Non-Death of Neoliberal International Law: Varieties of Capitalism and Persisting Geopolitical Structures

Narratives around the end of the US-led liberal international order and neoliberalism have been present in the discipline of international law since the 2008 Financial Crisis. Yet they have gained new force in the aftermath of the 2016 US election. While most of these accounts remain focused on the international plane and the decline of the multilateral trading order, some identify ‘the decoupling of capitalism from liberalism’ in the industrialized North as the source of change in the world order. This paper positions (neo)liberalism as a distinct theory of state-market-individual relations, originating in the Anglo-American sphere (Lockean state/society complex). It argues that ‘liberal capitalism’ and its de-territroializing modus operandi produces and simultaneously peripheralizes ‘non-liberal capitalism’. Illiberal capitalism and its territorial accumulation regimes (Hobbesian state/society complexes), in turn, pose threats to liberal free competition. The current US-China conflict over the terms of global economy is as well a battle between two forms of capitalist state/society complexes, without either shedding their foundational tendencies.