HOBSBAWM, Eric J. The age of extremes: a history of the world, 1914-1991. New York: Vintage, 1996. 627p.

The history of the twenty years after 1973 is that of a world which lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis. p. 403. Nobody seriously doubted that for these parts of the world [terceiro mundo] the 1980s were an era of severe depression. p. 405. Between 1990 and 1993 few attempts were made to deny that even the developed capitalist world was in depression. p. 408. Nevertheless, the central fact about the Crisis Decades is not that capitalism no longer worked as well as it had done in the Golden Age, but that its operations had become uncontrollable. Nobody knew what to do about the vagaries of the world economy or possessed instruments to manage them. p. 408 The crisis decades were the era when the national state lost its economic powers. p. 408. The only alternative offered was that propagated by the minority of ultra-liberal economic theologians. Even before the crash, the long-isolated minority of believers in the unrestricted free market had begun their attack on the domination of the Keynesians and other champions of the managed mixed economy and full employment. p. 409. Champions of absolute individual freedom were unmoved by the evident social injustices of unrestricted market capitalism, even when (as in Brazil for most of the 1980s) it did not produce economic growth. p. 410. However, the model [Swedish Model] was also, and perhaps even more fundamentally, undermined by the globalization of the economy after 1970, which put the governments of all states except perhaps the U.S.A., with its enormous economy at the mercy of an uncontrollable world market. p. 411. There were good grounds for some of the disillusion with state-managed industries and public administration that became so common in the 1980s. p. 412. In any case most neo-liberal governments were obliged to manage and steer their economies, while claiming that they were only encouraging market forces. p. 412. The historic tragedy of the Crisis Decades was that production now visibly shed human beings faster than the market economy generated new jobs for them. p. 414. The massive entry of the U.S.S.R. on the international grain market, and the impact of the oil crises of the 1970s dramatized the ending of the socialist camp as a virtually self-contained regional economy protected from the vagaries of the world economy. p. 418.

Only one generalization was fairly safe: since 1970 almost all the countries in this region [third world] had plunged deeply into debt. p. 422. There was a moment of genuine panic in the early 1980s when, starting with Mexico, the major Latin American debtors could no longer pay, and the Western banking system was on the verge of collapse, since several of the largest banks had lent their money with such abandon in the 1970s (when petro-dollars flooded in, clamouring for investment) that they would now be technically bankrupt. p. 423. The main effect of the Crisis Decades was thus to widen the gap between rich and poor countries. p. 424. During the heyday of the free-market theologians, the state was further undermined by the tendency to dismantle activities hitherto conducted by public bodies on principle, leaving them to the market. p. 425. The triumph of neo-liberal theology in the 1980s was, in effect, translated into policies of systematic privatization and free-market capitalism which were imposed on governments too bankrupt to resist them, whether they were immediately relevant to their economic problems or not [] p. 431. The other apparently fortunate consequences of the oil crises was the flood of dollars which now spurted from multi-billionaire OPEC states, often with tiny populations, and which was distributed by the international banking system in the form of loans to anyone who wanted to borrow. Few developing countries resisted the temptation to take millions thus shoveled into their pockets, and which were to provoke the world debt crisis of the early 1980s. p. 474 What drove the Soviet Union with accelerating speed towards the precipice, was the combination of glasnost that amounted to the disintegration of authority, with a perestroika that amounted to the destruction of the old mechanisms that made the economy work, without providing any alternative; and consequently the increasingly dramatic collapse of the citizens standard of living. p. 483. The attempt to save the old structure of the Soviet Union had destroyed it more suddenly and irrevocably than anyone had expected. p. 495. Thus, for the first time in two centuries, the world of the 1990s entirely lacked any international system or structure. p. 559 It was therefore likely that the fashion for economic liberalization and marketization, which had dominated the 1980s, and reached a peak of ideological complacency after the collapse of the Soviet system, would not last long. p. 574. The immediate reaction of Western commentators to the collapse of the Soviet system was that it ratified the permanent triumph of both capitalism and liberal democracy, two concepts which the less sophisticated of North American world-watchers tended to confuse. p. 575.

Increasingly, however, governments took to by-passing both the electorate and its representative assemblies, if possible, or at least to taking decisions first and then challenging both to reverse a fait accompli, relying on the volatility, divisions or inertness off public opinion. p. 580.