«Альтернативы нет?»: обзор теоретических интерпретаций TINA

Вестник Российского университета дружбы народов. Серия: Политология. 2026. Т. 28. № 4.

Янкилевич А. А.

This article reviews contemporary theoretical interpretations of the formula “There is no alternative” (TINA), a phrase widely associated with neoliberal policy in the late twentieth and early twenty‑first centuries. The principal aim is to identify the distinct semantic registers of TINA in order to systematize the polysemy that has emerged around the term in academic discourse. The review shows that scholars who mobilize TINA typically ground their analyses in several politico‑economic cases – notably processes in Latin America during the 2000s, the sovereign‑debt crisis in the European Union in the early 2010s, and the broader consequences of global shocks such as the 2008 global financial crisis. According to these case‑based narratives, the study examines the major approaches to theorizing TINA. First, within Latin American studies TINA is construed as an ideological principle of neoliberal globalization. Second, in the European context TINA is analyzed as a rhetorical strategy of depoliticization that serves to justify the ascendancy of technocratic institutions over democratically elected governments in moments of crisis. An economic perspective is also highlighted, which treats TINA as a legitimatory narrative for a specific package of neoliberal policies and as a form of cognitive constraint. Third, at a more global and theoretical level, critical political theory reads TINA as a specific state of Modernity and its political imagination in which alternatives to the existing status quo become effectively unthinkable. The article concludes that TINA is broadly polysemous, but that this plurality of meanings can be productively reconciled for understanding of the neoliberal stage of Modernity. As a promising avenue for further research, it proposes to conceptualize TINA as a specific state of political imagination.

Keywords: дискурс, современность, неолиберализм, discourse, Modernity, political imagination, neoliberalism, политическое воображение, TINA (There is no alternative), TINA (There is no alternative)