure that

allow citizenship to produce political participation are lost. Citizen actions can no longer be

coordinated and political and can no longer be animated by the reciprocal responsibility once

present in the relationship between citizen and state. The self-reliant message of the neoliberal

state serves to sever this relationship made up on the one hand of the bestowal and protection of

individual civil rights and social benefits, and on the other hand of investment in, and allegiance

to, the larger state entity. When states and individuals both take on the neoliberal logic of

competitive self-reliance and its moral imperative not to become an economic burden, there is no

longer a space, or even a language, for equal and mutually beneficial exchange. All interactions

of the state and citizen become necessarily mediated through the market economy with its

associated narrow focus on competition for profit. State expectations of the citizenry, now seen

through an economic lens become expectations of human capital; individuals must constantly be

accruing value to remain competitive and be seen as worthy of access to social benefits and of

participation in civil life.

“… these reorientations also entail an existential disappearance of freedom from the

world, precisely the kind of individual and collaborative freedom associated with homo
politicus for self-rule and rule with others. Moreover, the subject that is human capital for
itself and the state is at persistent risk of redundancy and abandonment. As human
capital, the subject is at once in charge of itself, responsible for itself, and yet a
potentially dispensable element of the whole.” (Brown 110)

Additionally, citizen expectations of the state now seen through the same economic lens, become

equally economic; state actions, mechanisms, and policies not seen to be of direct economic

benefit to the individual can only be seen as wasteful actions of an ineffective government. The

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Freedom Sorbara Student #: 260612710 Date Due: 12/04/2018

government is tied to the economy as an administrator and caretaker just as the individual is tied

to the economy as a disposable unit of human capital. Neither fully retain their traditional roles

and relationships in more than name. Both sides of the citizen-state relationship become severed

and reconnected via the intermediary of the economy. This new network isolates both citizenship

and the state from their mutual interactions and subjugates and taxes both for the benefit of the

economy to which they are connected. This pattern of economization and isolation outlined in

the Euro-Atlantic case by Brown is not unique to this region; similar consequences of

neoliberalism on relations to the state occur globally.

In another example focusing on the Asian context, Ong illustrates throughout

‘Neoliberalism as Exception’ how the actions of a neoliberally motivated state, allow its practical

sovereignty over shifting segments of populations and territory to be superseded by alternative

sovereignties. Ong incorporates Carl Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty as the ‘monopoly to

decide,’ to create exceptions to a normative rule or practice within a territory. When used for

political purposes, this use of exception as exercise of sovereign power cements the power of the

state over its citizenry and territory. However, Ong shows how the use of exceptions, both

inclusive and exclusive in their nature, made by the state for the benefit of the economy, deliver

sovereignty over territory and populations to economic forces. The removal of state sovereignty

for economic sovereignty disenfranchises all those who do not control capital or directly serve to

increase capital within the economic sphere. These exceptions allow non-nation sovereignties to

control the dispersal of the rights and benefits normally associated with citizenship within a state.

The elements that we think of as coming together to create citizenship— rights,

entitlements, territoriality, a nation—are becoming disarticulated and rearticulated with
forces set into motion by market forces. On the one hand, citizenship elements such as
entitlements and benefits are increasingly associated with neoliberal criteria, so that
mobile individuals who possess human capital or expertise are highly valued and can
exercise citizenship-like claims in diverse locations. Meanwhile, citizens who are judged

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Freedom Sorbara Student #: 260612710 Date Due: 12/04/2018

not to have such tradable competence or potential become devalued and thus vulnerable
to exclusionary practices. (Ong 6-7)

Often the root of these new sovereignties is explicitly economic in nature, with corporations or

multinational economic partnerships controlling what are ostensibly national territories and

populations. Within these zones of graduated sovereignty, the state can experiment with

graduated decreases in the level of state protection and control of populations, in many cases

letting economic and market powers fully dictate which rights and benefits accrue to which

individuals or populations. By handing over sovereignty within its borders, the state cuts ties

with those individuals now under new rule. This disconnection means that even the minority

granted benefits and rights usually associated with the state often get them from non-

governmental entities or via criteria not associated with state citizenship. In this way Ong shows

how the components of sovereignty and citizenship become disarticulated from one another and

rearticulated in a different configuration, leaving connective gaps between state and citizenship

that must be filled by economic forces.

While the state retains formal sovereignty, corporations and multilateral agencies
frequently exert de facto control over the conditions of living, laboring, and migration of
populations in special zones. (Ong 19)

No longer does the state exercise sovereignty over citizenry, but for the benefit of, and in

tandem with, economic forces. No longer does the citizenry gain rights and social benefits

associated with citizenship from the state, but from economic sovereignties allowed to flourish

by the state. This disconnect, though most obvious in the Chinese Special Economic Zones

(SEZs) discussed by Ong, is present in many modern contexts where neoliberalism inserts

economic forces between state and citizen.

In both the Euro-Atlantic and Asian instances, the neoliberal argument for this separation

of citizen and state with the intermediary of economy is ostensibly that it will yield benefits for

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Freedom Sorbara Student #: 260612710 Date Due: 12/04/2018

both sides. States often implement these economy-centric policies in order to extend the reach of

their economic and political power and to create opportunities for individual economic

advancement. However, the benefits that may or may not occur are obscured by the necessity of

passing through the omnipresent middle player: the economy. In neoliberal situations, all actions,

state and individual alike, are measured by their ability to benefit the market economy, which, by

merit of its internal mechanisms will, by some oblique method, return the benefits of those

investments to the state and citizenry which provide for it. This is the logic of neoliberalism.

However, the cost of making the economy the center of every network, both the beneficiary and

benefactor in all interactions, is that neoliberal ideology severs and erases previous societal ties

between the citizens and the state. Some states may increase their global influence and some

individuals may accrue substantial, and even excessive, civil rights and benefits, but statehood

and citizenship are both transformed in the process. The reconfiguring ideology of neoliberalism,

much like any abusive, isolating relationship, forces all those entities now linked only to the

economy to be completely at the whim of variable economic stability and dangerous market

vagaries.

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Freedom Sorbara Student #: 260612710 Date Due: 12/04/2018

References Cited:

Brown, Wendy

2015 Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.

Ong, Aihwa

2006 Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Duke University

Press.