The Integrated Circus: The New Right and the Restructuring of Global Markets

This work examines the relationship between the emergence of the New Right and the development of a global marketplace after the Second World War. Focusing on the political organization and neo-conservative ideologies of the New Right, Marchak scrutinizes the connections between technological change, the debt and environmental crises, mounting Islamic fundamentalism, the end of the Cold War, and the rise of the Japanese and other Asian-Pacific economies and the decline in American hegemony. When Pax Americana began to disintegrate in the late 1960s, economic leaders in corporate America joined with their counterparts in Western Europe and Japan to develop a self-interested strategy for dealing with the political and social impacts of a changing global economy. As Marchak shows, the political agenda of the emerging New Right - the dismantling of the welfare state - was supported by corporate-funded think-tanks which influenced public policy and by media campaigns which swayed public opinion. The New Right promoted the resurgence of laissez-faire political and economic ideas which Marchak traces back to the theories of Adam Smith. Marchak describes the changes such strategies created in the world economy and examines their effects on the United States and Canada, Western and Eastern Europe, Japan, the newly industrializing nations, and the increasingly impoverished third world countries. She includes chapters on the silicon revolution, Japanese expansion, the automobile industry, special export zones, the debt crisis, environmental issues, and international organizations.