Neoliberalism, as I have said, forms an international regime: that is, not just a system replicated within each nation-state, but one that binds together and exceeds the different nation-states of the advanced, and less advanced, regions of the capitalist world in the process that has come to be called globalisation. Unlike the various national agendas of neoliberalism, this process was not originally driven by the political intention of power-holders, but followed from the explosive deregulation of financial markets set loose by Thatcher’s so-called Big Bang of 1986. In due course, globalisation became an ideological watchword of neoliberal regimes across the world, since it yielded two enormous advantages to capital at large. Politically speaking, globalisation clinched the expropriation of democratic will that the oligarchic closure of neoliberalism was enforcing domestically. For now, TINA meant not just that policy connivance between centre-right and centre-left at national level largely eliminated any meaningful electoral choice, but also that global financial markets would not permit any deviation from the policies on offer, on pain of economic meltdown. That was the political bonus of globalisation. No less important was the economic bonus: capital could now weaken labour still further, not just by deunionisation, wage repression and precarity, but by relocating production to less developed countries with much lower labour costs, or even simply threatening to do this.
Another aspect of globalisation, however, had a more ambiguous effect. Neoliberal principles stipulate the deregulation of markets: the free movement of all the factors of production – in other words, mobility across borders not just of goods, services and capital, but also of labour. Logically, therefore, it means immigration. Firms in most countries had long utilised migrant workers as a reserve army of cheap labour, where supply was required and circumstances permitted. But for states, considerations of a purely economic kind had to be weighed against those of a more social and political sort. There, significantly, Friedrich von Hayek – the greatest mind of neoliberalism – had early on entered a reservation, a caveat. Immigration, he warned, could not be treated as if it were simply a question of factor markets, since unless it was strictly controlled it could threaten the cultural cohesion of the host state and the political stability of society itself. Here was where Thatcher too drew the line. Yet, of course, pressures for the import or acceptance of cheap foreign labour persisted, even as production was increasingly outsourced abroad, since many services of a menial or disagreeable sort, shunned by locals, could not, unlike factories, be exported, but had to be performed on the spot. Unlike virtually any other aspect of the neoliberal order, no stable establishment consensus was ever reached on this question, which remained a weak link in the chain of TINA.