Thomas J. Biersteker

State sovereignty as social construct: The social construction of state sovereignty

During the last several years, there has been a virtual explosion of scholarly interest in sovereignty. This interest transcends all of the major divisions within the study of international relations, and it engages scholars across the globe. There has been a comparable increase in the level of attention given to sovereignty within the popular media. Much of this concern with sovereignty can be explained at least in part by the end of the Cold War and the possibilities of a “New World Order,” which have raised questions about many old assumptions, including those made about state sovereignty. Moreover, the dramatic fragmentation and dismemberment of major states such as Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, along with the potential fragmentation of many others, have led to renewed questions about the location of sovereignty – whether it lies in a population, or within a contiguous territorial space – and about the criteria for recognition as a sovereign state. As questions begin to be raised about the criteria for recognizing the modern state, can challenges to the traditional idea of sovereignty be far behind? Traditionally, sovereignty has been characterized as a basic rule of coexistence within the states system, a concept that transcends both ideological differences and the rise and fall of major powers, and it is frequently invoked as an institution that must be both protected and defended.

Reducing the Role of the State in the Economy: A Conceptual Exploration of IMF and World Bank Prescriptions

A policy and scholarly consensus is emerging on reducing the role of the state in the economy, but with relatively little consideration of its meaning and potential consequences. Six different forms of state economic intervention are distinguished in this article (influence, regulation, mediation, distribution, production, and planning) and combined to characterize different national economic regimes. IMF and World Bank recommendations for policy reform are then identified, and the consequences of those recommendations are assessed for different forms of economic intervention. On balance, stabilization and structural adjustment programs would appear to facilitate a major continuation of some forms of intervention (influence and mediation), redirect others (regulation, mediation, and distribution), and reduce those associated with state production and planning. These differential effects of the programs have far-reaching political implications, can be internally inconsistent, and are not necessarily conducive to development. In nearly every developing country in the world today, short-term stabilization measures, structural adjustment programs, liberalization efforts, and economic reforms are being considered, attempted, or adopted. Although there is tremendous variation in the details of the programs being initiated, nearly all entail a reduced role for the state in the economy (especially in the area of expenditures and ownership of productive enterprises) and greater reliance on market mechanisms (especially in the areas of exchange rate adjustment, trade liberalization, and the use of subsidies). These tendencies are a far cry from the extensive state interventionism, economic nationalism, and state socialist experimentation found in much of the developing world during the 1960s and 1970s. These policy reforms have been accompanied and strongly encouraged by the official reports, studies, and declarations of the major international financial organizations (most notably the World Bank and the IMF), a number of private transna

Multinationals, the State and Control of the Nigerian Economy

Thomas Biersteker evaluates the sources of Third World economic nationalism and assesses the significance of the changes that have taken place between North and South since the early 1970s. Neo-classical and neo-Marxist approaches to international and comparative political economy are explored to develop methods and select criteria for the assessment of major change.Originally published in 1987.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

“Regulation for the rest of us?” Global civil society and the privatization of transnational regulation

Introduction The protests that took place in Seattle during the November 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and which have occurred periodically since then, illustrate a growing public demand for greater transparency, representation, and regulation under conditions of globalization. While much rhetoric was expended condemning the WTO for its intrusions on national sovereignty, the alternatives proposed by the groups marching in the streets were less clear. Inasmuch as a return to the prosperity and political conditions of the 1960s is not on the cards, and a return to the anarchic and “beggar-thy-neighbor” circumstances of the 1930s is manifestly undesirable, what constitutes a politically viable response to the negative impacts of globalization? Or, to put the question another way, how can “regulation for the rest of us” be achieved? We argue here that, in the interests of economic competitiveness and growth, nation-states have yielded a substantial amount of their domestic regulatory authority to transnational regimes and organizations, such as the WTO, the International Monetary Fund, and various other international regimes and institutions. While globalization is much discussed in terms of the mobility of capital and production, and much feared and opposed for its disruptive impacts on labor and social organization more generally, the question of regulation, per se, has not been much considered. Nonetheless, a critical set of problems arising from contemporary globalization are the social, economic and environmental externalities that are not being addressed within the existing international system of regulatory conventions and regimes.

Beyond the published discipline: : Toward a critical pedagogy of international studies

The growing sociology of International Relations literature systematically investigates the discipline’s organization and inner structuring. Making the academic field cognizant of its own institutional and intellectual configurations, the literature today empowers scholars to engage critically with the analytical, geocultural, and political lenses through which International Relations explains world politics. This contribution notwithstanding, there is a continuing focus in the literature on leading (flagship) publications as indicators of intellectual proclivities, and on International Relations scholars as their only relevant audiences. This article challenges this focus and expands the sociology of International Relations literature’s scope of analysis. Making the case for an inquiry into classroom socialization practices, it maps the paradigmatic, geocultural, gendered, and historical perspectives taught to students in the case of 23 American and European International Relations graduate programs. Pointing to differences between the instructed and the published discipline, the article shows how the instructed discipline is governed and constrained by different kinds of intellectual parochialisms. Problematizing the educative functions of these, it advocates a more self-reflexive understanding of International Relations teaching (a domain in which scholars have greater agency) and the enactment of a critical pedagogy of international studies.

The Problems of Simultaneous Transitions

Leslie Elliott Arm~]o is assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University. Her research interests include the politics of national economic policy making in Latin America and Asia. Thomas J. Biersteker is Henry R. Luce Professor and director of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and the editor of a forthcoming study on the political economy of structural adjustment in Nigeria. Abraham F. Lowenthal is professor of international relations and director of the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California. Until 1992, he was founding director of the InterAmerican Dialogue in Washington, D.C. Almost everywhere, command economies and overtly authoritarian politics are in retreat. Constitutional democracy and market capitalism now hold sway, at least as ideals, even in places where these concepts were anathema less than a decade ago. This is as true for Central and Eastern Europe as it is for Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and much of East Asia. Although the reform process has taken different paths in different countries--some countries have initiated economic reform prior to democratization while others have begun with political reform--a growing number of countries have introduced and are currently sustaining both democratization and market-oriented economic reform. These twin tendencies are widely assumed by policy makers in Washington and other capitals to be not only positive, but also linked. Indeed, the primary debate now taking place within governments and many international organizations centers not around whether democratization and market-oriented reforms are desirable, nor around whether they are mutually reinforcing, but rather around how they can be supported most effectively by external actors, and how best to secure and target the necessary resources. Although some scholars----market libertarians and modernization theorists--have also argued that democratization and economic

The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance: Private authority as global governance

Private locations of authority have begun to influence a growing number of issues in our contemporary world. Authoritative private actors are not only important players in the international political economy; they are increasingly beginning to play a critical role in the governance of other important spheres of social and political life. They are engaged in the establishment of standards, the provision of social welfare, the enforcement of contracts, and the maintenance of security. The essays in this volume illustrate well the extent of the phenomenon, its complex character, the controversies surrounding its definition, and some of its implications. While the very meanings of the “private,” of “authority,” and of “private authority” themselves remain controversial, we think we have made some important progress in our understanding of these phenomena. Rather than define the realm of the private in an abstract, theoretical sense, most of the contributors to this volume define the private sector in terms of what it is not. For Claire Cutler, private actors are increasingly engaged in authoritative decision-making that was previously the prerogative of sovereign states, while for Saskia Sassen the domain of the private is taking over functions once enclosed in national legal frameworks. Ronnie Lipschutz and Cathleen Fogel differentiate the private sector from the public, while Mark Juergensmeyer locates it in opposition to the government. Thus, whether it is differentiated from the sovereign state, the government, the national legal framework, or the public sector, the private sector is typically defined in terms of some residual of the national state.

Critical Reflections on Post-Positivism in International Relations

Yosef Lapid clarifies the nature of recent critical reflection on international theory and contributes to opening the discourse on the subject. However, he understates the diversity, the historicism, and the critical nature of post-positivist inquiry and exaggerates the extent to which pluralism, perspectivism and relativism have taken root in international relations. He is also insufficiently critical of post-positivism and does not say enough about the problem of criteria for evaluating alternative explanations. His article is essentially a preface to a larger project, one yet to be undertaken, a project which will need more concrete, self-reflexive, nuanced research that takes post-positivist criticisms seriously and constructs plausible alternative explanations of important subjects.

Eroding Boundaries, Contested Terrain

International studies is a contested domain, making the attainment of a genuinely global discipline extremely difficult. While there has been a significant broadening of the field, the American study of international relations, like that elsewhere, remains highly parochial: geographically, linguistically, methodologically, and politically. One way to overcome provincialism is to examine international relations scholarship from other parts of the world and to draw on the insights of more than one discipline. Difference lies at the heart of international studies, and we must favor approaches that entail empathetic understanding and can accommodate seemingly incompatible differences.

Self-reliance in theory and practice in Tanzanian trade relations

Self-reliance is a logical prescription of Latin American dependency writers and a great many other contemporary critics of the international economic and political order. It is based on assumptions and values shared by contemporary critics, employs the same definitions of central concepts, and most important, identifies specific policies designed to eliminate the bases of dependence and exploitation that critics hold responsible for a distortion of the development process throughout much of the Third World. Despite the significance of self-reliance for dependency and other critical writers, it is rarely defined and even less frequently examined systematically. As a result, self-reliance has too often been dismissed as merely part of the ideological jargon that necessarily accompanies discussions of the new international economic order.