The G20 Consensus: The Advent of Post-Structural Adjustmentism
By Quentin Albatross

The leaders of the twenty most economically powerful nations in the world met in Washington D.C. on Saturday to discuss tentative collaborative action to stem the recessionary pressures of the global credit crisis. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was pleased with the results, stating that “despite the great diversity of countries in the room for those two days of the summit, there was a practically unanimous agreement on all major topics."

Ever since the beginning of the financial meltdown, there has been increasing pressure on politicians to renounce what is known as the neoclassical economic model. Critics on the left blame neoclassicism for the ballooning economic crisis, as financial deregulation is one of its hallmark features; deregulation has taken a lot of flak as of late. Shockingly, some of the G20 leaders – most notably, French President Nicolas Sarkozy – seemed to concede to this ideological critique, and attempted to begin to form a new economic ethos for the twenty-first century.

Maintaining the tradition of French intellectuals, Sarkozy gave a rather vague lecture to the media after the meeting in an attempt to define the new economic ethos. “Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of neoclassical economics that could be called a ‘recession,’ if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of neoclassical – or neoclassicist – thought to reduce or to suspect,” he began distractedly. “But let me use the term ‘recession’ anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this recession will have the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling.”

After speaking for roughly six and a half hours, an English translator took his place at the podium and muttered, “Well, basically, he says that everything is really complicated and we shouldn’t rely on universal models to approach diverse and unique economic problematics.”

The speech was met with the disapproval of a significant portion of those who claim to have actually understood the totality of what Sarkozy said. Those on the left argued that Sarkozy’s renunciation of a “universal centre” provided no basis for any economic action to stop the bleeding caused by the credit crisis. "Even worse," stammered an anonymous neoconservative, "the subjective nature of Sarkozy's model carries the taint of protectionist sentiment!"

The French President was unavailable for comment, but his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy pacified most of the critics by stating that she would confiscate his collection of Derrida essays and make him read some Camus or Sartre.