The Geneva School: Slobodian and the Global Legal Order
Modern neoliberalism is not a simple return to laissez-faire, but a sophisticated project to build supranational legal structures. Quinn Slobodian reconstructs the thought of the Geneva School, which views the market not as a spontaneous phenomenon, but as a construct requiring protection from democracy. In this article, you will learn how neoliberals created the concept of "double government" and why the modern architecture of the European Union and the WTO realizes this scenario by separating power over people from power over capital.
1919 and the Primacy of Rules over Statistics
The turning point for neoliberalism was 1919, when the collapse of empires gave birth to a mosaic of sovereign nation-states. For Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, this meant destructive economic nationalism. To save world unity, they introduced a distinction between imperium (political power) and dominium (power over property). Their goal was to reconstruct dominium over the heads of sovereigns.
Neoliberals rejected economic statistics, believing that data on GDP or unemployment served only state planning. Hayek argued that market knowledge is dispersed and unknowable. Instead of technocratic management, the Geneva School proposed the primacy of legal rules. These were intended to safeguard the price mechanism from political interference, creating a negative sovereignty that forbids states from violating market logic.
Xenos Rights and the Constitutionalization of Trade
At the heart of neoliberal international law are xenos rights. These protect the investor as a "guest" whose property must be secured against populist confiscation or exchange controls. Philip Cortney even postulated that the right to transfer assets should be recognized as a fundamental human right. In this logic, capital becomes a primary subject requiring protection from the demos.
The most complete realization of this project became the World Trade Organization (WTO). It transformed flexible diplomatic agreements into a hard, global economic constitution. This system "ties the hands" of governments, limiting their political freedom in favor of the rule of commercial law. A controversial example of this hierarchy was the neoliberals' attitude toward apartheid—Hayek and Hutt prioritized the protection of property rights and free trade over sanctions aimed at the racist regime.
European Integration as Regional Ordoglobalism
European integration is, in essence, regional ordoglobalism. Hayek's federalism serves here to decompose the power of the nation-state. Through the supremacy of EU law and the free movement of capital, a mechanism was created to discipline governments. Political parties—from Christian Democrats to Social Democrats—often mask this structure by practicing "double bookkeeping": promising social security to voters while simultaneously accepting the inviolable core of the market constitution.
The economic models of Israel and France show different reactions to this order. Israel is building a "security economy" based on technology, while France attempts to introduce non-economic values, such as climate protection, into trade. This contradicts Hayekian neutrality, as do the demands of the Greens. Currently, green ordoglobalism is attempting to save capitalism by embedding ecological standards into global rules to avoid the total fragmentation of the world.
Capital vs. Human: The Limits of Legitimacy
The attempt to separate economics from politics, dominium from imperium, has proven to be an illusion. The conflict between capital and humans is systematically removed from public debate, leading to a crisis of legitimacy for transnational institutions. The Geneva School accurately diagnosed the tension between the global network of connections and local democracy, but its solution favors investment stability at the expense of social justice.
The question arises whether it will be possible to create a global order in which the rights of capital and human rights coexist in a more symmetrical way, or whether a world of walls awaits us, where conflict takes on a civilizational character. Can we build a bridge between the market-driven and the human?
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