Introduction: The Reduced State and the Economic Colonization of the Social
Since the 1990s, the world has lived under a structural phenomenon: never before had the economy been so powerful and the State so weak. In the name of efficiency and modernization, governments across the Global South and Eastern Europe surrendered to the neoliberal mandate that subordinated all political decisions to the rules of the market and the private sphere. The economy, presented as a neutral and technical domain, came to govern not only public finances but also social relations, welfare policies, and even the very notions of citizenship.
The State, once conceived as the guarantor of the common good and mediator of social conflicts, was transformed into an administrator of austerity. Its primary function ceased to be protection; instead, it became budget adjustment—not redistribution but balance. Structural reforms promoted by international organizations and local elites dismantled the State’s capacity to guide development, provide public services, or sustain projects of social integration coherent with real economic and social needs. This reconfiguration had profound consequences. Wherever the State withdrew, the market did not produce order but fragmentation and multidimensional inequality: the privatization of rights, the commodification of labor, and the depoliticization of life. Deprived of its material base, democracy was reduced to an electoral procedure emptied of collective meaning.
In both Latin America and post-socialist Eastern Europe, neoliberalism not only transformed economies but redrew the frontier between the public and the private, eroding the very foundations of sovereignty. In its place emerged an absent State—disciplined by global capital, unable to protect its citizens, and subordinated to an economy that recognizes no political or ethical limits. This article analyzes this historical drift through a comparative perspective, exploring how the “withdrawal of the State,” more ideological than fiscal, led to a process of social disintegration that today manifests in democratic disaffection and the resurgence of authoritarian projects.
The Neoliberal Turn: Global Doctrine, Local Trajectories
The 1990s consecrated neoliberalism as a global orthodoxy. Institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank imposed a uniform recipe based on fiscal discipline, privatization, and trade liberalization. These measures were presented as “technical solutions” but entailed deep political transformations. They rewrote the relationship between citizenship and the State, transferring the logic of market competition to the social and moral spheres.
In Latin America, the neoliberal turn was implemented in contexts marked by authoritarian legacies built on fire and torture. Under Pinochet’s dictatorship, Chile became a pioneering laboratory for structural adjustment. The reforms of Menem in Argentina, Fujimori in Peru, and Salinas de Gortari in Mexico followed suit. Even under formally democratic governments, the logic of adjustment remained intact: privatization of pensions, energy, education, and transport, accompanied by the hollowing out of the State as guarantor of rights and social protection.
In Eastern Europe, the collapse of socialist regimes opened a political and economic vacuum rapidly filled by Western advisors and financial organizations. The so-called “shock therapy” sought to dismantle planned economies overnight. In Poland, Russia, the Balkans, and the Baltic countries, the result was the emergence of oligarchic elites and the collapse of industrial employment. Everything associated with the former socialist order was demonized, and a system stripped of collective rights was established. If privatization in Latin America was the offspring of debt and dictatorship, in Eastern Europe it was the child of transition and uncertainty. In both cases, the outcome was the same: fragmented working classes, weakened States, and the commodification of everyday life.
The Absent State and the Fracture of the Social Fabric
Neoliberal reforms promised efficiency and modernization but produced inequality and insecurity. The State’s withdrawal from welfare provision broke the social pacts that had sustained both Latin American developmentalism and European socialism. The absent State is not simply a small State; it is a State stripped of social legitimacy, incapable of guaranteeing rights or articulating a collective horizon.
In the Global South, state absence became visible through the expansion of informality and the privatization of security. As protection systems collapsed, millions were pushed into precarious labor or migration. Violence, once monopolized by the State, became diffuse: from Central American maras to Brazilian militias, the institutional vacuum was filled by local powers, mafias, or para-state actors. In Eastern Europe, absence manifested through depopulation, aging, and nostalgia for a protective State. Countries such as Hungary, Poland, or Serbia responded to the neoliberal void with the rise of illiberal governments promising to restore national sovereignty against globalization’s effects. Yet this “reconstruction of the State” was based more on ideological control and exclusion than on redistribution or social justice.
The common result can be described as a post-social citizenship: individuals formally free but unprotected; politically included but economically disposable. The social corpus exists only in theory, as depoliticization dictates the tone of all social, political, and economic relations.
Democracy Without Demos
One of neoliberalism’s deepest consequences has been the erosion of democracy’s social content. Elections remained, but citizen participation and trust collapsed. In Latin America, data from Latinobarómetro reveal a sustained decline in trust toward parties, congresses, and governments as market reforms advanced. In Eastern Europe, surveys from the 2000s show a similar phenomenon: the initial euphoria for liberal democracy gave way to disillusionment and political apathy. Democracy became an empty ritual—a procedure without substance. Strategic decisions (monetary, fiscal, trade) were delegated to technocrats and international bodies, depoliticizing the economic realm. Boaventura de Sousa Santos aptly termed this a “low-intensity democracy”: formally plural but materially excluding.
According to data from the Regional Cooperation Council – Balkan Barometer 2024, in the Western Balkans 74% of citizens distrust political parties—the main channel connecting citizens and politics; 64% distrust their local parliaments; 68% believe laws are not effectively implemented; and 76% consider the judiciary to be corrupted by political influence. All these countries are classified as hybrid or transitional regimes, with Serbia showing the sharpest democratic decline in recent years.
In this context, the rise of figures such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Viktor Orbán in Hungary is not an anomaly but a structural consequence of an institutionalized practice. Authoritarianism did not emerge against neoliberalism but from within it—as a political response to the social disintegration neoliberalism itself produced, in a context where democracy no longer offered feasible answers to citizens’ needs.
From Transition to Disintegration: A Historical Comparison
The contrast between Latin America and Eastern Europe reveals both symmetries and divergences. The symmetry lies in structural outcomes: weakened States, fragmented societies, and crises of democratic legitimacy. The difference, however, lies in the historical memory of the State. In Latin America, the State was remembered as a promoter of development and social justice; in Eastern Europe, as an apparatus of authoritarian control. This difference explains their divergent political responses.
In Latin America, the so-called Pink Tide of the 2000s sought to reverse the neoliberal legacy through redistributive policies and the recovery of the State as an economic actor. In Eastern Europe, the reaction took a nationalist and conservative form: the reconstruction of the State became associated with cultural closure and ethnic sovereignty. Both reactions, however, share a common background—the search for community after neoliberal fragmentation. Both Latin American left-wing populism and European right-wing nationalism attempt to fill the void left by the absent State.
Conclusion: Reclaiming the Public in the Age of Abandonment
Neoliberalism transformed the State into a mere administrator of austerity and a guarantor of private capital. Its withdrawal did not produce self-regulated markets but atomized societies and cynical democracies. The current rise of authoritarianism and nationalism, both in the Global South and Eastern Europe, reflects a profound demand for protection and belonging—the need to rebuild the social bonds destroyed by the market.
Recovering the State does not mean returning to bureaucratic statism but reconstructing the public sphere as a space of justice and solidarity. It implies reestablishing the State’s capacity to guarantee rights, regulate capital, and articulate a collective horizon. The future of democracy, in both post-socialist and post-colonial societies, depends on overcoming neoliberalism’s legacy. Only by reintegrating the economic and the political—by reconstructing the demos that neoliberalism disintegrated—will it be possible to emerge from the age of abandonment and once again imagine citizenship as the shared foundation of justice and democracy.
