Reimagining the State

Theoretical Challenges and Transformative Possibilities

Davina Cooper, Nikita Dhawan, Janet Newman, Davina Cooper, Nikita Dhawan, Janet Newman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780815382195
• eBook ISBN: 9781351209090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This book examines what value, if any, the state has for the pursuit of progressive politics; and how it might need to be reimagined and remade to deliver transformative change.

Is it possible to reimagine the state in ways that open up projects of political transformation? This interdisciplinary collection provides alternative perspectives to the 'antistatism' of much critical writing and contemporary political movement activism. Contributors explore ways of reimagining the state that attend critically to the capitalist, neoliberal, gendered and racist conditions of contemporary polities, yet seek to hold onto the state in the process. Drawing on postcolonial, poststructuralist, feminist, queer, Marxist and anarchist thinking, they consider how states might be reread and reclaimed for radical politics. At the heart of this book is state plasticity – the capacity of the state conceptually and materially to take different forms. This plasticity is central to transformational thinking and practice, and to the conditions and labour that allow it to take place. But what can reimagining do; and what difficulties does it confront?

This book will appeal to academics and research students concerned with critical and transformative approaches to state theory, particularly in governance studies, politics and political theory, socio-legal studies, international relations, geography, gender/sexuality, cultural studies and anthropology.

Part I
The politics of reimagination

1
The political work of reimagination

Janet Newman

Introduction

Any project of reimagination cannot begin with a blank slate. As authors, academics and activists, our thinking is already marked by personal and political histories. I, like many others contributing to this volume, have engaged in long-running critiques of the state and its practices. I have been excited by attempts at reimagination, and helped to shape new paradigms with practitioners and activists, working for social change in spaces I imagined offered alternatives to state-centric ways of doing things: collective projects of housing, education, culture, childcare, health and so on. Later, as an academic, my intellectual efforts have tended to focus on critiques of the state: its patriarchal and paternalistic institutions, its undemocratic regimes of power, its unresponsiveness to the needs and voices of citizens and its entanglement with neoliberalism. But such critiques tend to resonate uncomfortably with would-be hegemonic projects of the political right that demonise the institutions of the state and pillory its ‘experts’ (Clarke and Newman, 2017a).

Once states have been identified as the agents of neoliberal rule, there seems little left to say. But in the current climate of neoliberal projects of rolling back the state, coupled with populist disdain for governing elites and professional expertise, I have come to realise the importance of re-engaging with a politics of the state. Citizens look to states to protect rights and deliver justice, and to ‘do something’ about common problems and anxieties. States are able – if not willing – to regulate the excessive power of corporations. They can collaborate to address global problems of climate change, migration and health. They have the resource power that might enable them to address inequality, both within and between nations. They can provide services to promote the education and welfare of citizens. They embody the legal and regulatory powers that can bestow rights, mitigate injustice and protect citizens from abuse. They are fundamental to contemporary struggles for independence and sovereignty. And they have the capacity to defend vestiges of public culture, public space and public institutions – as well as to eviscerate them (Newman and Clarke, 2008). States, it seems, still matter.

My engagements with projects of reimagination were inspired by concurrent experiences as an activist in the emerging social movements of the 1970s and 1980s, and as a local government worker. As such, I experienced the state both as object (distant, impersonal, oppressive) and as constitutive of my personal and professional identities as a state worker. These contradictory experiences have shaped the approach of this chapter. I do not, then, imagine the state as strongly bounded from its others (civil society, community, market). Nor do I view it as a coherent and singular entity. Rather, I follow Mitchell (2006), Painter (2006) and others in their concern with the ‘state effects’ produced through the interaction of multiple actors in a plurality of institutions and sites. I also focus on the importance of cultural and representational practices through which the state is imagined and enacted. Such practices, I argue, shape the kinds of politics that are possible.

And the kinds of politics that are possible depend both on how states are imagined, and on how such imaginings are realised – or not. In what follows, then, I want to avoid normative proposals; instead, I set out a series of propositions that I hope will offer productive resources for reimagining states. These draw on a range of disciplinary perspectives, from developments in human geography to cultural theory; from feminist perspectives to conjunctural analysis. I do not, then, want to imply that if added together they might offer a coherent programme or political platform. Rather, they trace different ways of conceptualising politics, power and agency, each of which has the potential to unsettle dominant formations of power. The propositions I offer are ‘imaginaries’ in that each requires a suspension of embedded pathways of thinking. But imaginaries do more than offer visions or ideals; while these are necessary, transformation relies on reimagination as political labour. Later in the chapter, I show how such labour is not only conceptual (building new forms of theory, fostering new imaginaries), but also material (creating new things), cultural (developing new symbols, telling new stories) and embodied (working in contested and often precarious spaces). The chapter explores the significance of such labour in crafting connections between idealised hopes and aspirations and the material and ideological work of bringing them to life (what Cooper, 2013, depicts as oscillations between imagining and actualisation).

Proposition 1: Imagining states beyond nations

My purpose here is not to offer normative prescriptions for ‘global governance’ or the empowerment of transnational institutions as a means of addressing contemporary problems. Rather, I ask how far it might be possible to reimagine states for progressive purposes given the rise of new nationalisms that promote regressive nostalgias and xenophobic exclusions. Is it only possible to imagine a ‘progressive’ state by discarding national imaginaries?

One productive resource is offered by Gupta (1998), who shows how the hyphen in the concept ‘nation-state’ works to mask the paradoxical entanglement of state and nation. He points to the provisional quality of their relationship, and the struggles to forge – and maintain – alignments between them. This helpfully opens up questions about the particular ways in which they are aligned in specific global contexts. In postcolonial nations, states remain the focus of movements by subaltern populations for self-determination. Contemporary struggles arise from the political aspirations of peoples denied sovereignty and legitimacy in the redrawing of national boundaries at different points of the twentieth century (Palestine, Kurdistan). Some are associated with the rise of right-wing nationalisms in the twenty-first century (the Lega Nord). Others offer initial hope followed by despair (the so-called Arab Spring). Prefigurative forms of the state sometimes emerge from such struggles: for example, the Syrian region of Rijava, at the front line of fighting both Assad and ISIS, was described as a democratic experiment enabling Arabs, Christians and Kurds to work together (Ross, 2017). Territorial sovereignty and independent statehood remain fundamental mobilising imaginaries. But at the same time, such states are increasingly subject to the demands of neoliberal globalisation on the one hand and the critiques of transnational justice and human rights activists on the other.

These different examples might be read as underscoring the significance of context: the particular dynamics associated with postcolonialism, or of nations traversed by historical divisions that remain unsettled. In postcolonial nations, progressive politics are fundamental to projects of state-making and to the mobilisation of resistance to colonial and ‘development’ projects (Hansen and Stepputat, 2001). But across much of Europe, the nation has forcefully returned as a key signifier:

In a political landscape marked by austerity and uneven and exclusionary responses to ongoing migration flows, divisive geographical imaginaries have acquired centre stage (Featherstone and Karaliotas, 2018, pp. 286–7).

However, rather than simply referring to different geographical contexts, I want to emphasise the contested alignments between different notions of state and nation. For example, independence movements (in Barcelona, Scotland, the Lega Nord and other would-be nations within nations) can be viewed as contesting established formations of statehood as well as nation – and not always in progressive ways.

The rise of new nationalisms is taking place at a political moment in which, it is often assumed, the nation-state has been hollowed out, bypassed and rendered powerless by the rise of ‘globalisation’. The thesis of globalisation is at the core of national narratives of nostalgia (for a golden past) and blame (of the other), and is fundamental to the legitimation strategies of austerity and retrenchment. But globalisation is a contested concept: Sassen (2006) argues that, rather than diminishing the importance of nation-states, it serves to reassemble them for new purposes. States are fundamental to the management of neoliberalism, seeking out sites of innovation, opening up new markets and installing new logics of work, education and consumption. The material and psychic harms that result have paved the way for the rise of populist political movements of the extreme right, as well as the left populisms of Syrizia in Greece and Podemos in Spain and other nations seeking political responses to economic and political crises. Such struggles show that the apparently settled alignments between state and nation are contested and provisional, opening up the possibility of new institutional forms, new democratic channels, new imaginaries of citizenship and identity that might – in some cases – transcend national borders. And, as Featherstone and Karaliotas (2018) argue, they also offer resources for reimagining politics – particularly forms of politics that challenge social and spatial divisions.

The paradoxical juxtaposition of new nationalisms and seemingly powerless nations is mirrored in many of the new social movements and activist struggles that have emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. There is a tendency to bypass nation-states in order to focus on more cosmopolitan sensibilities and the exciting potential of global activist networks, from the Occupy protests to new forms of feminist politics. Action on human rights, migration, climate change and other issues necessarily transcend – or seek to dissolve – borders (Gill, this volume). Alongside such global imaginaries, progressive politics also tend to reassert the significance of the ‘local’ as the focus of political renewal (see Featherstone et al., 2012, on ‘progressive localism’). While governments tend to construct the local as the domain of civic entrepreneurship and social responsibility, activists often view it as a locus for fostering enhanced forms of democratic participation and of creating progressive alternatives to the state.

But following Massey (2005, 2007), the transnational and local cannot be imagined as free-floating spaces above and below nations. Her work on the relational constitution of space and scale challenges binary distinctions between ‘local’ and ‘global’ or ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’: each only exists because of the imagined other. Imagining European nations as relationally constituted, for example, brings into view the colonial and neocolonial relations whose echoes inform contemporary politics, as well as the construction of ideas of Europe through its imagined relationships with the US or Russia. A relational perspective implies a more porous conception of states, offering ways of understanding how ideas and actions flow across social and spatial divisions, being remade as they travel. Such movements are mobilised through networks that, rather than dissolving the specificities of place, are embedded in and generative of local actions and protests.

A focus on the relational constitution of space and scale does not, however, mean abandoning the state as a source of progressive action. But it does require a shift away from the dominant conception of states as simply the passive pawns of neoliberal globalisation and towards a more positive role. Part of such a role is potentially delineated in state policies (on borders, migration, support for international institutions and so on). Part is legal – the potential role of states in addressing xenophobia, hatred and abuse of ‘the other’. But fundamental to both is a focus on the cultural role of states – the subject of proposition 4, below.

Proposition 2: Imagining the multi-ness of states

The notion of a unitary, coherent state can be viewed as an ideological trope that obscures the fragile and fragmentary workings of state power (Abrams, 1988). This renders problematic progressive attempts to capture or transform the state around a single cohesive imaginary (a participative state, a relational state, a decentralised state). Challenging this ideological trope means moving towards different conceptions of the multi-ness of states, brining into view potential spaces of power, of agency, in which alternative imaginaries might flourish and that might be mobilised by counter-hegemonic movements.

But if not as coherent entities, how are states to be imagined? One conception of the ‘multi-ness’ of states foregrounds different scalar ‘levels’ (transnational, national, regional, local) with policies flowing ‘downwards’ through clear-cut implementation plans, and (perhaps) projects developing power and responsibility to subordinate tiers of governance. This offers a rather mechanistic spatial imaginary. What is at stake here is not an interaction between ‘levels’ of governance, but rather the contested alignment of multiple, and often antagonistic, forces. Foucauldian concepts of governmentality illuminate how power is not devolved, but is dispersed to multiple actors and agents, coordinated through disciplinary logics that simultaneously empower and constrain their action (Clarke and Newman, 1997). The dispersal of power serves to weaken formal democratic accountability, but paradoxically also generates spaces of agency as multiple actors (many espousing progressive politics) are (selectively) drawn into governing practices. For example, some regions or cities may be the source of progressive experiments (see Cooper, this volume, on ‘municipal socialism’ in some local authorities in the 1980s), while others can be viewed as crucibles of neoliberal development. Such experiments are not, however, spatially bounded. Following Massey’s arguments discussed earlier, they are relationally constituted. Progressive ideas and experiments can, it follows, flourish within the seemingly hegemonic dictates of neoliberalism; indeed, such experiments, it is argued, are necessary for the continued expansion of neoliberal rationalities into new sites of exploitation and appropriation.

But the idea of dispersal is not the only sense of multi-ness I want to explore. What is at stake, rather, is an unstable ensemble of multiple forces, tendencies and antagonisms. I want to develop this form of analysis by proposing an understanding of states as a field of relationships traversed by different, and not necessarily compatible, political projects. Political projects can be viewed as more or less coherent efforts to bring ideas, interests, people and power together (Newman and Clarke, 2008; Sharma, 2008). They transcend party allegiances and help shape major shifts in social and political settlements; the development of welfare states, anti-colonial struggles, the formation of the EU, the rise of equality and human rights discourses (with their association with ‘modern’ statehood) and of course the projects that sustain neoliberal rule.

This form of analysis points not to the power of ‘the’ (reified, singular) state, but to the alignment (or not) between the multiple projects through which state power is constituted and legitimised. It offers the possibility of seemingly settled settlements becoming unstuck as a plurality of actors, institutions, technologies, ideologies, political parties and movements are assembled in novel ways, producing new formations of power and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The politics of reimagination
• Part II Performing re-readings
• Part III Prefigurative practices
• Part IV Reimagining otherwise
• Index