Neoliberals begin with a presumption that capital has a natural right to flow freely across national boundaries. (The free flow of labor enjoys no similar right.) Since that entails persistent balance-of-payments problems in a nonautarkic world, neoliberals took the lead in inventing all manner of transnational devices for the economic and political discipline of nation-states. They began by attempting to reintroduce pure market discipline (through flexible exchange rates, dismantling capital controls), but over the longer term learned to appreciate that suitably staffed international institutions like the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the IMF are better situated to impose neoliberal policies on recalcitrant nation-states. Initially strident neoliberal demands to abolish global financial institutions were tempered once the neoliberals used them primarily to influence staffing and policy decisions at those institutions, and thus to displace other internationalist agendas. Thus, it is substantially correct to observe an organic connection between such phenomena as the Washington Consensus and the spread of neoliberal hegemony (see Plehwe in the Introduction to this volume).

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 2131