Globalization and the future of the nation state

This article addresses the issue of whether the nation state has a future as a major locus of governance in an increasingly ‘globalized’ economic and social system. It begins by considering the development of the sovereign state and argues that international agreements between states were important in establishing the power of the state over society. It goes on to consider the changing capacities of the state in the modern world. Extreme versions of the 'globalization' thesis are then challenged, and it is argued that national-level economic processes remain central and that the international economy is far from ungovernable. Major nation states have a pivotal role to play in creating and sustaining such governance. However, their role is less than as autonomous national macro-economic managers, than as agencies that are representative of their populations and sources of legitimacy for new forms of governance. The central function of the nation state is that of distributing and rendering accountable powers of governance, upwards towards international agencies and trade blocs like the European Union, and downwards towards regional and other sub-national agencies of economic co-ordination and regulation.     

Intelligence,reason of state and the art of governing risk and opportunity in early modern Europe

Abstract

Drawing upon primary and secondary historical material, this paper explores the role of intelligence in early modern government. It focuses upon developments in seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England, a site-specific genealogical moment in the broader history of state power/knowledges. Addressing a tendency in Foucauldian work to neglect pre-eighteenth-century governance, the analysis reveals a set of interrelated processes which gave rise to an innovative technique for anticipating hazard and opportunity for the state. At the intersection of raison d’État, the evolving art of government, widespread routines of secrecy and a post-Westphalia field of European competition and exchange, intelligence was imagined as a fundamental solution to the concurrent problems of ensuring peace and stability while improving state forces. In the administrative offices of the English Secretary of State, an assemblage of complex and interrelated procedures sought to produce and manipulate information in ways which exposed both possible risks to the state and potential opportunities for expansion and gain. As this suggests, the art of intelligence played an important if largely unacknowledged role in the formation and growth of the early modern state. Ensuring strategic advantage over rivals, intelligence also limited the ability of England's neighbours to dominate trade, control the seas and master the colonies, functioning as a constitutive feature of European balance and equilibrium. As the analysis concludes, understanding intelligence as a form of governmental technique – a way of doing something – reveals an entirely novel way of thinking about and investigating its myriad (historical and contemporary) formations.     

When the exception becomes the rule: borders,sovereignty, and citizenship

Borders are a unique political space, in which both sovereignty and citizenship are performed by individuals and sovereigns. Using the work of Agamben and Foucault, this article examines how decisions made at the border alienate each and every traveler crossing the frontier, not simply the ‘sans papiers’ or refugees. The governmentality at play in the border examination relies on an embedded confessionary complex and the ‘neurotic citizen’, as well as structures of identity, documentation, and data management. The state border is a permanent state of exception that clearly demonstrates the importance of biopolitics to the smooth operation of sovereign power.     

Civil society and the regulatory state of the South: A commentary

The basic rationale of the regulatory state is to insulate certain kinds of decisionmaking from political actors. The main purpose of this commentary is to assess the ways that members of civil society, in fact, often shadow and contest the central actors of the regulatory state, even though they are ostensibly well outside it. I offer three distinctions to help broaden and sharpen analysis of the roles and impact of civil society actors: whether civil society actors have special expertise or not; whether the regulatory state is being put in place or already exists; and whether civil society actions are broadly complementary to, or substitutive of, state action. In discussing each of these, I also explore the consequences of the transfer of the regulatory state to the global South, and the way that change in location shapes both the role and impact of civil society and the regulatory state itself.     

Constructing a global commons in,against and beyond the state

The “commons” is emerging as one of the progressive political key words of our time. Against a backdrop of continuing neoliberal governance of the global economy, there is interest in a “translocal” global commons as an alternative that transcends both state and capitalist forms of appropriation. In this paper, I offer a constructive critique of the global commons. While sympathetic to arguments about the deficiencies of state-centric forms of socialist projects for emancipation, I nevertheless argue that realizing the commons vision of a more democratic politics means continuing engagement with the state, particularly for connecting up and scaling up local autonomous projects to achieve more transformative social change.     

Accountability in the EU's para-regulatory state: The case of the Economic and Monetary Union

This article revisits Majone's famous argument about accountability in the regulatory state in reference to the European Union's (EU) Economic and Monetary Union. We show that the EU has entered the stage of a “para-regulatory state” marked by increasing EU regulation in areas linked to core state powers. Despite the redistributive and politicized nature of these policy areas, the EU's “para-regulatory state” has continued to rely on its regulatory model of accountability, focused on decisionmaking processes, and interest mediation. In line with Majone, we describe the model as procedural and contrast it to substantive accountability – which is necessary when regulation has clear redistributive implications. Using two case studies from fiscal policy and monetary affairs, we illustrate the predominance of procedural accountability as exercised by the European Parliament and EU Courts. We complement the empirical analysis with a normative discussion of how substantive accountability could potentially be rendered in both fields.     

Privatisation in Botswana: the demise of a developmental state?

This article argues that efforts by the Government of Botswana to embark on privatisation of some parastatals as well as contracting out the provision of certain services with the main intention of enhancing productivity and strengthening the private sector will not have a negative effect on the strength and nature of the existing strong developmental state. It is argued that the cautious and pragmatic approach adopted by the government, coupled with the fact that privatisation in Botswana is embraced voluntarily (that is not imposed on the country by either the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a condition for financial assistance), hiving off parastatals to the private sector will not result in the weakening and ultimate demise of the state as it has happened in some countries within Sub Saharan Africa. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Empty promises: Indonesia's non-ratification of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court

Southeast Asia is one of the most underrepresented regions in the International Criminal Court (ICC). I address the question of non-ratification of the Rome Statute with a case study on Indonesia. While the Yudhoyono Administration has repeatedly promised to join the ICC, ratification has not materialized. I argue that Indonesia's tradition of emphasizing the protection of state sovereignty and economic gains in its foreign policy decisions best explains why it remains outside the ICC's jurisdiction. I test this claim by exploring Indonesia's human rights record, potential legal restrictions for the ratification of the Rome Statute, and the influence of domestic political players and external pressures.     

Embedded state autonomy and legitimacy: piecing together the Malaysian development puzzle

Malaysia's development trajectory has been comparatively successful, and the country arguably represents another example of the 'Asian developmental state'. However, when examined more closely, the Malaysian development experience is a deviation from the ideal-type 'East Asian success model', in that it occurred in the context of a predominantly Islamic cultural background, marked ethnic-religious heterogeneity,a relatively democratic political system, a strong reliance on FDI, abundant natural resources and a confined state autonomy. This article puts the Malaysian puzzle into perspective by giving a holistic account of the country's success against all odds and by applying an analytical framework centred on the concepts of embedded state autonomy and sociopolitical legitimacy. It is concluded that Malaysia's distinctive social, political and economic features constitute a web of countervailing forces that evolved into a positively self-reinforcing, if sometimes precarious, system of socio-economic reproduction.     

Tackling unemployment in China: state capacity and governance issues

Abstract

This paper considers China's state capacity and changing governance as revealed through its policies to tackle unemployment. Despite high levels of growth, economic restructuring has resulted in rising unemployment over the last decade. The Chinese state has been able to manage job losses from state enterprises, demonstrating some state capacity in relation to this sector and some persistent command economy governance mechanisms. However both design and implementation of policies to compensate and assist particular groups among the unemployed have been shaped by weak state capacity in several other areas. First, capacity to gather accurate employment data is limited, meaning local and central governments do not have a good understanding of the extent and nature of unemployment. Second, the sustainability of supposedly mandatory unemployment insurance schemes is threatened by poor capacity to enforce participation. Third, poor central state capacity to ensure local governments implement policies effectively leads to poor unemployment insurance fund capacity, resulting in provision for only a narrow segment of the unemployed and low quality employment services. Although the adoption of unemployment insurance (and its extension to employers and employees in the private sector), the introduction of a Labour Contract Law in 2007, and the delivery of employment services by private businesses indicate a shift towards the use of new governance mechanisms based on entitlement, contract and private sector delivery of public-sector goods, that shift is undermined by poor state capacity in relation to some of these new mechanisms.     

Citizenship,reproduction and the state: international marriage and human rights

The relationship between citizenship, marriage and family has often been overlooked in the social and political theory of citizenship. Intimate domestic life is associated with the private sphere, partly because reproduction itself is thought to depend on the private choices of individuals. While feminist theory has challenged this division between private and public – ‘the personal is political’ – the absence of any systematic thinking about familial relations, reproduction and citizenship is puzzling. Citizenship is a juridical status that confers political rights such as the right to carry a passport or to vote in elections. However, from a sociological point of view, we need to understand the social foundations and consequences of citizenship – however narrowly defined in legal and political terms. This article starts by noting the obvious point that the majority of us inherit citizenship at birth and in a sense we do not choose to be ‘Vietnamese’ or ‘Malaysian’ or ‘Japanese’ citizens. Although naturalisation is an important aspect of international migration and settlement, the majority of us are, as it were, born into citizenship. Therefore, the family is an important but often implicit facet of political identity and membership. In sociological language, citizenship looks like an ascribed rather than achieved status, and as a result becomes confused and infused with ethnicity. This inheritance of citizenship is odd given the fact that, at least in the West, there is a presumption, following the pronouncements of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, to think of citizenship in universal terms that are ethnically ‘blind’, but it is in fact closely connected with familial or private status. These complex relations within the nation-state are further complicated by the contemporary growth of transnational marriages and this article considers the problems of marriage, reproduction and citizenship in the context of global patterns of migration.     

The 'Bad Mother' in Media and Legal Texts

Mothers who kill or injure their children highlight crucial disjunctions between the status ‘mother’ and the practices and expectations of mothering. Failures of ‘mothering’ reconstruct the meaning of the maternal, while being themselves given meaning by it. Violent mothers may be pathologised and excused, demonised and condemned, but the explanatory narratives that are used draw centrally on notions of the maternal and, more broadly, the feminine. These discourses are reproduced in legal proceedings and sentences, and in the media reports of these proceedings. This paper will analyse the construction of the bad mother in legal proceedings in one prominent recent Victorian case, and in the print media reports of this case.     

Electoral competition and the welfare state

The article investigates how parties compete over the welfare state by emphasising specific welfare state issues. The core argument is that two issue-specific factors determine how much parties emphasise individual welfare state issues: the character of policy problems related to the policy issues and the type of social risks involved. To test the argument, a new large-N dataset is employed, with election manifestos from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The dataset contains information on how much parties have talked about health care, education, and labour market protection in national elections since 1980. With the data at hand, it is possible to provide the first systematic investigation of how parties compete for votes over the welfare state. The approach here is able to explain the empirical fact that health care is consistently receiving increased attention everywhere, while particularly labour market protection has witnessed a decline in attention.     

Weak civil society in a hard state: Lessons from Africa

Abstract

This paper investigates the role of civil society in Botswana within the broader context of the state–civil society dynamic in Africa. It is argued that, like other countries in Africa, civil society in Botswana is rather weak. Conversely, unlike other countries in Africa, a weak civil society is accompanied by a hard state. Thanks to wise leadership, Botswana has experienced remarkable economic growth rates and significant improvements in human development over a period of about four decades. Botswana is also considered a ‘shining liberal democracy’, with elections held every five years, an independent judiciary system, and low levels of corruption. Yet it has been a democratic system with a weak civil society. Four main reasons are provided: first, the political culture makes it difficult to question authority; second, it is arduous to mobilize citizens because of the culture of dependency created by the clientelistic state; third, the Government has for a long time denied—and still does—the role of civil society as a legitimate player in the development process; fourth, civil society is not a cohesive group and lacks funds, especially the advocacy groups.     

Certifying a state forestry agency in Quebec: Complementarity and conflict around government responsibilities,indigenous rights,and certification of the state as forest manager

As voluntary third‐party certification systems become an increasingly accepted part of international frameworks for forest governance, some state forestry agencies are following the private sector in seeking certification of their forest management activities. We ask how the roles and responsibilities of state forest management agencies interact with the processes and mechanisms established by certification systems. To answer this question, we review existing research to propose a conceptual framework composed of eight issues of particular relevance to states: regulation, transnationalism, sovereignty disputes, partnerships and competition, mainstreaming, effectiveness, equity, and legitimacy and trust. We then use this framework to analyze experience in Quebec, Canada, where the state agency initially sought certification and then abandoned this plan after facing difficulties meeting the requirements pertaining to indigenous rights. Our framework helps to understand possible complementarities between state and non‐state systems, but also highlights challenges for reconciling state roles and responsibilities under certification.     

Power transition and the regulatory state in large emerging markets: Norm-breaking after the global financial crisis

I examine the ways in which the global financial crisis that began in 2007, and whose effects arguably condition policymaking to the present day, affected the ongoing global power transition as manifested by the unilateral decisions undertaken by official agencies comprising national regulatory states. The theory of that power transition articulated in the overview paper of this Special Issue is reinterpreted to take into account the circumstances of that crisis. Empirical evidence on the propensity to discriminate against foreign commercial interests by the BRICS, Turkey, the European Union, and the United States during the years 2008 to 2017 at, and behind, the border is employed to identify a group of six potential rule-shapers and two possible sham rule-takers.     

Governance without a state: Can it work?

In this article we explore how much state is necessary to make governance work. We begin by clarifying concepts of governance and the “shadow of hierarchy” and we follow this clarification with a brief overview of empirical findings on governance research in developed countries. We then discuss the dilemmas for governance in areas of limited statehood, where political institutions are too weak to hierarchically adopt and enforce collectively binding rules. While prospects for effective policymaking appear to be rather bleak in these areas, we argue that governance research has consistently overlooked the existence of functional equivalents to the shadow of hierarchy. We assert that governance with(out) government can work even in the absence of a strong shadow of hierarchy, we identify functional equivalents to the shadow of hierarchy, and we discuss to what extent they can help overcome issues of legitimacy and effectiveness in areas of limited statehood.     

The story of two administrative states: state capacity in Hong Kong and Singapore

Abstract

Hong Kong and Singapore are both typical administrative states with an efficient administration and a vibrant market, which had achieved rapid economic growth in the past decades. This article examines the trajectory of their state capacity, highlighting recent problems and challenges. Based on a conceptual framework that captures and links up four dimensions – namely polity, bureaucracy, economy and civil society – their commonalities and differences in response are discussed. Their experience should be of particular relevance to transitional authoritarian states in Asia such as China, which faces similar challenges to reform in the arenas of politics, administration, economics and society.     

Recalibrating social protection: Electoral competition and the new partisan politics of the welfare state

This article investigates the new party politics of welfare states with a particular focus on electoral competition. The argument is that welfare state politics are no longer just about more or less, but involve trade-offs among ‘new’ versus ‘old’ social rights, and hence social investment versus social consumption. However, party priorities on these issues are highly dependent upon their electoral situation. As electoral competition becomes more intense, parties focus more on vote maximisation than on their traditional policy goals. For left parties, this means focusing more on social investment, which appeals to their growing constituency of progressive sociocultural professionals, and less on defending the traditional income maintenance programmes favoured by their core blue-collar voters. Centre-right parties, on the other hand, should hesitate to retrench old social rights when electoral competition intensifies because they need to prioritise their appeal to culturally conservative working-class voters over their traditional fiscally conservative policy profiles. Using a new dataset and a recently published measure of electoral competitiveness, the article shows that as electoral competition intensifies, left governments are willing to prioritise social investment by reducing pension rights generosity in order to expand programmes for new social risks, while centre-right governments by contrast avoid retrenchment of pension rights and pension expenditures. The findings demonstrate that this relationship is moderated by the presence of a credible radical right challenger, which increases the electoral risk of welfare state recalibration.     

The regulatory state in developing countries: Redistribution and regulatory failure in Brazil

Following the traditional doctrine of the “regulatory state”, regulatory agencies should be given very focused mandates and stay away from the politicized realm of distributive policies and decisions. An opposing perspective would state that if regulatory agencies can contribute to economic redistribution, positive results such as network expansion, economies of scale, and fiscal efficiency will ultimately lead to lower levels of regulatory failure. This article tests whether, in countries of high socio-economic inequality, such as Brazil, the active incorporation of distributive considerations by regulatory agencies leads to lower levels of failure. Through the analysis of the activities of seven Brazilian network regulatory agencies, the article develops theory-driven expectations and tests these expectations using crisp set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA). It concludes that not prioritizing redistribution is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for regulatory agencies' failure. In most types of failure, a lack of priority to redistribution leads to failure when combined with low regulatory capacity and low levels of competence.