Liberalism and neoliberalism are concepts that often end up slippery, undefined, and having different meanings when used by different actors. Therefore, in this section I present the general lines of liberal thinking as I have come to understand them. In particular, I concentrate on liberalism in relation to democracy and civil society, which are important in shaping the thinking and ideals of the Oborona activists.
I understand economic liberalism or fiscal liberalism, which draws on Adam Smith’s writings, related to the organization of the economy around a strong support of the free market economy, deregulation, and private property. Economic liberalism is often contrasted with state interference in business, and supports free individual choice and equality of opportunity. In economic liberalism, the state’s role is to support free flowing business by providing basic public goods, such as infrastructure or schools. The basic idea of economic liberalism is that free competition and free forces of demand and supply create conditions that eventually benefit all citizens. According to Smith’s theory of economic liberalism, ‘the wealth becomes the largest possible if everyone concentrates in gaining one’s own profit, and if the state as little as possible interferes with the mechanism which the market creates’ (Pulkkinen 1996, 17; Gaus & Courtland 2010). According to
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Smith’s ideas of liberalism, a certain ‘invisible hand’ steers the market mechanism so that the private interests turn into common good (Pulkkinen 1996, 18). Political liberalism, on the other hand, is tied to the ideas of liberty and equality in the form of representative government and freedom of choice. Political liberalism is often associated with free electoral process, freedom of speech and expression, freedom of media, toleration in religion, morals and lifestyle, respect for the rights of the individual as well as with opposition to racial and sexual discrimination (Waldron 1998).
Pulkkinen (1996, 28) differentiates the liberal view of democracy from the Hegelian-Marxian view by claiming that the liberal view is concerned with individual and group interests, and guaranteeing everyone’s liberty, while the Hegelian-Marxist, more statist view of democracy, emphasizes the concepts of people and nation and the self-rule or sovereignty of people22. The liberal view is based on the idea of free individuals whose freedom to move is threatened by institutions of power. In this train of thought, democracy is a device used to organize the government and to curb its harmful influence on individuals, and to ensure maximal individual liberties. (Pulkkinen 1996, 28.) Furthermore, concerning political participation, in the Hegelian-Marxist view of democracy, the participation of everyone becomes important. However, it is the communal whole that acts, and individuals come to represent the ‘will of the people’. On the other hand, in the liberal-individualistic model of democracy, importance is placed on the Constitution, which should provide the settlement and negotiation between various interests, guarantee individuals the possibility of intervening in political process, and to place leaders under surveillance, a task that is often allocated to the free press. In this view, general participation is not a value in itself, but can be viewed as a violation of privacy and their right to remain detached from politics if they wished. In this model of democracy, the division between political experts and the majority of people is possible:
political experts take care of public affairs, while the majority of people go on with their private affairs, and only the choice and possibility to intervene and change the specialists needs to remain. However, Pulkkinen argues that, even if contradictory to liberal principles, the notions of people and self-rule are often deployed in liberal thinking as well. (Pulkkinen 1996, 30–31.)
Liberal views are especially dominant in western civil society and democratization debates. Pulkkinen (1996, 23) argues that ‘the classical liberal civil society refers to action by free individuals, separate from and in opposition to governmental power’. According to Mercer (2002, 7), the liberal view in civil society and democratization debates ‘reproduces the liberal maxim that democracy within capitalist society requires a vibrant and autonomous civil society and an effective state capable of balancing the demands of different interest groups’. Liberal theory sees state and civil society as complementing each other and as separate entities. Thus, Mercer (2002, 7) argues, civil society is seen only in its relationship to the state. State is seen as an important entity in providing an accountable government with free and fair elections, and civil society should act as the state’s ‘watchdog’ and be granted civil and political rights and associational autonomy.
22 According to Hamburg (1998), Russian liberal tradition owes its intellectual inspiration to Hegelianism, from which also the state-centered form of post-socialist liberalism is derived.
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Especially in the transition to democracy, as the Russian transformation to a market society is often interpreted, civil society is seen as playing a major role in pressuring for political change. After the consolidation of democracy, civil society’s role is seen as encouraging citizen participation and acting as the watchdog of the state. However, this understanding of liberal democracy is strongly tied to the history of western thought.
(Mercer 2002.)
In addition to a political or economic doctrine, liberalism can be also seen as a form of governance. For instance, Foucault argues that Adam Smith’s thinking not only changed the thinking of economic and political realms, but also transformed the relationship between government and knowledge (Gordon 1991, 14). According to Gordon (1991, 15), Foucault saw liberalism as a critique of the state and as an attempt to define how government is possible, what it can do, and what lies within its powers. Thus, liberalism can be seen as aiming to place limits to the exercise of power by the state.
Besides liberalism, neoliberalism is also widely used in political and economic debates and too often it is not a clearly defined concept. I find the anthropological definition of neoliberalism helpful. According to Hilgers (2010, 352), despite a variety of theoretical frameworks, anthropologists agree on the definition of neoliberalism as ‘a radicalized form of capitalism, based on deregulation and the restriction of state intervention, and characterized by an opposition to collectivism, a new role for the state, an extreme emphasis on individual responsibility, flexibility, a belief that growth leads to development, and a promotion of freedom as a means to self-realization that disregards any questioning of the economic and social conditions that make such freedom possible’.
In recent theoretical debates, the Foucauldian interpretation of neoliberalism and its governing rationality is often taken as the starting point. Neoliberalism is usually used to refer to a maximized form of market liberalism and as a critique of the Keynesian welfare state. According to Rose and Miller (1992, 198), neoliberalism ‘reactivates liberal principles’ and positions itself against the ‘interventionist state’. Foucault’s theorization distinguishes neoliberalism from classical liberalism by emphasizing the role of the state in creating the conditions for market mechanisms and fabricating subjectivities, collective representations, and social relations to support the diffusion of markets (Collier 2012, 190). According to Rose (2007, 141) advanced liberalism changed the relationship between the economic and the social, and according to the neoliberal principle, ‘all aspects of social behavior are reconceptualized along economic lines’. Rose argues that this was not a return to 19th century liberalism or the laissez faire type of government after the period of the dominant discourse of the welfare state, but a form of reorganizing all national policies according to economic logic in order to enable a market to exist and function. Furthermore, according to neoliberal ideas, the population is governed according to market principles and the possibilities for state intervention are minimized. This can result in, for example, the monetization of social benefits and the privatization of health care and insurance policies, as for instance in Russia (Hemment 2009).
Neoliberal thinkers are skeptical of the political authorities’ ability to govern and see the welfare state as producing a dependency of the citizens on the state. Today’s western neo-liberal discourse further transfers the responsibility from the state to the individual. In neoliberal rationality, individuals should ‘strive to optimize their own quality of life and
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that of their families’ instead of putting the responsibility of citizen’s welfare on the state or the public institutions (Rose and Miller 1992, 198.) According to Hilgers (2012, 358),
‘[t]he drive towards individual responsibilisation and the self as enterprise is a major principle of the neoliberal art of governing’. In the Russian understanding of democracy and civil society, the liberal and neoliberal ideas are interestingly combined with frameworks of statist state-society relations, as I will show in the next section.