Neoliberalism, Mike Moore, and the WTO

Abstract

Mike Moore is a working-class boy from rural New Zealand who subsequently became Director General of the World Trade Organization. This paper uses his experiences and understanding to analyse the embodied forms in which neoliberalism travelled from nation-state to global settings. It shows that neoliberal discourses and techniques do not always emerge in the sites we assume, travel in the forms we expect, or move in the directions we anticipate. By analysing Moore's understanding of relationships between the global economy and nation-states, the reforms he made to WTO processes following the ‘Battle of Seattle’, and the implications these reforms had for broader conceptions of global spaces and subjects, the paper contributes to a conceptual argument that neoliberalism can be usefully understood as an assemblage which comes together in much more disjunctive ways than is often recognised, and that it should be theorised and researched as such.