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Conference presentation on different forms of welfare regime and their transformation in different economic and social contexts in the world market.
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Social Policy, State, and ‘Society’
Bob Jessop
This contribution explores the relations among social policy, the state and ‘society’ in the
light of recent changes in the social formation. It builds on my earlier work on welfare
state restructuring but updates it in four ways. First, it provides stronger foundations in
the nature of capitalism, looking beyond a general historical materialist critique of the
capitalist mode of production to consider specific configurations of capitalist social
formations and their insertion into the world market. Second, it extends the analysis
beyond the economies of Atlantic Fordism and their crises to include export-oriented
economies and developmental states and the differential implications for welfare
regimes of the development of the knowledge-based economy and finance-dominated
accumulation as potential bases of post-Fordist accumulation. Third, especially in
relation to finance-dominated accumulation, it considers the problematic status of the
welfare state and/or social policy in social formations that have undergone a neoliberal
regime shift. And, fourth, it comments on the so-called global financial crisis and its
implications for the future of the welfare state in conditions of austerity. The discussion
ends with some general conclusions.
OFFE’S PARADOX
Writing in the 1980s, when the crisis of the Keynesian national welfare state was first
placed on the political as well as theoretical agenda, Claus Offe, the renowned German
critical theorist and sociologist, identified a paradox in the relation between capitalism
and the welfare state. He wrote that ‘while capitalism cannot coexist with, neither can it
exist without, the welfare state’ (Offe 1984: 153, italics in original). Some might dismiss
this as a mere rhetorical flourish without theoretical meaning or empirical application. In
fact, Offe grounded his argument in the nature of capitalism; and he also noted some of
its practical implications. Indeed, his analysis is generally compelling and repays careful
reading. Indeed, his identification of a paradox was not just a perceptive remark by a
social scientist looking at the welfare state as a disinterested observer but a paradox
directly experienced and expressed by capitalist interests, political parties, reformist
trade unions, think tanks, and official bodies – often in the same documents. For
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example, during the closing stages of the crisis of Atlantic Fordism, the Commission of
the European Union argued that:: '[t]he high level of non-wage labour costs [in the
European Union is prejudicial to employment, exerting a dissuasive influence‘
(Commission of the European Union, 1994, 154). Yet the same document had earlier
noted: ‘[e]conomic and social policy are inextricably linked: they are two sides of the
same coin … A new sort of welfare state is required to match an investment-led
industrial strategy‘ (op. cit.: 12).
This theme was especially strongly articulated in the arguments for a ‘Third Way’, with
its diagnoses of the rigidities of big government, big business, and big labour and their
impact of economic performance and social well-being and its associated calls for more
decentralized, more flexible, and more resilient economic and political arrangements.
This was reflected in network governance, active labour market policies, and a social
investment state (classically, Giddens 1998). The Third Way is most significant for
crises in social democratic regimes and involved a search for a via media. between
(1) the earlier forms of social democracy (national plans, tripartite corporatism,
Keynesian welfarism), to which, it is alleged, there can be no return; and (2) the
emerging economic, political, and social strategy of a newly resurgent capitalist
class, especially in its currently hegemonic neo-liberal form. The search for this
‘Third Way’ is necessarily contested and experimental and occurs in specific national
contexts as well as on a far broader transnational political and intellectual scene.
More recently, in 2011, well-after a shift to Third Way had occurred to provide flanking
and supporting mechanisms to neo-liberalism, the OECD remarked in a document on
Growth, Competitiveness, Employment that: ‘a deep and prolonged fiscal consolidation
process is needed to stabilise and then reduce debt levels to pre-crisis levels. In many
countries, pension systems are unsustainable and must be reformed. In some
European economies sovereign debt issue must also be addressed’. And also observed
that ‘we must tackle high unemployment. Better activation measures can help; social
welfare systems must become more job friendly; training must increase labour market
skills. Such investments also promote competiveness (OECD 2011).
If there are problems with Offe’s paradox, they lie elsewhere than in its rhetorical form. A
first difficulty is that, like much theorizing about the crisis of the welfare state in the
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1970s and early 1980s, it was shaped by the economic and political horizons of its time.
Offe developed his analysis in the context of the Keynesian welfare national state in
Europe, North America and Australasia and did not fully address the more general
difficulties involved in capital accumulation. As the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk, it
became easier for scholars to appreciate the nature and limitations of the Keynesian
welfare national state (hereafter KWNS) and, above all, to distinguish its particular
features from those that characterizing capitalism as a whole. In this context, in The
Future of the Capitalist State (Jessop 2002), I suggested that Offe’s paradox could be
deparadoxified in three steps. First, I made explicit what Offe had only implied when he
stated his paradox, namely, that this awkward relationship was one with a past, present,
and future. To use an extended metaphor, the ‘unhappy marriage’ of capitalism and the
welfare state was not permanent but passed through an experimental period of
cohabitation until a mutually satisfying modus vivendi reached and then experienced
difficulties as incompatibilities were discovered and, despite counselling and attempts at
reconciliation, gradually deteriorated until new horizons opened for capitalism and the
welfare state was, if not abandoned, left to play a secondary role in a new relationship.
Second, I emphasized that there were different varieties of capitalism and different
welfare regimes and argued that some couplings were more compatible than others –
the paradox became apparent when incompatibilities became more evident than
compatibilities. And, third, on this basis, I suggested that each variety of capitalism finds
through trial-and-error experimentation its own way of coping with this paradox for a
time, that each way leads sooner or later to crisis, and that this then prompts a search
for new solutions.
I illustrated how Offe’s paradox could be resolved through an extended analysis of the
processes that led to the eventual consolidation of Keynesian welfare national states
compatible with different modes of insertion into the economic and political circuits of
Atlantic Fordism and, after an extended honeymoon period of economic growth and
expanded social welfare, produced a crisis in and/or of this type of welfare regime. This
prompted a move away from Atlantic Fordism to search for new economic and social
bases for capital accumulation. This led to a partial dismantling (with complex
'conservation-dissolution' effects) of the KWNS. This suggests à la Offe that the post-
Fordist accumulation regimes that were emerging could not co-exist with the KWNS. But
the search for new economic and social bases of capital accumulation was also a search
3
for new forms of state intervention that might help to secure the valorization of capital
and the social reproduction of labour-power in the new conditions. There was no single
successor regime to the Atlantic Fordist accumulation regimes but diverse responses.
We can distinguish two main types that were combined in different ways with path-
dependent legacies of the antecedent economic and political order. The two types are a
knowledge-based economy and finance-dominated accumulation – with the former type
more prominent initially in societies that had previously had more export-oriented
economies plus social democratic or corporatist welfare regimes and the latter more
prominent in societies that previously had more liberal welfare regimes and then went
through a neo-liberal regime shift (see below). This is associated in turn with different
kinds of coupling between post-Fordist capitalisms and new kinds of welfare state.
We can also look beyond (and dig beneath) the evidence for incompatibilities in the
relation between Atlantic Fordist capitalism and the Keynesian welfare national regime to
establish that there are basic structural contradictions and strategic dilemmas in the
capital relation that ensure that the relationship between market, civil society and state is
always problematic. Capitalist growth depends essentially on the market-mediated
exploitation of wage-labour – not on the inherent efficiency of unfettered markets.
Markets mediate the search for added value but cannot produce it themselves; and the
very process of commodification engendered by the spread of the market mechanism
generates contradictions that cannot be resolved by that mechanism itself. This is
evident in contradictions inscribed in the most basic forms of the capitalist market
society. Thus KWNS intervention often only modified the forms or sites of these
contradictions – introducing class struggles into the state and/or generating tendencies
towards fiscal crisis, legitimacy crisis, rationality crisis, etc.. And, as the capital relation
developed in ways that undermined the national economy as an object of state
management, the underlying contradictions re-emerged. It was in managing, at least for
a while, such contradictions and dilemmas within the spatio-temporal matrix of the
national economy and the national state that the 'welfare mix' associated with the KWNS
contributed to the Atlantic Fordist regime. However, if the KWNS proved to have failed to
compensate for the failures of the market in the Atlantic Fordist regime and, in addition,
generated its own failures, it does not follow that a return to the market would put things
right. The successor welfare regimes to the KWNS are the latest attempts to square the
capital accumulation-social welfare (reproduction) circle and, given the incompressibility
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of the contradictions on which capitalism is grounded, their development is likely to
demonstrate the continued (if now historicized) validity of Offe’s paradox.
CAPITALISM AND WELFARE STATES
The formulation of Offe’s paradox invites three major questions, each with a follow-up:
(1) What is capitalism? Is the paradox valid for all varieties? (2) What is the (welfare)
state? Are some welfare regimes more or less likely to display the paradox? And (3)
Where does paradox originate? Does it arise from the capital relation, social policies, or
their interaction? The following remarks address each question, focusing on the
supplementaries. Let me first note that Offe’s analysis of capitalism is grounded in
Frankfurt School and Weberian analyses of western, rational capitalism. He focuses on
free trade in markets and the rational organization of capitalist production (based on
double-entry book-keeping) in the circuits of Atlantic Fordism (economies based on
mass production and mass consumption in the heartlands of North American and North-
West European capitalism plus Australia and New Zealand) and on the crisis-
tendencies in the welfare states that developed in this context after 1945. He pays less
attention to semi-peripheral or peripheral economies in these circuits and to different
forms of political capitalism based on profits from force and domination, predation, and
unusual deals with political authority. Political capitalism is not confined to import-
substitution industrialization or developmental states, however, it is also found in
advanced capitalist societies, both in terms of accumulation through dispossession and
in terms of the use of economic power and lobbying to shape regulatory regimes
favourable to superprofits (most recently through neo-liberal deregulation, privatization,
marketization of the public sector, and reduced direct taxes on corporations and the
rich). By the same token he ignores the ways in which accumulation in some economic
spaces and the possibility of welfare states both depend on the articulation of different
varieties of capitalism (as well as pre- and non-capitalist relations of production) within
the world market. In the same way, his analysis of welfare states is focused on the role
of the state in economic and social reproduction in capitalist democracies characterized
by the rule of law and citizenship rights – exceptional regimes based on authoritarian
rule without competitive party systems and entrenched legal, economic, and social
rights remain outside the scope of his analysis. Yet, here, too, the existence of such
regimes may be a condition of existence of welfare regimes in the advanced capitalist
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economies. Two examples of this interdependence are the role of military dictatorships
and authoritarian rule in keeping oil flowing abundantly and cheaply in the 1950s to mid-
1970s, fuelling the Fordist growth regime, and, more recently, the role of authoritarian
one-party rule in China in enabling the export of low-cost consumer goods to post-
Fordist economies so that the costs of reproducing the labour force and wider
population became lower, compensating for declining nominal wages when the Fordist
link between productivity and wages was broken through neo-liberal ‘reforms’.
Capitalism
We can describe the capitalist mode of production as an ensemble of technical and
social relations of production organized around profit-oriented, market-mediated
accumulation and based on the generalization of the commodity form to labor-power,
i.e., its treatment as if were a commodity. This last feature is crucial to the dynamic
of capitalism and is a historically specific feature of the rational organization of
capitalist production. There are four key categories of fictitious commodity: land (or
nature), money, labour-power, and knowledge. Each of these becomes more fully
subordinate to market relations as rational capitalism develops but it is the treatment
of labour-power as if it were a commodity that gives capitalism its distinctive dynamic
and shapes the forms of economic, political, and social struggle more generally,
whether this is expressed through ‘old’ social movements based on the division of
labour or ‘new’ social movements based on identities, values, and interests anchored
in what is often called ‘civil society’.
Starting from the basic features of capitalism as a mode of production and an object
of régulation-cum-governance, stable capital accumulation is inherently improbable.
And, even where it is characterized by periods and zones of relative stability, the
preconditions for this opaque, indeteminate, and variable. This is why economic
imaginaries have a key role in envisaging these conditions, why poltical strategies
are often essential to delivering them, and why relative stability depends on trial-and-
error attempts to regularize and govern accumulation within any given set of spatio-
temporal horizons. This requires close attention to its co-constitution through the
interaction of market-mediated and non-market social relations and, in turn, to their
impact on the wider social formation. It is in this context that we can explore the role
6
of institutions and practices beyond the market economy in reproducing the
conditions for differential accumulation.
The nature of labour-power as a fictitious commodity not only shapes the forms of
class- and class-relevant struggles but also shapes the competition among capitals
to secure the most effective valorization of labour-power and the appropriation of the
resulting surplus value. Competition and class struggle are major sources (but by no
means alone) of capitalism's open-ended dynamic as a mode of production. Lastly,
when capital accumulation becomes the dominant principle of organization in the
economy in its narrow sense, it also gains a major influence on societies more
broadly and, in certain circumstances, may become the dominant principle of
societal organization (on ecological dominance, see below).
In this context I have distinguished four dimensions of states (understood broadly as
a structured ensemble of practices of government and governance organized in the
shadow of a state apparatus – with this term defined in the next section). These
dimensions are the distinctive role of the state in securing the conditions for the
profitability of private capital; the distinctive role of the state in securing the
conditions for the reproduction of the labour force on a day-to-day basis, over the
lifecourse, and on an intergenerational basis; the primary scale on which policies for
economic and social reproduction are organized – local, regional, national,
supranational, through international regimes; and the primary governance
mechanism (e.g., hierarchical command, networks and partnerships, or solidarity)
used to compensate for market failure. This provides a way to define typologies of
welfare regimes and, on this basis, to consider different hybrid forms (see below).
The State as a Social Relation
As noted above, Claus Offe also takes for granted the state as an ensemble of social
relations defined in terms of general state theory. As such it combines: (1) territory
controlled by the state, (2) an apparatus that makes collectively binding decisions, and
(3) a resident population subject to state authority. This is already problematic as
internationalization challenges the territorial and temporal sovereignty of states, that is,
their ability to control what happens within their territories as firms and powerful states
7
claim extra-territorial rights and immunities and, in addition, as states, faced with the
acceleration of economic activities through time-space compression, lose the capacity
to make decisions according to established procedures, especially where these should
involve democratic accountability. As we shall see, this loss of sovereignty is one factor
behind the crisis of the Keynesian welfare national state. Indeed, given Offe’s interest in
the pressures on the state apparatus (and the political class and state managers that
preside over it), this loss of sovereignty puts strong pressures on the axis of political
power based on the state’s interest in securing the conditions for profitable accumulation
and the conditions for political legitimacy in the context of competitive party democracy.
One response to this has been a shift towards authoritarian statism, in which citizenship
rights are rolled back and decision-making is less subject to democratic accountability.
This trend has recently been described as ‘post-democracy’ but the trend is much older
than the decade to which this label has been applied (Crouch 2004; see also Habermas
1962/1989; Poulantzas 1978; Jessop 2013a),
Rather than creating a ‘flat world’ (Friedmann 2005), these complexities reorder
economic, political, and socio-cultural differences and complementarities across
different scales, places, and networks. This offers opportunities for supra-national,
national, and local states to shape these differences and complementarities and
thereby influence their competitiveness and capacities to react to the problems
thrown up by ‘globalization’. But it remains a hierarchically ordered world too: some
‘spaces of flows’, some territorial states (e.g., USA, the People’s Republic of China,
and Germany), some places (e.g., global cities), some scales of economic and
political action (e.g., the European Union), matter more than others. In short, we
have an uneven terrain with uneven flows, differential frictions, and uneven power
with varying capacities for time-space compression and time-space distantiation.
In addition to their claim to territorial sovereignty, states also seek temporal
sovereignty. This involves the ability to make decisions according to the routines and
rhythms of the political system rather than those of other systems. World market
integration also puts pressure on this dimension of sovereignty due to its associated
forms of time-space distantiation, compression, and differentiation. As economic
decision-making and the rhythms of the world market accelerate relative to those of
the state and political decision-making, the time to determine and co-ordinate
8
political responses to economic events shrinks – especially regarding hypermobile,
superfast capital. This reinforces conflicts between the time(s) of the state and the
time(s) of the market with some states more actively involved in and/or more
vulnerable to time-space distantiation and compression.
As these remarks indicate and common observation reveals, there is no general form of
state any more than there is a general form of capitalism. Different types of capitalst
regime are associated with different kinds of state and their coupling and co-evolution
depends not only on internal, domestic factors but also their insertion into the world
market. Furthermore, notwithstanding the formal equality among states that comes from
the mutual recognition of states as ‘formally sovereign’, states are not substantively
equal in terms of their capacities to shape the world of states, the governance of the
world market, or the forms of social policy.
ATLANTIC FORDISM AND WELFARE STATES
Atlantic Fordism as a type of capitalism was associated with a distinctive form of
welfare state: the Keynesian welfare national state (or KWNS). Each of the terms in
the ideal type KWNS refers to a major aspect of state involvement in promoting
capitalist expansion and, in this sense, it develops a broadly economic interpretation
of the state. Adopting alternative entry-points would highlight other aspects of state
transformation or, indeed, reveal certain continuities in the state. But a broadly
economic approach illuminates many of the issues noted above and can be
complemented by other approaches.
First, in promoting the conditions for profitable economic growth, the KWNS 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
national infrastructural provision. Second, in contributing to the day-to-day, lifetime,
and intergenerational reproduction of the labour force, KWNS 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
9
favourable to the Fordist growth dynamic. Third, the KWNS was national insofar as
these economic and social policies were pursued within the historically specific (and
socially constructed) matrix of a national economy, a national state, and a society
seen as comprising national citizens. Within this 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 WW2 were
mainly intended to restore stability to national economies and national states. And,
fourth, the KWNS 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 case of the KWNS (it is an ideal type) within the
international economic and political framework of Atlantic Fordism. Nor was there a
generic crisis that affected all such states identically. Nonetheless, they all faced
similar pressures from changes generated by internal crisis-tendencies and external
developments. The first signs of crisis in Fordist growth emerged in the mid-1970s
and the situation worsened in the 1980s. In addition, the structured coherence of
national economy-national state-national 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 the nation-state
was also weakened by the (admittedly uneven) growth of multi-ethnic and multi-
cultural 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.).
Atlantic Fordism and the KWNS experienced crisis as the conditions for its relatively
stable operation were undermined. In particular, internationalization made it harder to
treat the national economy as if it were relatively closed and to pursue Keynesian
demand management policies because boosts to demand could leak into the world
market. It also becomes harder to treat wages as a source of local demand – they are
increasingly treated as a cost of international production. This also holds for the ‘social
wage’ (i.e., social policy), which is construed as a competitive burden (‘we can’t afford
10
welfare states’) that must be limited if national economies are to remain competitive and
deliver full employability. On similar grounds, the national scale loses its taken for
grantedness as state capacities and power are transferred upwards, downwards, and
sideways. Finally, the state is also seen to fail (state failure), which prompts a search for
new ways to compensate for both market and state failure
Internationalization also undermines the conditions behind that sustained the Listian
Workfare National State that was correlated with the export-oriented growth in East
Asian economies. Internationalization makes it harder to pursue neo-mercantilist
policies, especially as catch-up occurs and flexible innovation-oriented policies are
required. It is harder to treat wages just as cost of international production as mass
domestic demand expands and as democratic struggles and democratization develop.
Economic cycles and the decline of the extended household make it harder to rely on
company and/or informal ‘welfare’ and creates bottom-up demand and state responses
for new ‘workfare’ forms and/or new welfare regimes. Finally, the national ‘security state’
loses legitimacy and new forms of state guidance develop based on economic, political,
and social networks (guanxi).
What follows Fordism?
There were many suggestions about what follows Fordism: the hegemonic economic
and political imaginary in the 1980s and 1990s was the knowledge-based economy. But
finance-dominated accumulation also developed. Each with its own specific forms of
new welfare regime. Finance-dominated accumulation, promoted by neo-liberal,
transnational capital and financial capital oriented to maximizing exchange-value came
to dominate the organization of the world market.
• Liberalization: promote free competition
• De-regulation: reduce role of law and state
• Privatization: sell off public sector
• Market proxies in residual public sector
• Internationalization: free many flows in and out
• Lower direct taxes: boost consumer choice
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• [Also seen in structural adjustment programmes]
Growing imbalances in neo-liberal world market
The neoliberal world market involves more than financialization (the growing importance
of profit from financial services and interest-bearing capital): linked to importance of
fictitious capital (money capital as property) and debt as source of differential
accumulation. Breaks link between accumulation and welfare state: labour is now
production cost, welfare is a cost of production too, not source of demand. Prosperous
working class less necessary to transnational capital. At best favours neo-liberal SWPR;
at worst, a Ricardian workfare post-national regime backed by coercive state
THE CRISIS OF ATLANTIC FORDISM AND BEYOND
The crisis of Atlantic Fordism led to a search for possible post-Fordist scenarios. Many
economic imaginaries were proposed but two became dominant, if not hegemonic.
These were the knowledge-based economy and finance-dominated accumulation. The
former corresponds more to a profit-generating conception of capital accumulation, the
latter more to an interest-bearing capital perspective. In addition, the former scenario
was more prominent initially in societies that had previously had more export-oriented
economies plus social democratic or corporatist welfare regimes and the latter was more
prominent in societies that previously had more liberal welfare regimes and then went
through a neo-liberal regime shift (see below). An interesting observation requiring more
analysis is why the knowledge-based economy, although it became the hegemonic
imaginary of the 1990s and was adopted at many different sites and scales of economic
and political organization (and heavily promoted by the OECD, the European Union, and
other international bodies), was subordinated to finance-dominated accumulation, even
though this was not promoted as a serious alternative to the knowledge-based economy.
An important part of the answer may be found in three sets of causal mechanisms:
1. The difficulties of establishing knowledge-driven economies regardless of path-
dependent legacies and the time that it takes to develop the institutional supports
for such an economic model;
2. The appeal of neo-liberalism as a general economic, political, and social
imaginary in response to the crisis of Atlantic Fordism and its welfare state –
12
which created the space for finance-dominated accumulation to emerge without
the need for an explicit articulation and promotion of this specific accumulation
regime as opposed to the general advantages of a more market-driven approach
to economic growth and prosperity; and
3. The ecological dominance of finance-dominated accumulation, that is, the extent
to which, once established and able to expand, it causes more problems for other
modes of growth than they can cause for it.
This is associated in turn with different kinds of coupling between post-Fordist
capitalisms and new kinds of welfare state.
In the following sections, I discuss the welfare state form that corresponds most
closely to the Knowledge-Based economy and then consider the welfare regime that
suits the finance-dominated accumulation.
THE SCHUMPETERIAN WORKFARE POST-NATIONAL REGIME
In ideal-typical terms, the welfare regime that corresponds to a knowledge-based
economy is the Schumpeterian workfare post-national regime (SWPR). This can be
presented along the same lines as the Keynesian Welfare National State. Thus, first,
the new state form is Schumpeterian insofar as it tries to promote permanent
innovation and flexibility in relatively open economies by intervening on the supply-
side and to strengthen their competitiveness. This notion invokes Schumpeter, the
theorist of innovation, entrepreneurship, and competition, rather than Keynes, the
theorist of money, employment, and national demand, as its emblematic economist.
Second, as a workfare regime, the SWPR subordinates social policy to the demands
of labour market flexibility and employability as well as economic competition. This
includes putting downward pressure on the social wage qua cost of international
production but, given the economic and political limits to welfare cuts, it is especially
concerned with the re-functionalization of the inherited welfare state to serve
economic interests. The state also attempts to create subjects to serve as partners in
the innovative, knowledge-driven, entrepreneurial, flexible economy and its
accompanying self-reliant, autonomous, empowered workfare regime.
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Third, the SWPR is 'postnational' insofar as the national territory has become less
important as an economic, political, and cultural 'power container'. This is associated
with a transfer of economic and social policy-making functions upwards, downwards,
and sideways. On a global level, this is seen in the growing concern of a growing
number of international agencies (such as the IMF, World Bank, OECD, and ILO)
and intergovernmental forums (such as the G8 and G20) with the shaping of current
social as well as economic policy agendas. In part, the European Union acts as a
relay for these agenda-shaping efforts and, in part, is playing an active role in
developing its own agenda for countries beyond its borders, whether near
neighbours or further afield. The EU level is also seeking to impose more numerous
and tighter restrictions on national economic and social governance, especially
through the norms of the Single Market and the economic policy and performance
criteria of the Eurozone. This is reflected in the tendential Europeanization of labour
market policies, the transformation of national corporatist and bargaining
arrangements to allow for greater local and regional differentiation, and the
development of 'social pacts' that bundle economic and social policies together to
advance worker, business, and national interests. Needless to say, these are not
always successful. What is emerging in this context is a series of multi-level
government and/or multi-level governance regimes oriented to issues of the inter-
scalar re-articulation of the economic and political -- with the EU just one among
many such emerging regimes. At the same time there are tendencies to devolve
some economic and social policy-making to the regional, urban, and local levels on
the grounds that policies intended to influence the micro-economic supply-side and
social regeneration are best designed close to their sites of implementation. In some
cases this also involves cross-border cooperation among regional, urban, or local
spaces. Paradoxically, this often leads to an enhanced role for national states in
controlling the interscalar transfer of these powers – suggesting a shift from
sovereignty to a primus inter pares role in intergovernmental relations.
The post-national moment of economic and social policy restructuring is complex
because of the proliferation of scales and the relativization of scale with which it is
associated. There are clear differences among the triad regions here. The EU
provides the only example among the three of a clear commitment to economic,
political, and social integration and, more ambivalently, to the development of
14
supranational state structures. Nonetheless all three regions/triads are involved in
the internationalization of policy regimes not only in economic but also in the
juridical, political, social fields, etc. The rise of G20 to supplement the G8 is one sign
of this trend. Nonetheless continuing differences within and across regions indicates
that one should not push globalization too far as a general explanatory framework of
recent changes.
Fourth, and finally, the SWPR relies increasingly on governance to compensate for
market failures and inadequacies. There is an increased role for non-state
mechanisms in shaping and delivering state-sponsored economic and social
policies. One aspect is the increased importance of private-public networks to state
activities on all levels – from local partnerships to supranational neo-corporatist
arrangements. The shift from government towards governance means that traditional
forms of intervention are less important now in economic and social policy. This does
not mean that law and money have disappeared, of course; instead, active economic
and social steering now tends to run more through soft regulation and reflexive law,
additionality and private-public partnerships, organizational intelligence and
information-sharing, etc.. A key role is also played by metagovernance (see above)
both in normal times and in response to major shocks and crises.
As with all ideal types, there are no pure cases. Indeed, advanced capitalist
economies have developed along two lines in the past twenty years in regard to the
Schumpeterian dimension. Some have focused their efforts on promoting the
knowledge-based economy; others have promoted finance-dominated accumulation,
regarding de-regulated financial innovation as useful productive activity. The global
financial crisis has called this into question and encouraged renewed concern with
boosting industrial competitiveness.
RICARDIAN WORKFARE POST-NATIONAL REGIMES
The world market provides the ultimate horizon of economic analysis just as ‘world
society’ provides the ultimate horizon of social analysis. Historically, the world market
is both the presupposition and the result of the development of free trade in markets
and the rational organization of production (cf. Marx 1973; Weber 1961).
15
Nonetheless it has not developed in a linear fashion but has seen important
transformations, ruptures, and reversals. In particular, for our purposes, the
dominance of neo-liberalism on a global scale has introduced some interesting new
features into the dynamic of the world market that set it apart from earlier periods of
free trade imperialism as well as from more overtly statist periods of capitalist
development. In particular, neo-liberal globalization strengthens capital's chances of
avoiding the structural constraints of other institutional orders and their control
efforts, thereby increasing its ‘indifference’ to the operating environment. This is an
important achievement because capital's profit-oriented, market-mediated logic tends
to be 'ecologically dominant', i.e., to cause more problems for other systems than
they can cause for it. This tendency is greatly reinforced by the dominance of the
neo-liberal form of world market integration.
WORLD SOCIETY, WORLD MARKET, WORLD POLITY
‘World society’ is often presented as the ultimate horizon of meaning-making and
social communication but this is not the same as asserting that that world society is
an established societal reality, let alone one superior to other social formations. In
addition, world society does not develop evenly but takes different forms and
proceeds in different ways. One example is the world market organized under the
dominance of profit-oriented, market-mediated capital accumulation. Another
example is the world polity organized in the shadow of a world of states
(Staatenwelt) rather than as a world state (Weltstaat) but with a growing number and
range of international and transnational regimes that provide a further field in which
states compete for global influence. Other examples relevant to global social policy
include the emerging global education, health, legal, scientific, security, and
environmental regimes. This uneven development is complicated by the survival of
centre-periphery and segmented forms of societal organization (reflected in, for
example, hegemonic states and client states, core and excluded regions, and the
survival of territorial states in the world political system). Thus, alongside world
society, we can observe an international order based on interaction among
economic, political, and socio-cultural entities with clear national territorial
boundaries. This has implications for the issue of ‘global policy’, whatever specific
set of socially construed problems this might address and however adequate these
16
construals might be to underlying, extra-semiotic realities.
Whether one talks of world society and/or of world market, this does not entail that
the world scale is the primary (let alone sole) locus of globally significant causal
mechanisms or social forces. One should not mistake the field on which economic or
social processes unfold with their causal dynamics. For example, the global financial
crisis did not originate at some global scale above or beyond specific circuits of
capital anchored in particular places. It was made in the USA, broke out there, and
has spread unevenly through a mix of contagion and endogenous vulnerabilities
around the globe. Even during the most severe global economic crisis since the
1930s, some locales, regions, and national economies have expanded. Thus the
idea of the world market or globalization must be approached with care and
considered in relation to other spatial dynamics too.
In regard to global social policy, two interrelated concepts are useful: (1) the scalar
division of labour; and (2) the relativization of scale. Globalization does not mean
that the global is the dominant scale of policy formulation or implementation. On the
contrary, the national scale remains dominant but is increasingly influenced by
international regimes that are, in turn, sites of contestation among national states,
capitalist interests at different scales, and old and new social movements. In this
context we can observe an increasingly convoluted mix of scale strategies as
economic and political forces seek the most favourable conditions for insertion into a
changing international order, including the restructuring of social policy regimes. This
poses important issues around the coordination of strategies and policies on different
scales of action in various combinations of vertical, horizontal, diagonal, centripetal,
centrifugal, and vortical ways. This complexity cannot be captured in terms of simple
contrasts, such as global-national or global-local, or catchall hybrid concepts such as
'glocalization' or the 'tranversal'. Instead there is a proliferation of discursively
constituted and institutionally materialized and embedded spatial scales (whether
terrestrial, territorial, or telematic), that are related in increasingly complex tangled
hierarchies rather than being simply nested one within the other, with different
temporalities as well as spatialities. These complexities offer more opportunities for
rescaling, jumping scales, and so on; they also re-order spatial and scalar
hierarchies, producing new forms of uneven development. At the same time these
17
complexities add further to the complexity of spatial organization and create
pressures to mutual indifference and/or multi-spatial metagovernance.
Such a concern with the interaction (and potential antagonisms) between territorial
logics and the logics of flow-spaces provides an interesting entry-point into the study
of the world economic and political order. For it points to the inherent contradictions
that arise from the increasing integration of the world market – which reduces
frictions that slow the movement of capital (especially its hypermobile, superfast
forms) – and the continued survival of territorial states (typically national territorial
states) that find it hard to control these flows and even harder, in many cases, to
control the speed with which financial and economic crises unfold and, through
contagion effects, disrupt economic, political, and social life far from the initial sites of
crisis. In short, it is the interaction of the space of flows and the logic of territory that
provides a major challenge to effective global governance.
The co-existence and, indeed, entanglement of space and territory with the
complexities of multiple scalar divisions of labour and the many forms of connection
among particular places, we are faced with serious problems of unstructured,
unpredictable, and ungovernable complexity of socio-spatial relations.
These arguments can be applied to social policy as to other policy fields. The spatial,
territorial, scalar, place-based, and networked nature of social policy is shaped by
four key factors. First, all activities occur at particular places and times. Whereas
material control over these coordinates provides a means of intervening directly in
social practices, other technologies of power may also enable practices to be
steered at a distance. This latter possibility highlights a second factor. Activities are
not reducible to their coordinates in space and time: they have other discursive and
extra-discursive aspects. If we focus solely on their spatial and/or temporal
dimensions, we risk reifying or fetishizing space and time and neglecting potentially
more important causal factors in the generating, enabling, and constraining these
activities. Likewise, third, the existence and success of activities at specific
coordinates typically depends on conditions that exceed these times and places.
This implies that a multi-spatial and/or multi-scalar as well as multi-temporal
approach may be more appropriate and more effective than one that focuses
18
exclusively on the immediate and the local. Fourth, the consequences of social
activities also typically extend outwards in space and time. This highlights again the
importance of adopting multiple spatio-temporal horizons in the formulation of
strategies and exercise of governance.
Together these four factors make it impossible to govern all aspects of a given set of
social practices because of their extensive conditions of existence and spatio-
temporal ramifications. This suggests that relatively effective governance requires
the identification of a subset of features of relevant activities that are sufficiently
governable to enable the steering of their conditions of existence, of the substantive
activities themselves (including their location and timing), and of their repercussions.
This process of complexity reduction is organized along four axes: (1) the actual and
construed spatial aetiology of ‘social problems’; (2) the construed or imagined spatial
conditioning of solutions to these ‘social problems’ – in other words, the question of
whether spatial reorganization of some kind may help to resolve these problems; (3)
the proposed spatial, territorial, place-based, scalar or networked character of social
policy formation and its governance; and (4) the appropriate spatial location of social
policy delivery. Global social policy will have very different connotations, depending
on which of these four axes is prioritized in its analysis.
For social policy, there are three closely connected questions: changing definitions of
individual and social problems and their connection, the changing institutions
responsible for solving these problems in their interconnection, and the agents and
practices that deliver solutions to social problems. It is a social scientific
commonplace that governance practices (mediated by institutions) attempt to delimit,
unify, stabilize and reproduce their objects of governance as the precondition as well
as the effect of governing them. Spatial and temporal practices are important here.
Thus we must direct attention to the role of spatial, territorial, place-based and scalar
imaginaries, narratives and/or discourses in demarcating a specific spatial (TPSN)
aetiology of a common set of social problems from the potentially indefinite web of a
changing global-regional-national-local nexus as a focus of intervention. There is no
a priori reason why this space should coincide with a given political territory or
administrative unit rather than being grounded in specific places, particular scales of
social organization, or specific social networks. Nor is there any reason why the
19
temporalities of social problems should coincide with cycles or rhythms related to
one or another tier of government or mode of governance or with their
overdetermination by outside forces. It is an interesting question, then, whether the
organization of social policy is driven by administrative convenience or by actually
existing social problems. Indeed, social policy and social work interventions typically
fail because they are too place-specific and ignore the wider preconditions and
subsequent repercussions of social problems and their treatment. The rise of ‘global
social policy’ is one way to address such issues but is fragmented in turn by the
plurality of problems, imaginaries, agencies, sites of possible intervention, and so on.
5. Governance and Meta-Governance
Interest in governance, theoretically and normatively, is linked to growing recognition
(correctly or not) of the growing complexity of social life. ‘Governance’ sometimes
covers all possible modes of co-ordination of complex and reciprocally
interdependent activities or operations. The most commonly identified modes of
coordination are: ex post co-ordination through exchange (e.g., the anarchy of the
market), ex ante co-ordination through imperative co-ordination (e.g., the hierarchy
of the firm, organization, or state), reflexive self-organization (e.g., the heterarchy of
negotiated consent to resolve complex problems in a corporatist order and/or of
horizontal networking to co-ordinate a complex division of labour), and the solidarity
of unconditional commitments (e.g., within communities of fate) (see table 5).
Transposed to the global scale, these modes of coordination would correspond
roughly to the primacy of exchange in the world market, the primacy of imperative
co-ordination in a putative world state, the reflexive self-organization of governance
in global civil society, and the subsidiarity and solidarity that would be needed to
develop a world society based on principles of redistributive social justice and
respect for the environment that transcend the morality of specific functional
systems.
These trends appear to have promoted a shift in the institutional centre of gravity (or
the ‘institutional attractor’) for policy coordination towards heterarchy or reflexive self-
organization (which is sometimes conflated with governance tout court in claims
about a shift from government to governance). But disillusion with the utopias of
20
communism, the welfare state, and, more recently, the unfettered dominance of
market forces should not lead us to put all our trust in the atopic vision of good
governance based on horizontal and vertical solidarities and the mobilization of
collective intelligence (Willke, 2001). It is not just markets and imperative co-
ordination that are prone to fail; heterarchic governance and solidarity are also
failure-prone -- albeit for different reasons, in different ways, and with different
effects. In general, the greater the material, social, and spatio-temporal complexity of
the problems to be addressed, the greater are the number and range of interests
whose heterarchic co-ordination is necessary to resolve them satisfactorily. In
addition, the less direct and visible are reciprocally interdependent interests, the
more challenging is efficient, effective, and consensual co-ordination regardless of
the method of co-ordination.
Collibration can be defined as the judicious re-articulating and rebalancing of modes
of governance to manage the complexity, plurality, and tangled hierarchies found in
prevailing modes of co-ordination with a view to achieving optimal outcomes as
viewed by those engaged in metagovernance. In this sense it also means the
organization of the conditions of governance in terms of their structurally-inscribed
strategic selectivity, i.e., the asymmetrical privileging of different modes of co-
ordination and their differential access to the institutional support and the material
resources needed to pursue reflexively-agreed objectives. Collibration is no more the
preserve of one actor or set of actors than it is confined to one site or scale of action.
Instead it should be seen, like the various first-order forms of coordination of
complex reciprocal interdependence and the various second-order forms of meta-
coordination, as fractal in character, i.e., as taking self-similar forms in many different
social fields.
Governments play a major and increasing role in all aspects of metagovernance in
areas of societal significance, whether these are formally private or public. They get
involved in redesigning markets, in constitutional change and the juridical re-
regulation of organizational forms and objectives, in organizing the conditions for
networked self-organization, in promoting social capital and the self-regulation of the
professions and other forms of expertise, and, most importantly, in the collibration of
21
different forms of first-order governance and metagovernance. This is especially true
during periods of crisis that threaten system integration and/or social cohesion.
More specifically, governments provide the ground rules for governance and the
regulatory order in and through which governance partners can pursue their aims;
ensure the compatibility or coherence of different governance mechanisms and
regimes; create forums for dialogue and/or act as the primary organizer of the
dialogue among policy communities; deploy a relative monopoly of organizational
intelligence and information in order to shape cognitive expectations; serve as a
'court of appeal' for disputes arising within and over governance; seek to re-balance
power differentials and strategic bias in regimes by strengthening weaker forces or
systems in the interests of system integration and/or social cohesion; take material
and/or symbolic flanking and supporting measures to stabilize forms of coordination
that are deemed valuable but prone to collapse; subsidize production of public
goods; organize side-payments for those making sacrifices to facilitate effective
coordination; contribute to the meshing of short-, medium- and long-term time
horizons and temporal rhythms across different sites, scales, and actors, in part to
prevent opportunistic exit and entry into governance arrangements; try to modify the
self-understanding of identities, strategic capacities, and interests of individual and
collective actors in different strategic contexts and hence alter their implications for
preferred strategies and tactics; organize redundancies and duplication to sustain
resilience through requisite variety in response to unexpected problems;1 and also
assume political responsibility as addressee in last resort in the event of governance
failure in domains beyond the state (based in part on Jessop 2002: 219; see also
Bell and Hindmoor 2009).This emerging role means that networking, negotiation,
noise reduction, and negative as well as positive co-ordination occur 'in the shadow
of hierarchy'. In all cases, despite significant differences between their respective
modes of complexity reduction (which always and inevitably marginalizes some
features essential to effective governance), the continuing excess or surplus of
complexity – especially deep complexity -- is a major cause for failure.
Metagovernance involves not only institutional design but also the transformation of
subjects and cultures. Whereas there has been much interest in issues of
institutional design appropriate to different objects of governance, less attention to
22
the reform of the subjects of governance and their values. Yet the neoliberal project,
for example, clearly requires attempts to create entrepreneurial subjects and
demanding consumers aware of their choices and rights as well as actions to shift
the respective scope and powers of the market mechanism and state intervention.
This is an area where Foucauldian students of governmentality offer more than
students of governance. For they have been especially interested in the role of
power and knowledge in shaping the attributes, capacities, and identities of social
agents and, in the context of self-reflexive governance, in enabling them to become
self-governing and self-transforming (cf. Miller and Rose 2008). This raises important
questions about the compatibility of different modes of governance insofar as this
involves not only questions of institutional compatibility but also the distribution of the
individual and collective capacities needed to pursue creatively and autonomously
the appropriate strategies and tactics to sustain contrasting modes of governance.
Of particular interest is how new forms of governance fit into the overall configuration
of class power and political domination more generally. By analogy with Gramsci’s
own definitions, I argue that ‘the state in its inclusive sense’ could also be defined as
‘government + governance in the shadow of hierarchy’. In these terms, state power
involves not only the exercise of state capacities that belong specifically to the state
(e.g., legal sovereignty, a constitutionalized monopoly of organized coercion,
taxation powers); but also resort to practices of collibration, i.e., the rebalancing of
different forms of governance within and beyond the state in the shadow of
hierarchy. Collibration is more than a technical, problem-solving fix: it always
involves specific objects, techniques, and subjects of governance and it is tied to the
management of a wider ‘unstable equilibrium of compromise’. Indeed, it is typically
conducted in the light of the ‘global’ (or most general) function of the state, i.e.,
maintaining social cohesion in a class-divided (or, better, socially-divided) social
formation. In other words, governance and meta-governance cannot be reduced to
questions of how to solve issues of a specific techno-economic, narrowly juridico-
political, tightly focused social administrative, or otherwise neatly framed problem.
This is not only because of the material interconnections among different problem
fields in a complex world but also because every governance (and, a fortiori, meta-
governance) practice has implications for the balance of forces.
23
7. Multi-Level Government vs Multi-Spatial Metagovernance
Reflections on the socio-spatial complexity and inherent ungovernability of some
problems has prompted proposals for multilevel governance as a ‘third way’ between
supranational imperative coordination through a world state and a relatively anarchic,
negatively co-ordinated, and fragmented pursuit of common economic, social, and
political objectives in international society. This has been understood in terms of the
logic of territorialization based on multi-level government and/or in terms of the logic
of flows leading to network governance.
Multi-level Government
Multi-level government involves imperative coordination through a territorial state (a
multi-level but unified hierarchy of command) that is charged with (or claims
responsibility for) that manages the relations among bounded areas that are under
the state’s exclusive control. This state can be a large national territorial state (with
two or more tiers of government) or a confederation of national territorial states that
has delegated some competences to a supranational political authority. The two
most prominent cases are: (1) the break-up of the Soviet Union – a multi-state
imperial regime dominated by Russia that underwent decomposition – and its
reorganization into a Commonwealth of Independent States; and (2) the European
Union as a multi-state federal state in the process of formation, in which the
relationship between different tiers of political organization (cities, regions, national
states, and European institutions) must be settled and has evolved to date through
incremental innovation in stable periods and crisis-induced radical integration in
periods of turbulence.
In the case of the EU, debates range between two polar positions. At one pole, we
find calls for subsidiarity, i.e., maximum possible devolution of powers and
competences to the lowest tier of government with higher tiers responsible for policy
problems that cannot be settled at lower levels; at the other pole, we find arguments
for a United States of Europe with power concentrated in European level institutions
24
and lower tiers acting as relays for decisions made at the European level. In between
these extremes is a wide range of competing proposals and, more importantly,
competing tendencies or trends in development. A key part of European experience
in this regard is that crises that affect European economic development tend to
generate greater political integration to generate more effective crisis-management.
Network Governance
This political regime relies on a mix of well-ordered market relations (economic
exchange), commitment to negotiation (consensus-oriented deliberation), and
solidarity (credible commitments to cooperation). It can emerge spontaneously, in
response to particular initiatives by a key stakeholder or stakeholders, or through
state initiatives to reduce the burdens of government by pooling sovereignty and/or
sharing responsibilities for governing complex problems with a range of public,
private, and third-sector partners. Network governance is oriented to securing the
conditions for the flow of goods, services, technologies, capital, and people across
different territories, for connecting different places in different territories in new
divisions of labour (e.g., networks of cities, interdependent centres of production,
different forms of centre-periphery relation), over different scales of social
organization (that may not coincide with territorial boundaries), and different sets of
social bonds based on mutual trust. This pattern is less concerned with the
integration of government in an emerging supra-national or federal state system and
more concerned with creating the conditions for integrated markets with agreed
governance arrangements but no overall coordination.
In the European Union, this pattern of governance is most often associated with the
officially recognized Open Method of Coordination (OMC). This mechanism involves
common agreement on mission, policy objectives, and desired outcomes plus
decentralized methods of pursuing these objectives (chosen at national or sub-
national level) as well as monitoring and reporting mechanisms to check progress.
The development of the OMC can be seen as part of continuing efforts (often at
cross-purposes) by key economic and political actors to produce an appropriate
balance between different modes of economic and political coordination across
25
functional and territorial divides and to ensure, under the primacy of the political, a
measure of political apparatus unity and political legitimacy for the European Union.
Multi-Spatial Metagovernance
Neither multi-level government nor network governance adequately describes the
European Union. This combines elements of both forms plus other transversal
arrangements – complicated in the last few years by a new political axis based on
Franco-German interest in keeping the Eurozone intact with decisions being
imposed on weaker member states (notably Greece but with Portugal and Italy also
subject to Franco-German dictates). In this sense, the EU can be seen as a major
and, indeed, increasingly important, supranational instance of meta-governance in
relation to a wide range of complex and interrelated problems. Indeed, because the
sources and reach of these problems go well beyond the territorial space occupied
by its member states, the EU is an important, if complex, point of intersection (or
node) in the emerging, hypercomplex, and chaotic system of global governance (or,
better, global meta-governance). It is still one node among several within this
emerging system of global meta-governance and cannot be fully understood without
taking account of its complex relations with other nodes located above, below, and
transversal to the EU. Indeed, while one might well hypothesize that the European
scale is becoming increasing dominant within the multi-spatial metagovernance
regime of the European Union, it is merely nodal in the emerging multi-scalar
metagovernance regimes that are developing on a global scale under the
(increasingly crisis-prone) dominance of the United States.
The concept of multispatial metagovernance as a theoretical, strategic, and policy
paradigm can be developed by recognizing the complex interrelations between
territorial organization, multiple scalar divisions of labour (and other practices),
networked forms of social interaction, and the importance of place as a meeting point
of functional operations and the conduct of personal life. To escape the traps of
methodological nationalism and reification of world society, I propose multispatial
metagovernance as an alternative approach to the world state and global
governance. It has four potential advantages over multilevel governance. First, it
affirms the irreducible plurality of territorial area, social scales, networks, and places
26
that must be addressed in attempts at governance. Second, it recognizes the
complex, tangled, and interwoven nature of the relevant political relations, which
include important horizontal and transversal linkages – indicated in notions such as
‘network state’ or ‘network polity’ – as well as the vertical linkages implied in
multilevel governance. Third, in contrast to a one-sided emphasis on heterarchic
coordination, it highlights the role of metagovernance as the reflexive art of balancing
government and other forms of governance to create requisite variety, flexibility, and
adaptability in coordinated policy-formulation, policy-making, and implementation.
And, fourth, it insists on the plurality and, indeed, heterogeneity of actors potentially
involved in such institutions and practices, which stretch well beyond different tiers of
government and well beyond the confines of any given administrative, political, or
economic space.
At this stage of theoretical elaboration, the concept of multispatial metagovernance is
admittedly a place-holder that identifies a range of problems to be addressed in
research on the inevitably fractal, multi-dimensional nature of governance in an
emerging world society. It does not plot the ‘high road’ to an effective world state or
global governance but serves to warn against investing too many hopes in the
search for a quick, one-dimensional fix to the problems of world governance. In
particular, it reflects the rescaling of the complexities of government and governance
rather than a simple rescaling of the sovereign state or the emergence of
international regimes as just another arena in which national states pursue national
interests. In short, multispatial metagovernance operates through multiple modes of
governance and with multiple stakeholders in the shadow of post-national statehood.
Some states are more important in this regard than others and there is no simple
scalar division of labour that ensures the primacy of one particular scale. Each scale
and node is involved in complex, tangled relations with others located above, below,
or transversal thereto. Many parallel power networks are involved in the emerging,
hypercomplex, and chaotic system of global metagovernance.
A further complication is the growing disjunction in an increasingly integrated global
economy between the formal structures of political power associated with sovereign
territorial states and the substantive circuits of transnational power. If representative
democracy is based on territorial representation, it is rendered problematic by the
27
relativization of scale (the loss of primacy of the national scale), by de- and re-
territorialization (the territorial re-scaling of government powers and authorities), the
resulting increase in variable geometries and tangled hierarchies of political power
(the loss of territorial congruence and/or of neatly nested hierarchies of power across
a growing range of fields of government action), and the challenge to many of the
traditional bases of national citizenship and mutual solidarity in some national states
that come from multi-ethnicity, multiculturalism, and divided political loyalties.
Moreover, given the increasing interdependence among functionally differentiated
systems with their own operational codes, logics of appropriateness, temporalities,
spatialities, etc., it becomes harder for one system (even the state as the core of the
political system) to control the operations of other systems from outside and above.
8. Conclusions
Acknowledgment: This paper derives from research conducted within the
framework of an ESRC-funded Professorial Fellowship, ‘Great Transformations: a
Cultural Political Economy of Crises of Crisis-Management’. Award: RES-051-27-
0303. As readers will have noted, it also draws heavily on my earlier work on diverse
of theoretical and substantive issues, some of which is cited in the bibliography.
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1 One implication is that alternative modes of co-ordination should not be destroyed too
hastily –they may need to be re-invented in one or another form in response to particular
forms of coordination failure. Witness the current financial crisis.