Anarchic Unfreedom: Critical International Theory Versus Neoliberalism and the New Right

Abstract

In recent years, a number of voices have raised concerns about the role of critical theory in the contemporary political crisis. Critical theory has been accused of providing intellectual resources for the global rise of the new right, whether in Trump’s America or in Putin’s Russia. While acknowledging the ostensibly critical, even emancipatory appearance of the new right, my paper insists on the need for critical theory. Indeed, a desire for liberation is expressed not only by the new right, but also by the ruling neoliberal discourse. Both neoliberalism and the new right make emancipatory use of a key modern political distinction: the distinction between hierarchy and anarchy, or inside and outside. Both promise liberation from hierarchies and want to achieve freedom through anarchic competition, either on globalized markets or in international relations. However, upon close examination, the promised freedom is an anarchic unfreedom. It submits all competitors to a powerful competitive logic, justifies hierarchic submission and harbors an enormous potential for violence. Critical International Relations theory is uniquely suited to diagnose this problem and to point us into an alternative direction.

Confronted with the categories of economics, the task of the social theorist is therefore not so much to refute them as to get to the bottom of them in order to grasp the human relations which they express. (Justin Rosenberg ¹ )

Introduction

Some things are hard to see due to the categories that structure our field of vision. We may believe we possess an unmediated access to the world. But in fact, what we see depends on the tools of vision we have adopted and that have been passed on to us. This realization is key to critical theories of various kinds. Karl Marx criticized the liberal idea of freedom as hiding from us what it actually enables: exploitation. ² Michel Foucault criticized modern disciplinary discourse as hiding from us the cruelty of punishments of the soul. ³ Judith Butler criticized the fiction of stable gender relations as hiding from us the reality of constant change. ⁴ The critique of ideology is a central and absolutely essential part of the task and promise of critical theory. ⁵ Yet it appears that, faced with current political challenges from the alt-, far-, and new right, various scholars have become suspicious of the tools of critique. ⁶ Confronted with enemies who themselves lay claim to critical analyses of ideology, they stand frozen and fear their own complicity. ⁷ They opt to reflect critically on their own tools rather than apply them to criticize the flaws in the thinking of their adversaries. ⁸ Aren’t today’s ideologues themselves critical theorists? Don’t we have to move to post-critique to avoid being entrapped by them?

While it is right that new right voices have built affinities with critical theories, it is wrong that the project of critical theory needs to be abandoned as a result. ⁹ On the contrary, a critical theorization of contemporary ideologies is much needed. ¹⁰ It is true that the rise of the new right expresses a desire for liberation from the currently dominant forms of liberalism. This is why the rise of right-wing populism has been described as a crisis of liberal world order. ¹¹ However, critical theory can reveal that there are important parallels between the new right and the ruling neoliberal order. ¹² Not the new right’s affinities with critical theory, but its affinities with neoliberalism need to be carefully examined.

In this article, I understand neoliberalism and the new right as two broad and currently influential discourses. Neoliberalism is a distinct form of liberalism centered on the marketization of multiple realms of social life. ¹³ The new right is a distinct form of ‘radical’, ‘reactionary’, or ‘pseudo’ conservatism centered on national, civilizational, and cultural identities. ¹⁴ While both discourses have been interpreted as pursuing hierarchic social orders, ¹⁵ I will argue that a longing for liberation from hierarchies is at the heart of their respective normative and conceptual architectures. Their enormous theoretical and political influence is rooted in their emancipatory appearance. Both discourses make emancipatory use of a key modern political distinction: the distinction between hierarchy and anarchy, or inside and outside. ¹⁶ Both promise liberation from hierarchies and want to achieve freedom through anarchic competition, either on globalized markets or in international relations.

However, these emancipatory promises invariably fail. Critical International Relations (IR) theory can reveal why this is the case. For, whether they promise liberation through globalized markets or through international relations, both discourses invariably pursue the fiction of an anarchic social order that is at the heart also of seminal IR theory. Both neoliberals and the new right promise to lead us into a structural kind of anarchy in which functionally similar actors stand in a fierce contest against each other – a contest in which their survival is at stake and the worry for survival conditions both their identities and their interests. ¹⁷ However, as I will show notably through a critical discussion of Kenneth Waltz’s work, ¹⁸ this structural anarchy is a state of unfreedom according to two established philosophical understandings of freedom: It is marked by tight constraints on behavior and it hinders the self-realization of competitors’ identities. ¹⁹ Structural anarchy submits all competitors to a powerful competitive logic, reducing their options for choice and socializing them as strategic, calculating actors. ²⁰ Crucially, the anarchic necessity to prioritize strategy invariably justifies and creates hierarchic submission. The quest for ‘outside’ freedom invariably produces ‘inside’ domination. Neoliberal reforms as well as new right ideologies lead into a world of both fierce anarchic contest and tight hierarchic domination. As I will conclude, this is a world marked by an increased potential for violence, a violence directed both against others and against the self.

One key implication of this argument is that it is an urgent task to understand how hierarchy and anarchy co-constitute each other. This insight is a signature contribution of critical IR theory to broader social analysis – namely, an understanding of how the inside and the outside of societies co-produce each other. ²¹ And what applies to social analysis, applies to the quest for emancipation, too. Often, as in the title of this Millennium symposium, critical theory is characterized as a purely anti-hierarchic project. ²² However, our struggle for emancipation needs to be based on the insight that we can overcome hierarchic domination only if we overcome anarchic unfreedom, too.

The article falls into three parts. The first part reconstructs the role of the hierarchy/anarchy divide in seminal IR theory and elaborates the concept of anarchic unfreedom. The second part examines the role of this divide in neoliberalism and reconstructs the neoliberal promise of emancipation as an anarchic one. The third part repeats the same examination in the case of the new right. The conclusion highlights the potential for violence contained in this conjuncture and elaborates on the need to redirect our struggle for emancipation.

Anarchic Unfreedom

The year 1979 saw the publication of a landmark text of IR theory. This text, Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics, elaborates on a distinction that has a pervasive influence in the history of the discipline: the distinction between hierarchy and anarchy. ²³ Like authors before and after him, Waltz bases the very enterprise of international theory on this distinction. ²⁴ According to Waltz, the domestic political realm is predominantly one of ‘authority, of administration, and of law’ (i.e. of hierarchy) and the international political realm is predominantly one of ‘power, of struggle, and of accommodation’ (i.e. of anarchy). ²⁵ In the IR discipline, this distinction is often traced back to Thomas Hobbes, who argues in his book Leviathan that (what he claims is) the ‘natural’ condition of humankind, one of anarchic ‘war of everyone against everyone’, is terminated within state boundaries through the construction of an authoritative, sovereign government – but which continues, Hobbes indicates, in the relationships between sovereigns. ²⁶ The Hobbesian/Waltzian distinction continues to exercise a profound influence on theoretical thinking in the discipline. ²⁷ While much post-Waltzian IR scholarship (whether rationalist, constructivist, or critical) questions that the international political realm is one of Hobbesian anarchy, this questioning usually results either in the adoption of some modified version of the anarchy concept or in the adoption of a hierarchy-centered approach. ²⁸ In contrast, I want to return to an older concern of critical IR theory that takes into view the productive, generative force of the hierarchy/anarchy distinction itself.

The continued use of the hierarchy/anarchy distinction – which is more pervasive than often assumed, extending beyond IR scholarship into other realms of social analysis as well as broadly shared cultural and societal beliefs – results in an important blind spot. This blind spot can be revealed by means of a critical discussion of Waltz’s account of this distinction in Theory of International Politics. There is an important (and, to my knowledge, unnoticed) contradiction in how Waltz establishes this binary. Like Hobbes, Waltz claims that anarchy is a realm of unlimited freedom. As Waltz explains, this freedom is a result of the acceptance of insecurity: ‘States, like people, are insecure in proportion to the extent of their freedom. If freedom is wanted, insecurity must be accepted’. ²⁹ According to Waltz, this freedom is one key characteristic of anarchy, a characteristic that the realm of hierarchic authority lacks. This view mirrors the Hobbesian idea that the ‘state of nature’ is one of unlimited ‘natural liberty’, a liberty that people renounce when they authorize a sovereign ruler. ³⁰

However, the very idea that states are free in the realm of anarchy imagined by Waltz strongly contradicts what Waltz has explained just some 20 pages earlier. Outlining the ‘ordering principle’ of anarchic structures (the first element of the Waltzian definition of structure), Waltz uses the analogy to the microeconomic theory of the market to illustrate how anarchic structure shapes individual identities and behavior. Here is Waltz: ‘Once formed, a market becomes a force in itself, and a force that the constitutive units acting singly or in small numbers cannot control. Instead, in lesser or greater degrees as market conditions vary, the creators become the creatures of the market that their activity gave rise to’. ³¹ Waltz’s whole point in his reflections on structure is that the latter exercise a pervasive influence, constraining what ‘units’ do and shaping who they are. ‘Units’ – whether firms, states, or people – are just ‘creatures’ of structures, disciplined and punished by a powerful process of selection. ³² Whoever seeks to act against structure, Waltz points out multiple times, risks being killed – ‘either the competitors emulate [other more successful competitors] or they fall by the wayside’. ³³ In Waltz’s whole argument, the idea that structures exercise a powerful influence on ‘units’ is key. ³⁴ But in which sense can one claim that these ‘units’ are free under conditions of anarchy? Isn’t the freedom that Waltz sees as one key feature of anarchy but an anarchic pseudo-freedom? Isn’t it a pseudo-freedom that offers no choice but the submission to an extremely powerful structure?

Waltz claims to give an account of anarchic freedom, but he delivers an account of anarchic unfreedom. This anarchic unfreedom is, in Waltz’s theory, a direct product of the competition between functionally similar actors. This competition conditions units’ identities and behavior by imposing a specific principle of action. This principle is, in Waltz’s rather positive sounding words, one of ‘self-help’. ³⁵ But ultimately it is clear that ‘self-help’ in this case means nothing else than the need to behave rationally to survive: ‘In any self-help system, units worry about their survival, and the worry conditions their behavior’. ³⁶ The need to ensure survival implies that units ‘must be more concerned with relative strength than with absolute advantage’. ³⁷ This is the case for everyone, strong and weak, and perhaps even more pertinent for the strong than the weak. Waltz emphasizes that ‘great powers are never “masters with free hands.” They are always “Gullivers,” more or less tightly tied’. ³⁸ Everyone is constrained by the need to consider the ‘relative strength’ of others as a possible threat to one’s own security. Everyone is unfree to the extent that they must prioritize security over other concerns.

Waltz’s theory has played a crucial role in the emergence of the rationalist paradigm in IR, bringing together both realism and liberalism on the basis of a shared rational actor assumption. ³⁹ The anarchic ‘freedom’ enjoyed by Waltzian units is similar to the ‘freedom’ enjoyed by actors in game-theoretic dilemma situations, in which only one course of action is rational. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, for example, it is of course possible that one of the co-conspirators chooses to cooperate with her partner. But the point of orthodox modern game theory is precisely that this is irrational, as it risks to be punished with more years in prison. ⁴⁰ In rational choice theory more generally, notes Mitzen, ‘a “choice” amounts to mechanically implementing our desires under the constraints of the world as we know it’. ⁴¹ In Waltz’s theory, the ‘constraints of the world’ consist in the condition of international anarchy, marked by a ‘security dilemma’. ⁴²

Anarchic unfreedom is not merely a feature of Waltzian theory. While there is no space here to discuss in detail other works of IR scholarship, arguments that oppose, in some way or another, the two forms of unfreedom are not uncommon in IR. In fact, they pervade also social theory more generally. For example, the distinction between two ‘logics of action’ (of ‘appropriateness’ and of ‘consequences’) that played a central role in IR in the 1990s and 2000s can be read as a variant of the Waltzian hierarchy/anarchy distinction. ⁴³ According to the logic of appropriateness, actors’ behavior is a function of social norms and roles; according to the logic of consequences, it is a function of the need to maximize their chances of success. ⁴⁴ The analogous distinction between homo economicus and homo sociologicus is central in modern social theory. ⁴⁵ These distinctions were reframed, by James Fearon and Alexander Wendt, as core aspects of the distinction between constructivism and rationalism. ⁴⁶ But one remarkable thing about such distinctions is the absence of freedom in them. ⁴⁷ The distinctions constitute alternatives between two imaginaries of unfreedom. They express human relations of unfreedom.

The hunch that I pursue in the remainder of this paper is that this absence of freedom is symptomatic. It is a symptom of freedom’s absence in a much broader and wider discourse on social order. This discourse includes forms of neoliberal reasoning, which were on the rise at the time of the publication of Waltz’s book and which have pervasively shaped a powerful politics of social reform that extends into the present – a politics that sees ‘no alternative’ to the expansion of competition and the unleashing of market forces. ⁴⁸ Yet a similar absence of freedom manifests itself in contemporary right-wing attacks on (neo)liberal world order, which recognize in neoliberalism a form of hierarchic domination and instead imagine the return of an anarchic freedom of struggle among nations, birth cultures, and races. I will address neoliberalism and the new right one after the other, using my critical reconstruction of Waltz’s theory to reveal how freedom is absent also in them.

Neoliberal Anarchy

Neoliberal theories were developed in response to a perceived need for liberation. These theories became popular at a time when state interventions were perceived as hindrances to the free unfolding of the forces of economic markets, conceived as realms of private enterprise and initiative. Neoliberal thinkers like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman envisioned domestic and international state institutions that would protect markets rather than intervene in them. ⁴⁹ As Hayek writes, ‘the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom’ – and ‘central planning’ its greatest threat. ⁵⁰ As Friedman notes, ‘the paternalistic “what your country can do for you” implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny’. ⁵¹ In the apt phrase of Loïc Wacquant, neoliberalism is an ‘articulation of state, market and citizenship that harnesses the first to impose the second onto the third’. ⁵² The marketization of multiple realms of life, which is motivated by a hope for liberation, is a defining feature of neoliberal reform.

Politically, the neoliberal project materialized in the policies of US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. These policies celebrated private initiative and cast a negative image on the welfare state and social protection. Internationally, neoliberal ideas were embodied in the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’, which shaped the structural adjustment recommended to, and imposed on, the Global South by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. These institutions contributed to countering the prospect of nationalization in the context of national liberation and calls for a New International Economic Order. In the 1990s and 2000s, neoliberal policies were adopted by progressive politicians in the West such as Bill Clinton in the United States, Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, and Gerhard Schröder in Germany. Like Reagan and Thatcher, these political leaders placed their hopes for reform on the private initiative of individuals in the marketplace. ⁵³ Neoliberalism played a central role in shaping the process of European integration and specifically in the idea that neutral technocratic institutions like the European Central Bank should ensure the smooth functioning of markets. ⁵⁴ The influence of neoliberalism extends into the present. It is palpable for instance in an intensely meritocratic discourse centered on the responsibility of individuals for their own fates, a discourse that has been articulated for instance by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but is key also in Western academic life, not least American elite educational institutions. ⁵⁵

Both theoretically and politically, the neoliberal project is centered on the opposition between market freedom and state interference – between private initiative and social protection. Neoliberal theorists and politicians want to strengthen the first and reduce the influence of the second; there is a ‘simultaneous thinning of the social safety net and intensification of competition’. ⁵⁶ One key theoretical justification for this impulse is the idea that the market is a realm of freedom and protectionist intervention a source of unfreedom.

When understood in this way, the neoliberal project is founded on the same distinction as Waltz’s Theory of International Politics, published in 1979 right before the first decade of neoliberal reform. Recall that, according to Waltz, international anarchy (which he models on the microeconomic concept of the market) is a realm of freedom and domestic state rule a realm of domination. ‘If freedom is wanted, insecurity must be accepted’, Waltz claims ⁵⁷ – and here expresses a key neoliberal idea: reduce social guarantees by the welfare state and you will gain freedom. But if the neoliberal concept of freedom is the same as Waltz’s, then the neoliberals risk pursuing nothing but anarchic pseudo-freedom. To the least, the specific kind of market they want to protect from intervention is a realm of freedom only in a very limited sense. Theoretically, as we can learn from Waltz, this market is a realm of structural necessity rather than freedom. Market actors must conform to market principles, otherwise they fall ‘by the wayside’, as Waltz recognizes. ⁵⁸ There is a tough and rigorous selection process performed by anarchic structure. We find the very same claim in the microeconomic theory of the market pioneered by Friedman. Friedman, like Waltz, sees at work a process of ‘natural selection’ that leaves alive only those market actors who, consciously or unconsciously, conform to the principle of the ‘rational and informed maximization of returns’. ⁵⁹ Those who do not conform risk dying – they either go bankrupt in the market or are eradicated through wars in the international system. The ‘freedom’ enjoyed in this kind of situation is thus akin to a choice to ‘kill or be killed’ ⁶⁰ – to kill, either directly (e.g. by buying other firms) or indirectly (by being more rational and efficient than others), or to be killed (because others are more rational and efficient than oneself). But what kind of ‘choice’ is this? We struggle to call ‘free’ the choice imposed by a robber who offers ‘life or money’. Shouldn’t we struggle as well to call ‘free’ the choice offered by anarchic market structure to ‘perform or die’?

The neoliberal concept of freedom is the same as the one used by Waltz in his Theory of International Politics – it is the freedom to help yourself (‘self-help’). There is a rich literature on neoliberalism that highlights the importance of the self-help principle: of individual resilience in the face of risks and individual responsibility for failure. ⁶¹ Neoliberal freedom is anarchic unfreedom, in the sense that it imposes a specific, strategic logic of action on actors – not just on states, but principally on all market actors. ⁶² Precisely like anarchic structure in Waltz’s theory, this strategic logic does not enlarge options for choice, but constrains them. ‘There is no alternative’, or TINA, is a well-known slogan associated with neoliberal reform. ⁶³ The slogan expresses the absence of a rational option for choice under conditions of neoliberal competition. The only alternative is to maximize competitiveness. The need to prioritize strategy rules out other concerns. The more we approach all kinds of social relationships as forms of neoliberal competition, the greater the risk that we feel, and ultimately follow, this need. It is human relations of necessity, not freedom, that neoliberal reform creates, despite its intention to liberate.

In fact, the neorealist concept of freedom may have directly influenced the neoliberal one. Models of rationality under conditions of the possibility of nuclear war, associated in IR for instance with the work of Thomas Schelling (who in turn influenced Waltz), correspond to models of rationality used by neoliberal economists. ⁶⁴ The commonality of both is evident in the pervasive use of game-theoretic models, and notably that of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. ⁶⁵ As discussed in the preceding section, the imaginary of the Dilemma performs the same work as anarchic structure in Waltz, the ‘logic of consequences’ in IR and homo economicus in social theory more generally. If you do not conform to the rational solution (if you feel, for instance, a social obligation to your fellow co-conspirator), you risk to ‘fall by the wayside’, ending up in prison for many years. This strategic view of rationality rules out a number of other ways of being and acting. For instance, the moral choice to prioritize social bonds and obligations – and the conception of the self that such a choice entails – is discarded as irrational. In the apt characterization of Sonja Amadae, such purely strategic rationality constitutes a ‘prison of reason’. ⁶⁶

The Waltzian contradiction between his assumption of anarchic freedom and his insight into the force of anarchic structural necessity is mirrored in a contradiction on which the neoliberal reform project is based. Seeking to liberate markets from protectionist intervention, this project replaces one form of domination with another. While formerly individuals were submitted to hierarchic domination, now they are submitted to the structural violence of anarchic ‘natural selection’. Not only Waltz, but also Marx describes market competition as anarchic. In Marx’s view, modern political authority serves the purpose of creating a legal basis for an unending ‘collision of unfettered individuals who are determined only by their own interests’. ⁶⁷ While neoliberal reformers emphasize the need to create and protect competition rather than just unleash it, ⁶⁸ they rely on an anarchic concept of the market that is central to capitalism more generally. ⁶⁹ Anarchy can be said to constitute the ‘characteristic social form of capitalist modernity’, ⁷⁰ a point not recognized in much IR literature. ⁷¹

With the neoliberal expansion of the market, we experience an expansion of this social form. Anarchic competition gains importance inside states and societies, inside various social fields, inside international institutions, even inside the human soul. ⁷² Inside various actors, new ‘outsides’ are opened up. Rather than the outside becoming an inside, as John Ikenberry argues, ⁷³ the inside becomes an ever-smaller space, surrounded by ever new outsides. Anarchy becomes almost omnipresent. We live in times of neoliberal anarchy.

This development does not at all imply that hierarchy is absent today. With anarchy on the rise in the relations between competitive units, hierarchy is on the rise within these units, palpable in an internal demand for rational self-discipline and hierarchic submission. The experience of anarchic competition on one level of analysis (e.g. between states, firms, institutions, self-entrepreneurs) thus entails hierarchic domination on another level (inside states, firms, institutions, self-entrepreneurs). It is as Marx already argued – in capitalism there is ‘anarchy’ between producers, but ‘despotism’ inside the firm. ⁷⁴ Neoliberalism multiplies the anarchies, and with them also the despotisms. The neoliberal reform project does hence not at all abolish and overcome hierarchic domination, as it purports to do. It also produces and reinforces it. We always need to think the outside and the inside together.

While, to my knowledge, neoliberal reformers did not explicitly draw on Waltz’s text and arguments, the neoliberals and Waltz articulate ideas from the same thinking cosmos – from the same ideational realm, or discourse, in which hierarchy and anarchy appear as the solely imaginable and mutually exclusive types of order. Precisely as critical IR theorists have for long argued, this discourse is much broader than IR theory. It pervades modern political thinking – also, and perhaps ever more sharply, its contemporary political and theoretical expressions. As we shall see in the next section, the same discourse is articulated by a theoretical and political movement that ostensibly challenges neoliberalism: that of the new right.

The Rise of the New Right

Like neoliberalism, the new right responds to a perceived need for liberation. However, rather than from the interventionist welfare state, the new right wants to liberate us from the global rule of liberalism. It recognizes in contemporary liberalism a form of domination. In its resistance against liberal rule, the new right appropriates thinking tools and intellectual resources at home on the political left, such as, notably, a Gramscian awareness of the struggle for cultural hegemony, a Marxist critique of capitalist exploitation, and a poststructuralist sensitivity for the importance of difference. ⁷⁵ The work of Jean-François Drolet and Michael Williams, especially, elaborates on this fact, discussing in detail a range of new right intellectuals from Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried in the United States to Alexander Dugin in Russia to Keishi Saeki in Japan. ⁷⁶ Both in its explicit references and in its more general relationship to liberalism, the new right takes a perspective that is on the surface similar to a critical theoretical perspective.

The new right’s resistance against liberal rule finds numerous and manifold political expressions. It takes notably two common, widely perceived forms. On the one hand, new right critique is populist. It erects binary distinctions between the ‘good people’ and self-serving ‘liberal elites’. ⁷⁷ On the other hand, it takes the form of post-truth politics. It attacks the ‘factual infrastructure’ of liberal democratic politics and interprets ‘liberal’ scientific truths, whether they concern the reality of climate change or FBI crime statistics, as products of manipulations and deceit. ⁷⁸ New right populist and post-truth politics are united in that they express a critique of liberal domination. The new right is, in both respects, an anti-hierarchic project.

However, when examined closely, the new right’s association with critical thinking is in many respects spurious. Its critique is not ‘sustainable’. ⁷⁹ Its post-truth politics naturalizes the belief in one specific, alleged ‘truth’. ⁸⁰ Its suspicion is ‘repressive’. ⁸¹ On a deeper level, there are crucial affinities between the new right and key aspects of liberal and especially neoliberal discourse. These affinities become visible precisely if we examine the seemingly critical character of the new right. Its paranoid rejection of ‘liberal’ facts and truths is a twisted expression of liberal subjectivity and its transparency ideal. ⁸² Its post-truth politics is nourished by a ‘dogmatic cynicism’ that is furthered by the neoliberalization of society. ⁸³ And its emancipatory promise is founded on the same theoretical and political operation that is central also to neoliberalism. This promise is to escape hierarchic domination by means of the unleashing of anarchic competition.

In the place of globalized liberal rule, the new right plans to construct an ‘international anarchy’ well-known in IR theory, in which nations and cultures stand in a survivalist competition against each other. Articulations of new right discourse in various countries, from Italy to the United Kingdom to the United States, ‘share the assumption that liberation from liberal internationalism will herald a “natural” order where identity’s strength will be unleashed, its mettle tested, and the deserving succeed’. ⁸⁴ The idea of a ‘natural’ competition set free from all normative and legal burdens is a pervasive trait of new right discourse. It marks the dominant concepts of sovereignty articulated by Trump’s America, Putin’s Russia, and Xi’s China. These concepts are, in the analysis of Roland Paris, ‘extra-legal’, ‘organic’, and in sum ‘openly, if not ostentatiously, chauvinist and solipsistic’. ⁸⁵ They belong to a world of anarchic competition, where legal rules do not apply, the survival of one’s own identity is threatened, and self-help is therefore the principle of action.

In new right discourse, the concept of anarchic competition is associated with a different set of beliefs than in neoliberalism. It tends to have an openly sexist, xenophobic, and paranoid character that it ostensibly lacks in neoliberalism, where it is associated with rational economic arguments that highlight the need to seek competitive advantages. ⁸⁶ The concept has a still different character in Waltz, who combines theoretical insight with an ethical, anti-war orientation. ⁸⁷ The point is not that the three discourses are all the same and there are no differences between or within them. The point is that there is, despite and apart from these differences, a crucial and deep conceptual overlap.

Others too have recognized this overlap. ‘Much as in Hayekian theory, the market once set free achieves balance and fairness, the New Right’s national identity once set free from normative burdens like NAFTA or the EU, will achieve its natural potential’. ⁸⁸ There is a common, deeply rooted ‘Darwinian’ trait that marks both the neoliberal view of the market and contemporary ‘New Right demands for ethnocultural diversity’. ⁸⁹ With Waltz, we can say that the competing ‘units’ are different in both imaginaries, but the imagined ‘structure’ is the same. There is an analogy between neoliberalism and the new right, as there is one in Waltz’s theory between the market and international politics. The analogy consists in their common use of a concept of structural anarchy.

This analogy is hidden by the new right’s critical stance toward liberalism. There are other phases in modern history when anarchic market competition and anarchic international competition have been more openly associated. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the doctrine of a natural ‘harmony of interests’, produced by the free unfolding of competitive energies, shaped economic as well as international discourse. ⁹⁰ This doctrine was a key object of critiques by E. H. Carr and Max Horkheimer. ⁹¹ As especially Carr’s work reveals, the doctrine was increasingly marked by a ‘Darwinian’ character that justified the exploitation of the weak by the strong. ⁹² In this historical phase, Social Darwinism was a widely influential discourse – a ‘body of belief’, Richard Hofstadter notes, ‘whose chief conclusion was that the positive functions of the state should be kept to the barest minimum’ – ‘it was almost anarchical’. ⁹³ In the modern history of ideas, imaginaries of structural anarchy have played a pervasive role in theorizations of both the market and of international politics. ⁹⁴

Despite its critique of liberalism, today’s new right is not unanimous in its rejection specifically of neoliberal market competition. There is an important libertarian wing especially in the American new right that values economic competition as much as the international one. Parts of the new right adopt, rather than criticize, the neoliberal critique of the rule of a ‘socialist’, protectionist and interventionist state. ⁹⁵ Others more strongly object to neoliberalism, consciously adopting a more ‘national social’ or ‘anti-capitalist’ position. ⁹⁶ Sometimes, also, the same actors are not consistent in their critique, such as Donald Trump who recurrently criticized the influence of ‘Big Money’ while at the same time capitalizing on his ostensibly successful career as a businessman. But whatever the new right’s explicit relation to the ideal of neoliberal market competition, the described conceptual analogy remains. Like neoliberalism, the new right is a project of anarchic liberation.

This promise of liberation is a profoundly uncritical one. It pursues a kind of anarchic competition that is not natural, but imagined. Its quest to resurrect identities constructs the world in a specific way, rather than returning it to its ‘natural’ form. It is not conservative, but ‘pseudo-conservative’. ⁹⁷ Crucially, the realization of this promise does not produce liberty, but anarchic unfreedom. As discussed above, anarchic competition submits all competitors to a strategic logic that dictates how they must behave, punishes misbehavior with the risk of death, and conditions the self-understandings of the competitors. Ultimately, this anarchic unfreedom produces the very thing that the new right claims to escape – hierarchic submission.

Visions of a hierarchic national inside constitute an explicit part of the new right’s political agenda. As Beate Jahn notes, new right policies like ‘America first’ or ‘take back control’ serve ‘but one goal: to re-establish a clear distinction between the domestic and the international sphere by building (ideological, legal or physical) walls between nations’. ⁹⁸ The vision of unleashed international competition is inherently linked to a vision of hierarchic ‘units’ that are strictly isolated from each other. Anarchic liberation from global liberal rule is combined with a defense of hierarchies at home. We can say that the new right simply transposes the divide that also neoliberalism uses. It uses the divide domestic/international to overwrite the divide market/competitors, which neoliberal globalization has installed everywhere and which has led to a suppression of the former. But whichever divide is used, the outcome is the same. In each case, anarchic unfreedom outside is combined with hierarchic domination inside.

Neither neoliberalism nor the new right aims at ending all hierarchies. While they object against specific forms of hierarchic domination on the outside, they both produce their own forms of hierarchic domination on the inside. They criticize hierarchies outside either the market (i.e. the interventionist state) or the nation (i.e. globalized neoliberal rule). Yet they affirm hierarchies inside market actors and inside nations. Note that this does not imply that anarchy is not unleashed on the inside, too, for instance through the creation of competitive job markets inside firms. Also inside Trump’s America and Putin’s Russia, for example, we find a characteristic anarchic struggle to win the favor of the sovereign ruler. ⁹⁹ The point is that, on each inside, there is a potential for new outsides to open up. Whatever the level of analysis we choose, the existence of external anarchic competition will entail the establishment of internal hierarchic domination on a lower level. In the words of Waltz, competing ‘units’ (with hierarchies inside) are ‘creatures’ of anarchic ‘structure’. The point can be repeated on any level of analysis.

Some imaginary of ‘free’, unleashed anarchic competition is conceptually central to any form of hierarchic domination. Indeed, we can posit that there is an escalatory dynamic. The more extreme the vision of unleashed anarchic competition, the more extreme is the urge for hierarchic submission (and vice versa). Forms of totalitarian rule have radicalized precisely this logic of ‘internal discipline, external struggle’, demanding total submission on the inside while fighting an unleashed struggle for world rule against enemies on the outside (as well as their alleged internal allies). ¹⁰⁰ Also in the totalitarian case, and arguably with unprecedented radicality, anarchic unfreedom is co-produced with hierarchic unfreedom. The fact that contemporary new right discourse uses the same binary in a quite radical way is an indication that, as Hannah Arendt argued after the defeat of Hitler and the death of Stalin, the crisis is not over. ¹⁰¹ The potential for a return of totalitarianism is inherent in the current conjuncture, and it justifies why a critical analysis of ideologies is an eminent task for contemporary critical theory. ¹⁰²

A last clarification is in order. This concerns the role of international cooperation within the new right. Does it not only seek competition with liberal actors, but cooperation with other like-minded movements? Recent IR research has made much of this point, highlighting multiple ideological and organizational connections between various new right actors and arguing that the new right shares an ‘international political sociology’ of its own. ¹⁰³ Also historically, far right actors like fascist movements were not without plans for international cooperation, as Jens Steffek and more recently Kye Allen have shown. ¹⁰⁴ However, against the background of the above analysis, it seems doubtful that such cooperative relations will survive the defeat of the common enemy – liberalism. It is more likely, and consistent with the conceptual structure elaborated here, that other existential enemies on the outside are needed to justify the need for internal discipline and keep up an identity-based discourse according to which one’s own ‘unit’ is sharply distinct from others. After all, as I have suggested, this condition is conceptually needed to formulate the false emancipatory promise of the new right. It is needed for it to keep and uphold the popularity that only an emancipatory movement can possess – if only seemingly so.

Conclusion

Both neoliberalism and the new right attempt to escape specific forms of hierarchic domination. Their emancipatory appearance is what makes these projects so widely popular and influential. It pulls many people toward them who believe their promises of liberation. However, these promises are false. Their implementation leads into a reality of anarchic unfreedom. This anarchic unfreedom also co-produces hierarchic unfreedom. In this way, the quest for anarchic liberty brings about the very thing it claims to escape. The stronger the quest to make our social life anarchic, the stronger will this life be marked by both types of unfreedom, the anarchic and the hierarchic. This is the case because the necessity to win the anarchic struggle entails a necessity for rational self-discipline and hierarchic submission.

Today we find ourselves in a situation in which the force of both kinds of necessity has increased ever more. The two unfreedoms are on the rise. The success of the new right is nothing but a symptom of this development. This rise harbors in it an enormous potential for violence, both externally in the relations to others and internally within the social body. The strategic necessity to ‘win’ has always justified excesses in violence, against enemies from both without and within. It can justify the eradication of whatever is not considered naturally fit or competitive enough. There are so many signs in current politics of an increased potential for violence, from hateful online commentary to the storming of parliamentary buildings to the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Anarchic unfreedom consists in the fiction that we are firmly separated from others, all in the same situation but only some can win. This is why, and how, it can seem to us that violence against others does not hurt ourselves. From the preceding analysis, we can conclude that this violence has one root cause in all imaginaries of anarchic unfreedom, both those of the international and those of the market. We cannot separate the neoliberalization of social life from the increased violence that characterizes this social life today.

Critical IR theory can play a key role in this situation. It can diagnose a crucial conceptual link between the two discourses that contend for global hegemony today, neoliberalism and the new right. It can reveal that the political and intellectual influence of both discourses stems from their appearance as projects of liberation and emancipation. It can show how, and why, these emancipatory projects fail – how they inevitably reproduce what they claim to overcome. All this can become visible only if we understand both discourses as specific articulations of a divide between anarchic outside and hierarchic inside. Only if we comprehend how the two sides of this divide are interconnected, can the nature, the failure, and the danger of both projects become fully evident. Only then can we see clearly their emancipatory appearance, their failure to produce freedom, and the danger of totalitarian violence.

This diagnosis has crucial implications for the direction the quest for emancipation should take today. The contribution of critical IR theory here lies in revealing that liberation from hierarchic domination cannot be achieved without liberation from anarchic unfreedom. ¹⁰⁵ Freedom within a hierarchic realm, whether this be a state, a firm, an institution, a family, or the self, is predicated on freedom in an anarchic realm of horizontal relations to other states, firms, institutions, families, and beings. As long as the latter are marked by anarchic unfreedom; as long as strategic necessities dictate how we behave toward others; as long as there is only anarchic self-help in our outer relations, so long can there be no full inner freedom either. ¹⁰⁶ And the same applies vice versa. We will not be free in our relations to others if we do not learn to emancipate ourselves from the commands of parents, superiors, and other authorities. Inner and outer freedom can be achieved only together. To see and articulate this connection, which is so centrally important in the current historical moment, critical international theory is most urgently needed.