Challenges of Globalization

New Trends in International Politics and Society

Marika Lerch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351529624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"Globalization has been the ""buzzword"" in international political and academic discourse since the 1990s. It is used as a general descriptor of a world in which borders are becoming less and less important, while transnational flows of capital and goods, but also of ideas and people, cultural norms and values, crime, war, and viruses are increasing.If globalization's dynamics are to be fully understood, a reasonable critique is to be formulated, and realistic political proposals to meet the challenges of globalization are to be developed, this complex phenomenon must be dissected. Challenges of Globalization brings together prominent authors of different national backgrounds. They look beyond the buzzword to provide a genuinely ""global"" view of globalization. The editors' introduction provides a ""roadmap"" through the globalization debate and shows the connections between the different aspects covered in detail in the various contributions.This volume deals with two major issues: first, the economic, societal, ecological, and political consequences of globalization, including--but also going beyond--the identification of globalization's ""winners and losers"" worldwide; and second, solutions that have emerged from the current political debate to cope with the various challenges. These include the creation of new global governance structures, fostering a ""global civil society"" that might enhance the democratic legitimacy of global governance, and strategies to be implemented at national and regional levels, allowing states to adapt in ways that make liberalization compatible with development in poor countries and enable the rescue of the welfare state in rich countries.Challenges of Globalization serves as a multi-dimensional and accessible introduction to the globalization debate, and will be of particular interest to academics, policymakers, and international agencies."

Part 1

Globalization and Its Consequences

1

The Future of the State in an Era of Globalization

Bob Jessop

Lively debates over the future of the nation-state resurfaced in the 1980s as scholars and politicians began to suggest that it was now too small to solve the world’s big problems and too big to solve its little ones. Among the most frequently cited problems were: (1) the rise of an uncontrolled and possibly uncontrollable global capitalism, (2) the emergence of a global risk society, (3) the challenge to national politics from the politics of identity and new social movements based on local and/or transnational issues; and, more recently, (4) the threat of new forms of terrorism and decentralized network warfare. But there is little agreement about what these problems mean for the state — especially as such challenges are politically constructed and contested. Prognoses include the rise of a single global Empire; a western conglomerate state centered on the United States; a series of supranational states modeled on the European Union; the rise of a fragmented neo-medieval state system; a shift from largely state-based government to network-based governance; the re-scaling of the powers of the national state upwards, downwards, or out-wards; and minor incremental changes in secondary aspects of the nation-state that leave its primary features intact. This paper reviews some major changes in the postwar state in advanced capitalist societies and relates them to other changes, including the increasing integration of the world market. But it first offers six clarifications regarding what is really at stake in the debate over globalization and the future of the state.

Six Clarifications

First, all forms of state are based on the territorialization of political power. A formally sovereign national state exercising control over a large territorial area is only a relatively recent institutional expression of state power. It results from a specific, socially constructed division of the global political order into many territorially exclusive, mutually recognizing mutually legitimating, sovereign states. Other modes of organizing political power on a territorial basis existed before the rise of this Westphalian system (e.g., city-states, the medieval state system, and traditional empires); and other modes have coexisted with it and/or may be superseding it (e.g., modern imperial-colonial blocs, supranational alliances such as the European Union, or complex post-national polities associations with variable geometries). Thus, even if we accept that globalization challenges the national state as one mode of territorialization of political power, it does not follow that political power will cease to assume some territorial form or another. Indeed, rather than simply withering away or being entirely superseded by non-territorial forms of organizing political power (e.g., a series of global or international regimes addressed to specific functional problems), the evidence points to continuing attempts to redesign and/or rescale territorial statehood in response to current challenges.

Second, we should distinguish between the national state and the nation-state. The territorial organization of power long preceded nation formation and, whereas territorial statehood is now almost universal, nation-statehood is not. The latter can also have different, potentially overlapping, sometimes antagonistic bases. These include ethnic identity, based on a socially constructed ethnonational community (e.g., Germany); a cultural nation based on a shared national culture that may well be defined and actively promoted by the state itself (e.g., France); and a civic nation based on patriotic commitment to the constitution and belief in the legitimacy of representative government (e.g., the USA). These three forms can reinforce each other (e.g., Denmark), be combined in a hybrid multinational state (e.g., mainland Britain), or provoke conflicts over the proper basis of the nation-state (e.g., Canada, New Zealand). Pressures exist to grant significant autonomy to regionally-based national minorities (e.g., Spain) or institute “consociational” forms of government to share power between nations in a given state (e.g., Belgium, New Zealand). Initially, then, we should consider how these challenges affect the national state form rather than different forms of “nation-state.”

Third, addressing the future of national and/or nation-states requires us to look beyond the state. The latter does not normally exist in majestic isolation overseeing its own society but is more or less embedded in a wider political system, other institutional orders, and civil society. Thus state transformation involves the redrawing of the multiple “lines of difference” between the state and its environment(s) as states (and the social forces they represent) redefine their priorities, expand or reduce their activities, rescale them in the light of new challenges, modify the relation between different branches and apparatuses, seek greater autonomy or develop forms of power-sharing, and disembed or re-embed specific state institutions and practices within the social order. This holds for the international as well as national dimensions of state relations.

Fourth, and relatedly, even in the most liberal economies, states are actively involved in shaping economic life. There is no absolute institutional separation between the political (the domain of the state) and the economic (the domain of the market). The market economy is also embedded in an ensemble of extra-economic institutions and practices that are essential for its operation. The state plays a key role here not only in securing the general institutional framework for profit-oriented, market-mediated economic activities but also in shaping their specific forms, organization, and overall dynamic. This is reflected in growing academic and practical interest in the intimate relation between forms of state and political regime and “varieties of capitalism” and in the various complementarities and contradictions among these different local and national varieties within a changing global economy. Thus even the dominant, neo-liberal form of globalization continues to depend heavily on state institutions and practices at many different territorial scales and in many different functional areas and on the survival of other ways of organizing capital accumulation both within and beyond the dominant neo-liberal economies.

Fifth, globalization is not a single causal mechanism with a universal, unitary logic but is multicentric, multiscalar, multitemporal, multiform, and multicausal. It is better seen as a hypercomplex, continuously evolving product of many processes. As such it does not generate a single, uniform set of pressures on all states but affects them in different ways. Indeed, it is not the State as such (sovereign or otherwise) that is pressured by globalization (or other challenges). For the many social forces and mechanisms that generate globalization can only exert pressure on — or, indeed, strengthen — particular forms of state with particular state capacities and liabilities. Moreover, in so doing, they modify the balance of forces within states and create space for, and prompt, struggles to reorganize state forms and capacities in order to meet these challenges.

Sixth, and consequently, questions about globalization and the state should not be posed in zero-sum terms. At its worse, this involves an untenable contrast between a singular, emergent, borderless flow-based economy able to operate globally in real time and a plurality of formally equivalent traditional national territorial states qua “power containers” that operate within defined territorial frontiers and according to heavily time-consuming political routines. This contrast errs in two ways. On the one hand, it misrepresents the actual complexities of globalization, ignores the extent to which it depends on changing place-based competitive advantages, neglects the general dependence of economic activities on extra-economic supports that are place-and time-bound, and, of course, overstates the extent of the global economy, even in regard to financial capital, let alone industrial and commercial capital. It also ignores the significant degree to which the unfolding economic logic (and illogic) of globalization constrains individual firms, branches, and clusters as well as the operations of the political system. On the other hand, despite the formal equivalence among sovereign states in the modern state system, as signified, for example, by membership of the United Nations, not all states are equally capable of exercising power internally and/or internationally. They face different problems at home and abroad; have different histories; have different capacities to address these problems and reorganize themselves in response in international as well as domestic matters. Moreover, just as the economy has important territorial dimensions (reflected in concepts such as industrial districts, agglomeration economies, global cities, and regional or national capitalisms), so states also operate as power connectors within various global systems as well as power containers. And, while not even the USA has an effective global reach and the ability to compress its routines to match those of hypermobile capital, many states have proved capable of reorganizing their routines to modify the impact of economic processes.

Given these arguments, we should focus on the changing organization of politics and economics and their respective institutional embodiments and see frontiers and borders as actively reproduced and contingent rather than as pregiven and fixed. I will illustrate this approach by exploring:

• changes in the form of postwar state typical of postwar western capitalist economies;

• broad changes in six key dimensions of the state; and

• the temporal pressures currently facing the state and its responses thereto.

The Keynesian National Welfare State

This essay cannot consider recent changes in all forms of state in the interstate system. Instead it focuses on changes in the Keynesian national welfare state (or KNWS). This is the form of state that became dominant in North Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand during the 1950s to 1970s and that was closely linked with the postwar Fordist growth dynamic based on mass production and mass consumption. Obviously, there are important differences among the states in these countries but there are enough similarities to justify describing them in terms of an ideal-typical (or stylized) state form. Each term in this four-dimensional ideal type refers to a major aspect of state involvement in securing continued capitalist expansion and, in this sense, it interprets the state from a broadly economic perspective. This is not the only way to examine changes in the state; adopting alternative entry points would highlight other aspects of state transformation or, indeed, reveal some continuities in state forms. But my approach does provide a benchmark for assessing some key recent changes.

First, in promoting the conditions for profitable economic growth, the KNWS was distinctively Keynesian insofar as it aimed to secure full employment in a relatively closed national economy and did so mainly through demand-side management and nationwide infrastructural provision. Second, in contributing to the day-to-day, lifetime, and intergenerational reproduction of the population, KNWS social policy had a distinctive welfare orientation insofar as it (a) instituted economic and social rights for all citizens so that they could share in growing prosperity (and contribute to high levels of demand) even if they were not employed in the high-wage, high-growth Fordist economic sectors; and (b) promoted forms of collective consumption favorable to the Fordist growth dynamic. Third, the KNWS was national insofar as these economic and social policies were pursued within the historically distinctive matrix of a national economy, a national state, and a society seen as comprising national citizens. Within this nationally organized matrix it was the national territorial state that was mainly held responsible for developing and guiding Keynesian welfare policies. Local and regional states acted mainly as relays for policies framed at the national level; and the leading international regimes established after World War II were mainly intended to restore stability to national economies and national states. And, fourth, the KNWS was statist insofar as state institutions (on different levels) were the chief supplement and corrective to market forces in a “mixed economy” concerned with economic growth and social integration.

There was never a pure KNWS. It assumed different national forms within the broader international framework of Atlantic Fordism. This is reflected in distinctions between, for example, Germany’s “flexi-Fordism,” France’s statist Fordism, and Sweden’s social democratic Fordism. Nor has there been a generic crisis that affects all national cases in the same way. Nonetheless, they have all faced similar pressures. The first signs of crisis in Fordist growth emerged in the mid-1970s and worsened in the 1980s. In addition, the structured coherence of a nationally scaled economy-state-society was weakened by changes associated with globalization, internationalization, the rise of multi-tiered global city networks, the formation of triad economies (such as European Economic Space), and the re-emergence of regional and local economies. The unity of nation-states (as opposed to national states) has also been weakened by the (admittedly uneven) growth of multiethnic and multicultural societies and of divided political loyalties (with the resurgence of regionalism and nationalism as well as the rise of European identities, diasporic networks, cosmopolitan patriotism, etc.). Because many of these changes are not directly related to globalization, we should not focus one-sidedly on the latter as the decisive causal mechanism in recent political transformation.

Six Trends in the Restructuring of the Keynesian National Welfare State

Taking the postwar KNWS as our benchmark, the current reorganization of the state and its capacities can be summarized in terms of six analytically distinct but empirically interrelated trends. Each trend is also linked to a counte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Globalization and Its Consequences
• Part 2: Global Governance and Its Promises— the Political Dimension
• Part 3: Global Governance and Its Promises— the Economic Dimension
• Part 4: Global Governance and the Environment
• Part 5: “Prosperity for All”: National Strategies in the Era of Globalization
• Contributors