by Tamara Kunanayakam

Public Lecture and Panel Discussion on Dynamic Interrelationships among Economic Policy,
International Relations And National Sovereignty Organised by Sri Lanka Association for Political Economy (SLAPE) together with the Departments of Economics and International Relations, and the Economics Students Association (ESA) of the University of Colombo Colombo, 06 June 2018

Sri Lankan sovereignty – its supremacy in domestic policy and its independence inforeign policy – is under a two-pronged attack.

At the UN Human Rights Council, the attack is led by US neoconservatives who aggressively promote direct, unilateral, preventive, and pre-emptive intervention, including military, in the internal affairs of sovereign States. Within Sri Lanka, the attack is on the economic front led by their ideological counterparts, the neoliberals, aimed at the physical takeover of the country’s wealth, natural resources and economic activities, including its public assets,
financial as well as non-financial, tangible as well as intangible (such as brand name, customer databases, customer relationships, supplier data bases, supplier relationships, experienced and trained people and the technical know-how of running the business).
The common aim of neoconservatives and neoliberals is maintaining US global hegemony by combatting the reemergence of a potential rival, which the 2018 US National Defense Strategy identified as the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by China and Russia, not terrorism. State sovereignty – not US sovereignty – is the common enemy of both neoconservatives and neoliberals.

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