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towards a theory of state transformation University of Sussex |
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towards a theory of state transformation University of Sussex |
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ABSTRACT
This article argues that it is erroneous to counterpose globalization
to the state, as many increasingly sterile debates in the social sciences
have done. Globalization does not undermine the state but includes the transformation
of state forms: it is both predicated on and produces such transformations.
The reason for the false counterposition of the state and globalization
is that the debates rest ion inadequate theorizations of the state, and
it is these whiich the article seeks to address. This article is therefore
in two parts. In the first, I seek to identify the dominant contemporary
form of the state noy as the nation-state, but ad a massive, institutionally
complex and messy agglomeration of state power centred on North America,
western Europe, Japan and Australasia, which I call the western state. I
argue that since 1989, the global role of this western state has undergone
further important transformations and it is becoming possible to see the
western state as a global form of state power.
In the second part, I ask how the globally dominant western state can be
understood in terms of state theory, and argue that we should understand
this state form as an emergent global state. I discuss Michael Mann's definition
of the state, and take the four elements of this in turn, arguing that the
emergent global state can be considered a state in these terms. I argue,
however, that an additional fifth criterion needs to be added if we are
to make sense of the situation od overlapping levels of state power, i.e.
that a state must be to a significant degree inclusive and costitutive of
other forms or levels of state power (of state power in general in a particular
time and space). Recognizing that the inclusiveness and costitutiveness
of the variou trasnational forms of state are not easy to determine, I conclude
that the global state is evidently a problematic level of state power, whose
western core remains in many ways stronger than the global form itself.
I conclude by esplicating the nature of contemporary nation-states and the
great variation in their relations with global state power.