There is no alternative (shortened as TINA) was a slogan which Margaret Thatcher, the conservative British Prime Minister used often. In economics, politics, and political economy, it has come to mean that "there is no alternative" to economic liberalism, that free markets, free trade, and capitalist globalization are the best way for modern societies to develop.
The phrase may be traced to its emphatic use by nineteenth-century classical liberal thinker Herbert Spencer.
Cabinet minister Norman St John-Stevas, one of the leading "wets" nicknamed Thatcher "Tina".
In the early nineties, Francis Fukuyama wrote a book named The End of History and the Last Man, which in a similar strain argued that liberal democracy had triumphed over communism and the historical struggle between political systems was over (though there could still be future events).
According to TINA, economic liberalism is the only valid remaining ideology.
Famous quotes containing the words there is no, there is and/or alternative:
“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there. For there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“If nations always moved from one set of furnished rooms to another—and always into a better set—things might be easier, but the trouble is that there is no one to prepare the new rooms. The future is worse than the ocean—there is nothing there. It will be what men and circumstances make it.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“No alternative to the
one-man path.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)