"Hobbes once remarked that if you are forced at gunpoint to go through a door, you are still free to go through it: you can be forced and be free. For most of us today this is a perversity that smacks of Stalinism. But what if someone throws walls around you on three sides and then leaves you to decide for yourself what to do? Are you still free to determine your future, assuming that the wall builder has at least as much right to build the walls as you do? ... [U]unfortunately most conventional discussion ... either fails to spot the walls or assumes that they are natural structures deriving from the very substance of market economics, rather than the work of political hands. As a result, conventional wisdom does not for a moment doubt that ... peoples ... have at last entered the realm of freedom and self-determination...

[W]hat right do a handful of capitalist states assert their political power over the world economy? It is in this field of what conventional liberal thought presents as a depoliticized world market, that the West’s decisive political power lies, largely hidden, today. Military strength is, if understood politically, merely an ancillary buttress to this power over world economics: it steps in to preserve this system of domination, and has a defensive or regulatory quality."

—Peter Gowan, 1990