This concluding chapter of the book discusses whether the neoliberal state can be described as a specific institutional configuration. We do not take for granted that the neoliberal state represents a real historical phenomenon or a conceptually consistent state model. The chapter instead asks these questions precisely. Can we find theoretical and empirical validation for the neoliberal state as a historical and sociological type? To address the issue, the chapter begins by discussing the concept of “internal structure” of the state, which was established by German scholar Otto Hintze as the foundational principle for state-building as a discipline. The chapter compares the neoliberal state to other state formations: the liberal state of the nineteenth century and the developmental state of the twentieth century. In contrast to the neoliberal state, these two other state formations are generally accepted as valid historical and sociological types by the scholarly literature. Finally, the chapter summarizes empirical results and theoretical discussions introduced by the previous chapters of the volume, as well as additional empirical research, in order to find whether neoliberal states in Latin America and Spain have demonstrated their own specific characteristics of internal structure in the sense of Hintze discussed at the beginning of the chapter.

This chapter provides a historical institutionalist interpretation of first- and second-generation administrative reforms in Latin America during the 1990s, building on the experiences of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru. Although path dependence partly explains why Brazil and Chile were able to secure bureaucratic autonomy during the first wave and retain the administrative capacity to implement the second wave of reforms successfully, the contrasting experiences of Argentina and Brazil illustrate how similarly profound critical junctures led to different outcomes depending on a contingent constellation of political factors. The chapter also illustrates how the concept of sequencing is key to explain the success of second-generation reforms. In Argentina and Peru, where first-generation reforms were profound, administrative autonomy was undermined, and the capacity to implement the recommendations of the second wave was severely hampered. Overall, the chapter illustrates how the field of public administration could benefit from the incorporation of concepts such as bureaucratic autonomy and capacity and theoretical constructs such as path dependence, critical junctures, contingency, forking, sequencing, and others, which are central to the study of the state in the historical institutionalist tradition.

Chile is the birthplace of neoliberalism in Latin America. A group of rightwing economists, the so-called Chicago boys, convinced Pinochet to abandon the state-led developmental model that had been dominant in the country since the early 1930s. Instead, they began to apply in April 1975 an orthodox neoliberal model based on free market principles. By this, Chile pioneered the adoption of neoliberal policies in Latin America and the Western world as it preceded the emergence of Thatcherism and Reaganomics in the Northern hemisphere. Neoliberal rule deeply reshaped Chilean society, leading to a fast process of capitalist modernization and cultural transformation. The neoliberal model survived the end of military rule in 1990 and still plays a pivotal role in the Chilean economy today. This study aims to explain the remarkable longevity and relative strength that has characterized neoliberalism in Chile. The neoliberal model has been seriously challenged by the October revolt in 2019 and by the leftwing government led by Gabriel Boric since March 2022. But despite attempts to dismantle it, the neoliberal model has proved to have taken deep roots in Chilean society.

Whether the model of the neoliberal state is conceived in terms of the history of ideas or political economy, a specific reorganization of fiscal relations is always at the center of the debate. The neoliberalization of the state is supposed to be achieved through the containment of inflation and public debt, the reallocation of the declining tax burden to consumption, and the creation of economic competitiveness through low-income, corporate, and capital gains taxes. Although the Spanish state has pursued neoliberal policies in various areas since the 1990s, its tax policy has always been at odds with neoliberal ideas. Instead, and in contrast to developments in Latin America, its political elites never abandoned the idea of progressive taxation. Moreover, they have been guided by the European model of the tax state, whose two pillars, VAT and progressive income taxation, have never been touched in principle. The concept of neoliberalism, therefore, suggests a problematic interpretation of the Spanish state’s recent history. This finding presents us with a critical choice: Either neoliberalism is not deeply attached to specific tax policies, or the narratives of neoliberalization, which have nevertheless become popular, fail to capture its history.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, globalization, technological changes, and neoliberal reforms weakened labor organizations in Latin America and beyond. In this context, scholars not only documented labor union decline but also suggested that historical differences between formal-sector insiders (e.g., salaried workers) and outsiders (e.g., informal sector, rural, and unemployed workers) would deepen. However, unexpected alliances between labor unions representing insiders and social movements representing outsiders have since formed in a number of countries. Some of these alliances have crystallized into new national labor federations or overarching associations, which I call insider-outsider coalitions. I argue that these coalitions emerge in the context of major political or economic threats affecting labor movements. When labor movements split in response to such threats, defecting labor unions seek outsider allies. Coalition formation succeeds when defecting unions are strong and there are existing networks or organizations among outsiders. The chapter illustrates the argument of insider-outsider coalition formation in the case of Argentina.

A voluminous literature has explored the origins and consequences of neoliberal public policy. However, the question of whether scholars can identify a distinctly neoliberal state formation remains under discussion. This introductory chapter begins to offer an answer by first describing neoliberal reforms throughout Latin America, challenging conventional understandings of the period. For example, while the region did see a turn toward export-driven growth, the retrenchment in state spending often associated with neoliberalism did not occur. The chapter continues by providing brief case studies describing how neoliberal policies were implemented within individual countries, underscoring the difficulty of speaking of a regional model of neoliberal reform. The chapter then turns to the question of state capacity by introducing the four dimensions of state power that provide the organizing framework for the remaining chapters of the volume: economic, territorial, infrastructural, and symbolic power. Following a series of brief synopses of the individual chapters contained within the present volume, the introductory chapter concludes by suggesting that while there were general regional patterns in terms of policy, each individual state remained “neoliberal” in its own idiosyncratic way.

This chapter argues that successive institutional modernizations since 1990 in Chile have reconfigured the neoliberal state into an “enabling” form that preserved and entrenched the centrality and fundamental role of the market and the decentralization of social responsibility to the municipal level. The municipalization of primary health care, education, and social assistance embedded by the architects of the “subsidiary” neoliberal state, and defended in terms of greater efficiency in the delivery and quality of those public goods, was legitimized in moral-political terms. The institutional modernizations of the past three decades have been legitimated as “enabling” subjects, as gender-neutral citizens, to bear responsibility for their own well-being. They aim to resolve the fundamental contradiction between, on the one hand, the needs of a rapidly globalizing and diversifying the resource-based capitalist economy, and, on the other hand, the social reproductive activities on which that economy necessarily relies. A gendered approach reveals that women play a fundamental role in materializing the moral vision of this embodied, gendered, “enabling” state form. It shows that while women’s work provides the major share of private and social provisioning, their efforts remain largely invisible and undervalued.

Evidence from Indigenous organizing in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile offers useful illustrations of the ways in which Indigenous peoples have challenged (and been challenged by) neoliberalism and settler colonial orders. While there are sound reasons to say that Indigenous movements have been “stronger” in Bolivia and Ecuador than in Chile, I make the more modest claim that all three countries provide useful ways to think about the longue durée of colonial entanglements in Latin America. Viewing neoliberalism through the lenses of Settler Colonial Studies and Indigenous Studies offers two different ways of situating the central concern of this volume. First, it provides an alternative timescale, one that situates neoliberalism not only within the twentieth and twenty-first-century swing of statist and market-based development models, but within a longer colonial history of extractivism, state formation, and Indigenous struggles. Second, it considers the politics of neoliberalism as both an enabling condition of Indigenous mobilization and demobilization. Neoliberalism, from the vantage point of Indigenous Studies, is part of an ongoing story of colonial dispossession, anti-colonial resistance, and negotiation.

Spain, and Europe more generally, has long been regarded as an epicenter of regionalism and secessionism, while Latin America is usually portrayed as lacking comparable movements. This chapter takes a different approach. First, applying the concept of territorial autonomy movements, it pursues a cross-regional comparison of Santa Cruz in Bolivia, Guayas in Ecuador, and Catalonia in Spain. The chapter shows that autonomy movements across the Iberian world are strikingly similar with regards to their core claims, diagnostic frames, and tactics. The chapter draws on social movement theory, secondly, to account for the recent intensification of territorial autonomy mobilizations in the three cases under discussion. We argue that in all three cases, (1) transformations of center-region relations triggered territorial grievances; (2) dense associational networks and new alliances with local state representatives enhanced organizational resources, while (3) broader anti-neoliberal protest cycles and their concern with direct democracy and/or multicultural group rights provided territorial challengers with new ways to assign meaning to and justify their demands. Finally, the chapter also engages with the broader theme of the volume and places territorial autonomy movements in the context of the neoliberal state and wider anti-neoliberal protests in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Spain.