Philip G. Cerny

Globalization and the changing logic of collective action

Globalization transforms collective action in domestic and international politics. As the scale of markets widens and as economic organization becomes more complex, the institutional scale of political structures can become insufficient for the provision of an appropriate range of public goods. A process of this sort occurred prior to the emergence of the modern nation-state, which itself constituted a paradigmatic response to this predicament. Today, however, a complex process of globalization of goods and assets is undermining the effectiveness of state-based collective action. Overlapping “playing fields” are developing, made up of increasingly heterogeneous—transnational, local, and intermediate—arenas. The residual state retains great cultural force, and innovative projects for reinventing government are being tried. Nevertheless, the states effectiveness as a civil association has eroded significantly, and this may lead to a crisis of legitimacy.

The changing architecture of politics : structure, agency, and the future of the state

Preface and Introduction PART ONE: THE PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL STRUCTURATION: STRUCTURE, AGENCY, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN STATE Political Structuration and Political Science The Elements of Political Structure Patterns of Agency Markets, Hierarchies and Political Allocation The Modern State at the Crossroads Structuring the Field of Political Action PART TWO: CHANGING PATTERNS OF POLITICAL STRUCTURATION AND THE FUTURE OF THE STATE The Limits of Political Power Personal Leadership and Party Systems The State and Interest Intermediation Patterns of Collaborative Behaviour The Paradox of Civil Society De-differentiation and Re-differentiation in the Contemporary State Transnational Structures and the State Responses From the Welfare State to the Competition State Epilogue Political Structuration and Political Ideas in the 21st Century

The dynamics of financial globalization: Technology, market structure, and policy response

The development of increasingly transnationalized (‘globalized’) financial markets raises several key issues for the analysis of politics, public policy, and the national state. This article suggests that financial globalization increasingly constrains policymakers and circumscribes the policy capacity of the state. After looking briefly at a range of approaches to the process of financial globalization itself, the author suggests that technological change is the main independent variable, by reducing transaction costs and dramatically increasing the price sensitivity of financial markets across borders, while at the same time making possible a range of economies of scale. These very developments have a knock-on effect throughout the domestic and international economies. They in turn make obsolescent the political economies of scale — the governance structures — which have characterized economic policy in modern nation-states, undermining the capacity of the state to produce public goods. At the same time, globalized financial markets interact with rapidly changing interest group structures and divided state structures, especially through ‘regulatory arbitrage.’ Without the development of transnational regimes capable of regulating global financial markets, the structural basis of the national state itself is being undermined, and Polanyis ‘Great Transformation’ is over.

Globalization and the erosion of democracy

Despite the apparent development and spread of liberal democratic state forms in the 1980s and 1990s, possibilities for genuine democratic governance overall are declining. Firstly, the emergence and consolidation of modern liberal democracy was inextricably intertwined with the development of the nation-state and is profoundly socially embedded in that structural context. Secondly, in todays globalizing world, cross-cutting and overlapping governance structures and processes increasingly take private, oligarchic (and mixed public/private) forms; hegemonic neoliberal norms are delegitimizing state-based governance in general; and democratic states are losing the policy capacity necessary for transforming democratically generated inputs into authoritative outputs. Consequently, robust constraints limit the potential for (a) reinstitutionalizing the ‘democratic chain’ between accountability and effectiveness, (b) rearticulating the multitasking character of authoritative institutions and (c) renewing the capacity of authoritative agents to make the side-payments and to undertake the monitoring necessary to control free-riding and assimilate alienated groups. Rather than a new pluralistic global civil society, globalization is more likely to lead to a growth in inequalities, a fragmentation of effective governance structures and the multiplication of quasi-fiefdoms reminiscent of the Middle Ages.

Globalisation and public policy under New Labour

The concept of the Competition State differs from the Post-Fordist State proposed by regulation theory, which asserts that the contemporary restructuring of the state is aimed at maintaining its general function of stabilising the national polity and promoting the domestic economy in the public interest. In contrast, the Competition State focuses on the transformation of the state from within with regard to the reform of political institutions, functions and processes, in the face of processes of globalisation. It is argued that the state does not merely adapt to exogenous structural constraints; domestic political actors take a proactive lead in the process through both policy entrepreneurship and the rearticulation of domestic political and social coalitions, on both the right and the left, as alternatives are incrementally eroded. State intervention itself is aimed at not only adjusting to, but also sustaining, promoting, and expanding an open global economy in order to capture its perceived benefits. Such strategies, while reinforcing the roles and positions of such actors, can also undermine the generic function of the state seen in terms of traditional conceptions of social justice and the public interest and create the space for social conflict. It is further argued that the New Labour government in the UK has adopted a policy agenda which in its most crucial aspects reflects the continuing transformation of the British State into a Competition State in an attempt to adapt state action to cope more effectively with what they define as global ‘realities’.

Different Roads to Globalization: Neoliberalism, the Competition State, and Politics in a More Open World

Internalizing globalization is about how people are changing their domestic political worlds in the context of growing complex interactions — economic, social, and political — across national borders. Globalization itself is in turn reshaped by and through local conditions and domestic political objectives; it is not just imposed from outside. It starts from the competing goals of people in everyday politics and economics — especially over the meaning and character of the ‘general welfare’, as the Preamble to the United States Constitution terms it — and seeps into the deepest nooks and crannies of everyday life. International and domestic politics are therefore not two separate arenas, but parts of an interpenetrated set of webs of politics and governance that increasingly cut across and entangle the nations of the world, summoning forth and molding the actions of ordinary people. Globalization affects how giant corporations and small firms alike go about their business; how politicians and bureaucrats build (and rebuild) coalitions and generate public policies; how people work and get paid; how consumers decide what to buy, or whether they have the resources to participate in consumer society at all; and how people in general get to know and understand a rapidly changing world.

The competition state today: from raison d’État to raison du Monde

In a globalising world, states are undergoing a fundamental transformation in their underlying rationality, what Foucault has called ‘governmentality’. Raison d’État is being superseded by a transnationalising, globalising rationality that I call raison du Monde, at the core of which is the imperative of maintaining and promoting competitiveness in a world marketplace and multi-level political system – the Competition State. The state still has a major national yet paradoxical role to play – to expose the domestic to the transnational in order to ensure that citizens keep up with the multiple pressures and demands of that increasingly interpenetrated political, economic and social ecosystem. The foreign or external is thereby being internalised. In this process the state is becoming increasingly pluralistic, although, to be viable and effective groups must widen and deepen their transnational connections. There is thus an ongoing struggle between those groups that can capture the benefits of globalisation by transnationalising their activities, networks, strategies and tactics – the ‘winners’ – and those who bear the brunt of the downside of globalisation in terms of unemployment, reduced incomes, limited opportunities, political repression, civil strife, and so on – the ‘losers’. The Competition State is an evolving terrain of conflict between these groups and between raison d’État and the growing hegemony of raison du Monde.

The New Security Dilemma: divisibility, defection and disorder in the global era

Traditionally, the central problematic of the Westphalian states system has been how to counteract the so-called ‘security dilemma’, the tendency for states in a context of uncertainty to defect from cooperative arrangements if they perceive other states security preparations as threatening (misperception; arms racing). As the states system became more centralized and the number of major players declined in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the nondivisibility of benefits—the dangers of potential defection (world wars; nuclear annihilation)—grew while states incentives to defect increasingly necessitated control from the centre. The end of the Cold War, however, has reflected not a further centralization (nondivisibility) of benefits in the international system but (1) an increasing divisibility of benefits in a globalizing world economy and (2) the declining effectiveness of interstate mechanisms at preventing defection not only by states (‘defection from above’) but also by non-state, sub-state and trans-state actors (‘defection from below’). In this ‘new security dilemma’, the range of incentives grows for the latter to defect from the states system itself—unless coopted through the increased availability of divisible benefits. Furthermore, attempts to impose security from above (intervention) can create backlashes which interact with complex globalization processes to create new sources of uncertainty: overlapping and competing cross-border networks of power, shifting loyalties and identities, and new sources of endemic low-level conflict. In this context, emerging mechanisms of stabilization will be uneven, characterized by structural tensions and suboptimal performance.

Globalization and Other Stories: The Search for a New Paradigm for International Relations

Dimensions of globalization A fundamental transformation has begun in the way we perceive the world. What has often been presented as four centuries of normal science2 in politics and international relations the Westphalian or realist understanding which posits a priori that the key actors in international relations are states (and, more recently, nation-states) is being challenged across a sufficiently wide range of empirical findings that theorists are attempting systematically to look for an alternative paradigm. In recent years,

Neomedievalism, civil war and the new security dilemma: Globalisation as durable disorder

Globalisation is creating a growing range of complex challenges to the autonomous policy‐making capacity, authority and legitimacy of nation‐states, while a new security dilemma is challenging the ability of states and of the states system to provide both international and domestic security as a public good. These changes are leading to an unbundling of basic state functions and the growth of uneven, cross‐cutting and overlapping levels of governance and quasi‐governance, the fragmentation of cultural identities and the reconfiguation of social, economic and political spaces. At the same time, systemic pressures for the consolidation of new forms of transnational and international authority are insufficient, resulting in a governance gap. Exit is becoming an increasingly viable option for a growing range of actors and groups, leading to endemic civil and cross‐border wars. The result will be not mere chaos, however, but something resembling the ‘durable disorder’ of the Middle Ages.