Impact of Globalisation on the State

11 Key excerpts on "Impact of Globalisation on the State"

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  Global Forces and State Restructuring

  Dynamics of State Formation and Collapse

  • M. Doornbos(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Last, the question of the future of the state is taken up, leading on to an exploration of regional variations in the relative propensity of state systems to ‘cope with globalization’ and survive. Globalization and the state Among the numerous implications of what we call globalization, some of the most far-reaching ones are its impacts on the role of the state (Strange 1996, Weiss 1998). More drastically than at any earlier times, it seems, state systems across the globe in recent years have been reshaped through global transformations, affecting both the inter-connections between states and their internal structuring. At the present time a discussion on questions of state restructuring and governance, more specifically on the dynamics of state formation and state collapse, thus must start off from a preliminary reconnaissance of the relations between globalization and the state. Globalization of course has numerous facets, which cannot be detailed here. A vast and growing literature has explored many of its core dimensions (e.g. Robertson 2003, Stiglitz 2002), and there will be more to follow. For present purposes, though, we may provisionally refer to globalization as comprising a set of pervasive forces – economic, political and cultural – transforming relations between collectivities and individuals across the globe, including those among ‘nation-states’. Globalization and the State 31 This is roughly in line with Stiglitz’s formulation, who describes globalization as ‘the closer integration of the countries and peoples of the world which has been brought about by the enormous reduction of costs of transportation and communication, and the breaking down of artificial barriers to the flow of goods, services, capital, knowledge, and (to a lesser extent) people across borders’ (p. 9). The ‘artificiality’ of barriers which Stiglitz alludes to, though, suggests something unwanted, out of place, and calling for removal.

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  The Impact of Globalization on the United States

  [3 volumes]

  • Michelle Bertho, Beverly Crawford, Edward A. Fogarty, Michelle Bertho, Beverly Crawford, Edward A. Fogarty(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  GLOBALIZATION, THE STATE, AND SOCIETY IN THE UNITED STATES Arguments about globalization extend all the way to its basic defini- tion. 12 At some level, though, most observers will agree that globalization involves the deepening interconnections between the forces and develop- ments that shape our lives in different parts of the planet. It is a process that increasingly subjects the choices and constraints facing individuals and institutions in any given place to the impact of actors and movements operating in and across different parts of the globe. As such, globalization changes the relationship between the individual, her society, and the state in which she lives, raising questions and challenges that long-established models of sovereignty and political community had seemed to resolve. But what kind of challenge is this? For many critics and some support- ers of globalization, as I have noted, these challenges are presented in terms of a conflict between the forces of globalization and the power of the state over its borders. I believe that this approach to the issue is mis- leading, especially in the context of the United States. Here, globalization has created a politics of sovereignty not by reducing the power of the state, but by changing the way it has approached issues of security and identity. This distinction between these different but often intertwined meanings of the term is necessary to grasp clearly the current politics of sovereignty. My analysis begins by identifying the sources of globalization in a set of political choices and policy changes in the United States beginning in the late 1970s. 13 In the context of persistent inflation, low growth rates, and concerns over competitiveness, an emerging coalition of policy makers, 266 LAW AND GOVERNANCE policy intellectuals, and business leaders began a process of redirecting the role of the American state toward the promotion of market institutions and competition.

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  Political Globalization

  State, Power and Social Forces

  • Morten Ougaard(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  This phenomenon is one central aspect of what Robert Cox called the ‘internationalization of the state’ (Cox 1987). This amounts, further to a certain dislocation between social forces and states. In a traditional picture, social forces are constituted at the national level, and the state’s functions of coherence and persistence are oriented towards these domestic forces. There is a one to one relation- ship between social forces and states, defined by the boundaries of national communities. As a result of internationalization, this no longer holds. States’ functions are functions towards internationalized social 156 Political Globalization: State, Power and Social Forces structures and internationalized constellations of social forces and power, meaning that states cater to domestic as well as foreign social forces, and that the domestic function of persistence has acquired an important international quality, due to the external projection of national economic interests. At the same time, the interests of social forces, and in particular those of internationalized business, relate to many societies and hence to the policies of many states and inter- national institutions, to which they also turn to pursue their interests politically. Social forces operate politically in relation to several states, and states function in relation to social forces rooted in several national societies. This does not mean that international businesses have lost their ties to their home countries or home states, as I will argue later, but it does mean that matters have become more complicated, which is an added reason why relations of power cannot simply be ascertained from a state-centred perspective. In principle, then, the analysis of relations of power in global society is a highly complex matter and one that cannot be fully addressed in the present volume.

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  The Nature and Development of the Modern State

  • Graeme Gill(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  The state and globalization The spaces between the forces for globalization also provide room within which the state can function. There is much that the forces of globaliza-tion do not encompass but which still need regulation. A prime example is in the economic sphere, where globalization has involved the free move-ment of trade, investment and capital, but not labour; states still control who may work within their boundaries and under what conditions. The opening up of such room for the state is reinforced by the way in which globalization can promote fragmentation, particularism and differentia-tion. This ensures the existence of communities that are locally based and oriented, and these require the sort of order, regularity and predictability that can only come from the presence of a political authority. The lives of people will continue to be lived locally; globalization may continue to structure the macro-universe within which such lives will be lived, but the immediate conditions of such existence will require local regulation. This the state can provide. And this is essential for the continued func-tioning of the major struts of globalization. In all strands – economic, political and cultural/ideological – the forces of globalization rely upon the activities of people. They cannot function without the actions of those who drive them – the futures dealers and currency speculators, the international bureaucrats and the media celebrities and technicians all rely upon the local communities within which they live. The people who work in the institutions of the emergent globalized world have to get to work each day, they need to be secure in their ability to travel about the streets, to acquire food and those other necessities of life. The continuing capacity of the state to provide this security is crucial.

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  Globalization

  Theory and Practice Second Edition

  • Eleonore Kofman, Gillian Youngs, Eleonore Kofman, Gillian Youngs(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  But it does depict a world where states are operating in an increasingly technologically, economically and, to some degree at least, politically integrated world, which is as much about the transcendence of different territorial and social (e.g. public and private) boundaries as it is about the influence of their historical and contemporary realities. This assessment stresses that globalization is about contradictions and, importantly, the capacities to identify and address them, whether they concern divides between states or within them, including along lines of gender and ethnicity. Globalization problematizes accepted notions of societies as divided or separated along national territorial lines. These divisions and separations exist and are still at the centre of bloody conflict and threats. But in an increasingly networked and information-driven world, new connections and patterns of exchange are also being formed. These include: e-business; cross-border political affiliations and activism that may help to form new kinds of identities; individual research activities that enable, for example, citizens to gain easy access to world press and other official views of a government's action; cross-national political or personal discussions in chatrooms; email relationships between people who have never met. These kinds of developments can be considered part of the processes of relating internationally. Many of their meanings and implications for the structures of politics and economics are not yet clear, and may not be for some time to come. Some of them may seem minor compared to the world of diplomats and power politics. Paying them too little attention, however, may be to miss much about the world that is in the making. 14 GILLIAN YOUNGS References Agnew, J. and Corbridge, S. (1995) Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy, London, Routledge.

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  Global Politics in the 21st Century

  • Robert J. Jackson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Power permeates poli-tics and, thus, global affairs. But it is a relational concept and not an absolute one. What matters in a state getting its way is its having more power than adversaries, not any particular amount of power. Despite all its complexity, global politics provides a fascinating array of power relationships to dissect, analyze, and evaluate. We live in a world where resources are scarce and unevenly distributed and where disputes and conflicts constantly arise and need to be resolved. This never-ending chain of dispute, conflict, and resolution ensures that global politics is an ongoing process. It is literally true that politics never stops. It takes place at the individual, societal, state, and global levels as part of a struggle for goals such as equality, liberty, justice, economic well-being, and even power itself. Power and national interest In global affairs, power involves a network of relationships among states and other actors. The national interests of states change over time depend-ing on the relative power of different political actors inside and outside the state. But there is no doubt that leaders claim to act on behalf of their respective country’s national interests regardless of their own ideas, party affiliation, or ideology. While power can be thought of as multidimensional, and realists stress the role of military power, all theorists understand that state power is important and can be achieved in different ways. Military, economics, and even ideas and culture all play a role in determining the relative ability of a country to get its way in global politics. problematic in the discipline. The term implies that each state consists of only one nation, yet there are very few such states.

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  New Directions in Political Science

  Responding to the Challenges of an Interdependent World

  • Colin Hay(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Whilst these two theses The Character of the State 133 arrived at a broadly similar point in describing what, from the 1980s, at least some states came to do, the different causal explanations of what produced this phenomenon is politically significant. Was the state suppressing reasonable political expectations when they could have decided otherwise, or were there real-world limits on what the state could be expected to do, such that the imaginative allure of the postwar European promise of citizenship based on economic entitlements and some measure of redistributive justice had, as a matter of necessity, to be permanently jettisoned? Globalization and the state in the international sphere The primary theoretical debate in international relations between realism and its critics is, at its centre, a discussion about the state and its weight. Whilst realists have insisted that states remain the decisive political actor in an anarchic world defined by competition between them, the different critics of realism have argued that the state is only one of many actors in the international sphere and that the international arena is neither practically nor ideationally defined by relations between states and an anarchic problem. The structure of this theoretical debate has been matched in a more empirical debate about whether the state still has sovereignty, and how viable both the practice and idea of sovereignty remain if globalization is real. Many have argued that states have lost sovereignty and that now, at best, they share it with the regional and inter-national organizations, non-governmental actors, or global networks (Rosenau 1990; Wallace 1999; Brown 2002; Slaughter 2004). Others have argued that these arguments rest on a confusion concerning the nature of sovereignty. Internal and external sovereignty are not the same thing, and external sovereignty is not something that all states have.

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  Marxism and the State

  An Analytical Approach

  • P. Wetherly(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Summarising, globalisation can be seen as a primarily economic process. Although this process is multi-scalar it can be understood in a limited way as the stretching of economic interaction beyond the nation-state, that is across national borders. This approach cuts short the debate as to whether a truly global economy has yet emerged (or will do so). 6 Economic globalisation is a tendential process linked to the basic character of capitalist relations of production and the 200 Marxism and the State accumulation process – profit-oriented capitals operating in a com- petitive environment. In other words ‘capitalism, as a social order, has a pathological expansionist logic’ (Held & McGrew, 2002, p. 4). In this sense economic globalisation is nothing new, but there may be novel aspects in terms of its specific forms and/or overall level. From a Marxist perspective, based on economic determination, the key ques- tion is to what extent economic globalisation shapes other dimensions of social interaction, especially the state and political power. Globalisation and the theory of history The theory of history concerns the relationship between the produc- tive forces, the set of production relations that a society has, and the character of its legal and political superstructure. The theory comprises two stages of functional explanation: Stage 1 – the stage of development of the forces of production functionally explains the nature of the relations of production Stage 2 – the nature of the relations of production functionally explains the character of the legal and political superstructure Relations of production are selected because, and persist so long as, they are forms of development of the productive forces. In turn, laws and other phenomena that make up the superstructure are selected, and persist so long as, they are functionally effective in stabilising the economic structure. In this theory history is fundamentally a story of productive progress.

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  Emerging Markets and the State

  Developmentalism in the 21st Century

  • Christopher Wylde(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Following neopluralists such as Cerny (2014: 49), the outcome of pro- cesses such as globalisation is not determined by the a priori existence of cohesive, vertically unified projects of hegemonic states as such. Instead, they stem from the interaction of a range of individual and collective actors below, outside, and surrounding (hegemonic) states and societies. These actors have very different kinds of social bonds, levels of social, economic, and political power resources, understandings of how to use that power, material interests, normative values, and political projects (Cerny 2014: 49). From the opposite end of the agent-structure debate, states are not simply able to pursue any national-based agenda free from the multitu- dinous influences at different levels of structuration either. But what is important to note is that this influence not only changes depending upon the level of material capabilities of states; but also that the power of World Order—expressed partially through institutions of global governance— waxes and wanes over time. For example, it can be seen at its strongest in times of economic downturn and austerity (Gamble 2014: 29; see also Crouch 2008). Any account that seeks to understand the role of the state in a 21st-century development process must be sensitive to the nature of World Order, and its ever-changing influences and shaping of the limits of the possible for Emerging markets. Governance involves not only institutional design appropriate to different objects of governance, but it has also been argued to involve 64 C. WYLDE the transformation of subjects and their orientations to the world. Foucauldians have contributed to this field, drawing attention to the role of power and knowledge in shaping the attributes, capacities, and identities of social agents and how, through a process of governmental- ity (Foucault 2008/2004), these agents become self-governing and self-reforming.

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  Political Power

  The Development of the Field

  • Mark Haugaard, Kevin Ryan, Mark Haugaard, Kevin Ryan(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Verlag Barbara Budrich

    (Publisher)

  Political power at the level of world politics is thus becoming less like old-fashioned “power politics” or Realpolitik , and more like the domestic politics of: • interest group pressure, competition and conflict; • the clash of ideologies and social values; • the construction of – and resistance to – evolving norms and rules of the game; and • an uneven but growing “civilianization” of power relations. More controversially, I argue that, paradoxically, while these crosscutting processes can be destabilizing at some levels, they are likely to be broadly stabilizing at system level. The centrality of power in international relations The concept of power has traditionally played a crucial role in the analysis of International Relations and World Politics. It has been seen as the key factor, variable, driving force or “currency” in relations among states. Indeed, this role has been seen by many observers since Thucydides as the defining at-tribute of the international system itself. This interpretation of the role of power is derived from the understanding that no seriously effective level of organized, authoritative or legitimate governmental or socio-political struc-ture exists above the level of the state that does not itself emanate from, and in the last analysis remain responsible to, autonomous sovereign states. In Globalization and the Transformation of Power 187 other words, there is no genuinely supranational overarching power structure or political process in world politics. Therefore, in order to explain what hap-pens in world politics – as distinct from politics within states – it is necessary to privilege (a) power-seeking actions of states (taken as structurally coherent “unit actors” in and of themselves: Waltz 1979) and of “state actors” (actors acting through or on behalf of states, mainly politicians and bureaucrats) and (b) structured, ongoing relations of power between and among states, over the claims of other potential actors or causal variables.

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  The Politics of Change

  Globalization, Ideology and Critique

  • W. Bonefeld, K. Psychopedis, W. Bonefeld, K. Psychopedis(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Above all, ‘global- ization’ signalled the demise of that great modernist symbol of totalizing power: the nation state. There is of course no uncontested definition of ‘globalization’. Higgott (1997, p. 6) offers an example of the eclectic international political economy (IPE) orthodoxy arguing that globalization represents: ‘(a) the emergence of a set of sequences and processes that are unhindered by territorial or jurisdictional barriers and that indeed enhance the spread of trans-border practices in economic, political and social domains, and (b) a discourse of political knowledge offering one view of how to make the post-modern world manageable.’ Implicit in such a view is the idea that economic interdependence, and the ‘power’ of financial markets in particular, has changed the course of modern capitalism resulting in new structures of global governance. The principal responses to the globalization thesis have been to assert either the call of Ecclesiastes that ‘nothing much has changed’ (there are no new things under the sun) or proclaim that ‘all is new’ (and presumably ‘history is bunk’). While sceptics and realists line up to dismiss globalist claims and reassert the ‘power’ of the state (Hirst and Thompson, 1996; Waltz, 1979), liberals and post-modernists point to the retreat and even disappearance of the state as the principal form of political authority (Ohmae, 1995). In contrast to the often quite sterile debate produced by this realist/liberal encounter, this chapter suggests that a return to classical Marxist ideas on the relation between class, capital and state in a global context offers a more productive approach for mapping recent industrial, political and economic change.

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