New Follies on the State of Globalisation Debate?

ADAM DAVID MORTON*

Abstract. This review article explores several latest endeavours that theorise the state and globalisation. The aim is to reﬂect further on some of the wider follies that lie within the ambition of debates on the state and globalisation. By uniting common themes throughout the review – revolving around issues of state capacity in the post-colonial world, the relationship between globalisation and international relations, and the very meaning of globality – the review raises a series of questions for further research on the state and globalisation. Most signiﬁcantly, it seeks to question the future of critical theorising on the state and globalisation within international studies. It does so by arguing that there remain serious question-begging assumptions about capitalism that lie at the core of present general theories of the state and globalisation that, if overlooked, might also blunt the precepts of critical international theorising.

Ian Clark, Globalisation and Fragmentation: International Relations in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Ian Clark, Globalisation and International Relations Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Joel S. Migdal, State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Martin Shaw, Theory of the Global State: Globality as an Unﬁnished Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Introduction: the political economy of imperialism

In Petals of Blood by Ngu˜gı˜ Wa Thiong’o, Munira, a teacher from the remote Kenyan village of Ilmorog, turns to a radical lawyer in Nairobi for knowledge about his country’s history. However, in the political science books Munira receives, he comes to look in vain for anything on the political economy of colonialism or imperialism. All of the books focus on more distant themes concerning issues of social order, political control and the so-called passage from ‘traditionalism’ to ‘modernisation’.

* The ﬁnancial support of an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship is gratefully acknowledged (Ref.: T026271041). I would like to thank Andreas Bieler, Pinar Bilgin, Ian Clarke, Randall Germain, Stuart Shields, Taku Tamaki, Peter Wilkin and the anonymous referees for this Journal for comments on this article in draft, as well as members of the Research Colloquium within the Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, during which further feedback was received. 133 134 Adam David Morton

When returning the books to the lawyer, Munira complains about the lack of detail on the history and political struggles of the people of Kenya. In his reply, the lawyer recommends moving beyond the voices of educators and intellectuals – that are never disembodied or neutral – to question the individual and group interests behind them that tend to rationalise particular needs, whims and caprices.1 And so one can think in a similar way about the books under consideration in this review. In order to do so, the review proceeds by reading the books within the frame of reference of Justin Rosenberg’s The Follies of Globalisation Theory. His central organising idea in this volume is that much debate on globalisation revolves around an inversion of explanans and explanandum in the treatment of the changing character of the modern world. Hence in debates on globalisation there is confusion over the relation between explanandum (globalisation as the developing outcome of historical processes) and explanans (globalisation as itself explaining the changing character of the modern social world in interaction with the state).2 The risk of pursuing globalisation as an explanans is that no clear, definitive argument is permitted to emerge from the analysis, with arguments thereby resembling the intellectual equivalent of an architectural folly. Rather than a theory of globalisation, constructed out of analysis of phenomena generating the processes involved, such follies produce globalisation theory, or reifications rather than explanations. Due to the uneven dynamic and nature of the expansion of globalisation across the globe, no clear-cut distinction is implied by the contrast between globalisation as a principle of historical explanation and globalisation as a point of reference that itself explains the modern world. But to specifically treat globalisation in terms of the latter would endow it with a sense of absolute autonomy, eliding how the particular institutional forms of capital accumulation condition and circumscribe state and global power in a determinate historical conjuncture. The purpose of this review, then, is to reveal a perpetuation of ‘new follies’ on the state of globalisation debate. Whether considering treatments of the post-colonial state (Migdal), the relationship between globalisation and international relations (Clarke), or the very meaning of globality (Shaw), common fallacies lie within the ambition of the books under consideration in relation to their treatment of state capacity and globalisation. In contrast to these ‘new follies’, the argument will situate debate within an alternative frame of reference that draws analysis from wider historical processes of capitalist world development. By doing so, a series of questions for future critical theorising on the state and globalisation within international studies will be generated, thereby revealing serious question-begging assumptions about capitalism that lie at the core of present general theories of the state and globalisation and that, if overlooked, might at the same time also blunt the precepts of critical international theorising.

Globalisation, state capacity and regime type: strong? weak? failed?

A particularly apposite way of reﬂecting on Joel Migdal’s State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another is by beginning the

1 Ngu˜gı˜ Wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood (London: Heinemann, 1977), pp. 199–200. 2 Justin Rosenberg, The Follies of Globalisation Theory (London: Verso, 2000), p. 3. The globalisation debate 135 task of revealing the political and social interests governing such knowledge production. This book is a collection of essays that is intended to update and supple- ment Migdal’s influential signature publication Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World.3 The main inter- locutors Migdal engages with are inter alia David Baldwin, Stephen Krasner, Edward Shils, Daniel Lerner, Lucian Pye and, of course, Samuel Huntington. The last was Migdal’s dissertation advisor in the late 1960s and it is perhaps Huntington’s legacy – situated within a broader context of mainstream American social science enquiry – that pervades the argument of the book more than anyone else’s. As Migdal himself confesses, there are many shared notions throughout modernisation theory and development studies that ‘continue to sway, even today, interpretations of how change occurs’ throughout the post-colonial world so that ‘important connections to past assumptions do survive.’4 It is this legacy of political development theory that permeates the state-in-society approach developed by Migdal, which then shapes specific representations of the post-colonial world. For Migdal, states and societies are in a recursive relationship of mutual engagement, constitution and transformation. The state-in-society approach assumes a conflictual environment within which a mélange of social organisations (families, clans, multinational organisations, domestic businesses, tribes, political parties, patron-client dyads) struggle for personal survival and vie for power. The state is imbricated in this struggle and competes to maintain social control and create the conditions for domination. Hence ‘state leaders need a set of strong state agencies to be able to make their own strategy of survival acceptable to the peasants and labourers of the Third World’.5 An environment of conflict is therefore the overriding context within which the capabilities of states must be enhanced whilst interacting at the same time in a world social system consisting of other states, large corporations, international organisations and transnational actors. ‘The state’, it is argued, ‘is a field of power marked by the use and threat of violence and shaped by (1) the image of a coherent, controlling organisation in a territory, which is a representation of the people bounded by that territory, and (2) the actual practices of its multiple parts.’6 The state, then, is conceptually redeemed by disaggregating its various ‘parts’ and studying these parts in relation to the societal arena that can ‘sap the state’s strength and eventually topple it’.7 What we are left with is a supposedly more nuanced understanding of what constitutes ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ states by analysing the mutually constitutive relationship between state and society.8 There are several problems with this state theorising. Primarily, the state itself is regarded as a discrete institutional category, a reified thing, which still exists in a

3 Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 4 Joel S. Migdal, State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 196, 224. This point is more critically affirmed in Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 42 and Paul Cammack, Capitalism and Democracy in the Third World: The Doctrine for Political Development (London: Leicester University Press, 1997), pp. 119–27. 5 Migdal, State in Society,p.68. 6 Ibid., p. 15–16. 7 Ibid., p. 50. 8 Ibid., p. 148. 136 Adam David Morton relationship of exteriority to society. State and society are taken as two separate, albeit mutually interacting, entities which results in their juxtaposition and obscures their complex character. Most significantly, the inner connection between state (politics) and society (economics) is rent asunder by such state theorising. This means that the apparent separation of the economic and political cannot be problematised or, most crucially, related to an understanding of capitalism.9 Put most strongly, there is a failure to conceive the state as a form of capitalist social relations, as an aspect of the social relations of production, predicated upon the reproduction of antagonisms and exploitation. The transformation of social practices and identities involved in the changing nature of sovereignty, including class (-relevant) struggle, thus becomes dissolved within a liberal pluralist competitive arena. Finally, the above separations are compounded by the exterior way in which the state is seen to interact, on the one hand, with a ‘world arena’ of transnational corporations and, on the other hand, with a ‘societal arena’ over which the state seeks control.10 Little is said about the process of globalisation beyond the view that it has ‘deepened and strengthened practices that enhance the state’s role as much as it has generated practices that bypass the state.’11 The abiding weakness of the state-in-society approach is therefore the separation of the global as ‘external’ and the social as ‘internal’ and an inability to conceptualise asymmetries of power within the changing boundaries of the global political economy. As a result, the social explanation that emerges offers no clear, definitive argument on the relationship between the state and globalisation other than one of muddled mutual constitution. The issue of globalisation as explanans or explanandum in relation to state capacity in the post-colonial world is never logically spelt out. The question of how far globalisation is cause, concomitant or consequence of state capabilities is therefore left unanswered; a key oversight of the ‘state-in-society’ approach that lingers from earlier work.12 The above not only leads to the counterposing of state and society but also to vague assertions about ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ states. The latter are deemed ‘grossly inefficient states’ because of a failure to supply security, as evidenced in the existence of crime, or due to an inability to deliver on material bargains, for example to sections of the military or bureaucracy.13 Institutional decay or breakdown distinguish these ‘failed states’ and can include ‘flimsy reeds’ (Somalia, Liberia, Afghanistan), a ‘gaggle of new states’ (Croatia, Eritrea), or ‘state wannabees’ (Palestine).14 Yet perhaps what is required here is not so much a taxonomy of ‘failed states’ – akin to the practice of Victorian butterfly collectors assembling lists and typologies of different species15 – but a more nuanced appreciation of the determining influences on state

9 Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 31–6. 10 Migdal, State in Society, pp. 62, 262. 11 Ibid., p. 142. 12 Joel S. Migdal, Atul Kohli and Vivienne Shue (eds.) State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation in the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 324, n.3. For further contributions to the ‘state-in-society’ approach also see Atul Kohli (ed.), The State and Development in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 13 Migdal, State in Society, p. 157. 14 Ibid., p. 233. 15 Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (London: Zed Books, 2001), p. 13. The globalisation debate 137 capacity. In elaboration, one could question more seriously the prosecution of Cold War rivalries that may have militated against the collapse of friendly regimes – or ‘client states’ – to the degree that one of the consequences of eroded bipolar rivalry has been an increased prevalence of state ‘collapse’ – or ‘failed states’. Similarly, further attention needs to be drawn to the institutional processes that have impacted on and constructed conditions of state failure which are often embedded within wider practices throughout the global political economy that contribute to weaken- ing state capacity. Recognition of embedded state failure within the structures of the global political economy, such as IMF policies that have insisted on cutting back the state itself and effectively dismantling modes of authority, mechanisms of social regulation and the maintenance of social bonds within post-colonial states, is therefore essential. Finally, a deeper questioning is required of the propagation of contemporary assumptions about ‘failed states’ and whether they are borne from the fears of US foreign policy and the loss of bipolar reference points in the post-Cold War era.16 Expanding this latter point could, for example, require a wider analysis of representations of post-colonial states and the efficacy of basing analysis of authoritarian practices on notions of ‘sultanistic’ regimes – linked to personalistic, tyrannical, arbitrary rule – or ‘chaocracy’ defined as ‘the rule of chaos, the mob, mercenaries, militias’.17 The representation of regime types as ‘strong’, ‘failed’, ‘weak’ or ‘collapsed’, evident in Migdal’s State in Society, seriously undermines an appreciation of the determining influences on state capacity confronting the post-colonial world. Also, rather than condemning the role of ‘bandits’ and other suspected miscreants (the mob, mercenaries, or clan militia) for creating disorder and lawlessness within so- called ‘failed states’,18 a more meaningful method of inquiry would require a thorough historicisation and thus more nuanced understanding of such activity. Hence a need to shift the focus from pathologies of deviancy, or ‘aberration and breakdown’, to understanding the different strategies of accumulation, redistribution and political legitimacy that unfold in different zones of conflict.19 To cite Mark Duffield directly: there is a distinction between seeing conflict in terms of having causes that lead mechanically to forms of breakdown, as opposed to sites of innovation and reordering resulting in the creation of new types of legitimacy and authority.20 Drawing from the literature on the agency of ‘social banditry’ in various conditions of state formation might provide one opportunity to question the very cultural values and meanings attached to such ‘banditry’. For example, these issues are

16 Pinar Bilgin and Adam David Morton, ‘Historicising Representations of “Failed States”: Beyond the Cold War Annexation of the Social Sciences?’, Third World Quarterly, 23:1 (2002), pp. 55–80. 17 H. E. Chehabi and Juan J. Linz (eds.), Sultanistic Regimes (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) and Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000), p. 36. 18 Further illustrative works would include I. William Zartman (ed.), Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995) or Terence Lyons and Ahmed I. Samatar, Somalia: State Collapse, Multilateral Intervention and Strategies for Political Reconstruction (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995). 19 Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars, pp. 136, 140. 20 Ibid., p. 6. 138 Adam David Morton usefully sketched by Eric Hobsbawm when alluding to the similarities and differ- ences, within the historical conditions of capitalism, between old forms of ‘classical social banditry’ and the revival of new forms within the break-up of states towards the end of the twentieth century.21 It might therefore be more promising to explore different notions of ‘banditry’ linked to alternative modes of social organisation within the historical conditions of state formation during interim periods of state governance in post-colonial states. This may mean, for example, that bodies such as the Somali Reconciliation and Restoration Council (SSRC), set up on 1 April 2002 to establish a fourth Somali government in Baidoa, joining the breakaway regions of Puntland and Somaliland in rejecting the authority of the Transitional National Government in Mogadishu, is less an example of state ‘failure’, or the prevalence of bandits, and more a contestation over social and political organisation embedded within complex processes of historical state formation. Alternatively, factional struggles within and between sub-Saharan African states (Liberia, Rwanda, Congo and Uganda) might be better interpreted as the reduction of war to a mode of political production: a source of accumulation that enables the seizure of the resources of the economy based on strategies of ‘extraversion’ involving new claims to authority and redistribution.22 For example, in the late-1990s, the rebel Alliance for the Liberation of Congo- Zaire, led by Laurent Kabila, played off the diamond cartel De Beers against one of its rivals, America Mineral Fields, concerning diamond mining contracts as well as contracts to mine copper, cobalt and zinc in just this fashion.23 This arrangement is also somewhat mirrored by the intervention of the Ugandan Peoples’ Defence Force (UPDF) in the ensuing Congo war through which some officers of the UPDF managed to institutionalise their private interests and benefit from the predatory pursuit of capital accumulation whilst simultaneously underwriting the Ugandan state’s compliance with debt obligations to creditors within the global political economy. Long-term aims of state building, however, remain thwarted by the volatile balance sustained by these competing factional interests in the Ugandan state.24 Elsewhere, the conflagration in Côte d’Ivoire, since 19 September 2002, initially involving the launch of an attack by army rebels on Abidjan and two northern towns, Bouaké and Korhogo, in an attempt to seize state resources, reflects again more the conditions of extraversion – the predatory pursuit of wealth and power – that have to be related to the specific historical experiences, cultural, ethnic and political conditions of the region through which political power is disseminated and wealth redistributed, rather than seen as an affirmation of state ‘failure’. By extension, then, an examination of what historical and social circumstances give rise to both state break-ups and alternative modes of social organisation might

21 Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (London: Abacus, 2001 edition) and Eric Hobsbawm, Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz (London: Abacus, 1999 edition), pp. 256–67. 22 Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, trans. Mary Harper, Christopher Harrison and Elizabeth Harrison (London: Longman, 1993), pp. xiii–xiv, 74–5. 23 William Reno, ‘How Sovereignty Matters: International Markets and the Political Economy of Local Politics in Weak States’, in Thomas Callaghy, Ronald Kassimir and Robert Latham (eds.), Intervention and Transnationalism in Africa: Global-Local Networks of Powers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 204, 206. 24 William Reno, ‘Uganda’s Politics of War and Debt Relief’, Review of International Political Economy, 9:3 (2002), pp. 415–35. The globalisation debate 139 require consideration of varied conditions of ‘rebellion’ related to periods of social transformation and changes in capitalist social property relations; the coexistence of Western economic penetration and colonial domination; overlapping structures of kinship that are prone to challenges which weaken specific social relationships; or the impact of the changing nature of war on internal and international conflict.25 In essence a thorough appreciation of the historical sociology of processes of state formation is required that, rather than succumbing to crude assumptions of ‘failed states’ – ensconced in a discourse of leaner and meaner state efficiency – attempts to grasp the diverse historical trajectories that have shaped state-civil society relations within post-colonial states generating conditions of uneven development. Lastly, another pathway for analysis might be provided by drawing from work on ‘divided societies’ within conflict research that is cognisant of the nature of colonial relationships and the distinct historicity of ethnic conflicts within violently divided societies, as well as the point that all societies, of whatever hue, are replete with divisions.26 Finally, besides Migdal’s own dubious representation of post-colonial states as ‘failed states’, there is also very little engagement with more recent state theorising across the political science fields within Historical Sociology, International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE). Discussion commonly revolves around the rather outdated debates of the 1970s and 1980s on ‘bureaucratic- authoritarianism’ and ‘state corporatism’. There is thus little attempt to update Migdal’s earlier contentions in Strong Societies and Weak States in light of more recent discussion on the imported state;27 on warlord politics, the criminalisation of the state and disorder in Africa;28 or on state formation, elite power and subaltern resistance in the Americas.29 To summarise, there is a persistence within State in Society to counterpose ‘state’ and ‘society’ in the representation of post-colonial states that has clear links to a period of political development theory during the Cold War. Perhaps the quintes- sential formulation of such interaction was Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies.30 As Migdal admits, ‘no work surpassed Huntington’s in its influence on a generation of comparative political scientists studying the state.’31 The logic of

25 Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974 edn.), especially pp. ix–x, 1–12, 13–29 and Eric Hobsbawm, ‘War and Peace in the 20th Century’, London Review of Books (21 February 2002), pp. 16–18. 26 Marie Smyth and Gillian Robinson (eds.) Researching Violently Divided Societies: Ethical and Methodological Issues (London: Pluto Press, 2001). 27 Bertrand Badie, The Imported State: The Westernisation of the Political Order (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 28 William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998); Jean-François Bayart, Stephen Ellis and Béatrice Hibou, The Criminalisation of the State in Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 1999); or Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Oxford: James Currey, 1999). 29 See the representative works of Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (eds.), Everyday Forms of State Formation: The Negotiation of Modern Rule in Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994) and Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Rule in Mexico and Peru (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995). 30 Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1968). 31 Migdal, State in Society, p. 249. 140 Adam David Morton political development theory and theorists – also known as the ‘Huntingtonian legacy’32 – enamoured with maintaining quiescent subjects in situations of social order and political control still persists. The contribution of this book should therefore be situated within the refurbishment of Cold War mental structures and thus the institutional furtherance of an American mainstream social science disciplining of state theorising.

Theorising the state-globalisation-Cold War triptych

This mainstream social science disciplining has also largely shaped the rhetoric of the so-called ‘eclipse’ of the state within debates on globalisation. Therefore, whilst the logic of state failure has developed at one remove from arguments about globalisation, they both resonate with a dominant ideology based on prevalent visions of state capacity and statelessness.33 By contrast, some of the more contemporary theorising on globalisation and the state has attempted to recast the state- globalisation relationship by focusing on aspects of state transformation that lie at the heart of globalisation and the Cold War. In both Globalisation and Fragment- ation: International Relations in the Twentieth Century and Globalisation and International Relations Theory, Ian Clark undertakes this task by considering globalisation and the reconstitution of the state in mutually constitutive terms: the state is itself both shaped by and formative of the process of globalisation.34 Globalisation here denotes changes in both the intensity and extent of international interactions and is usually coupled with elements of fragmentation suggesting disintegration, separatism, or nationalism.35 The sources of globalisation are located within modes of Westernisation or the spread of modernity, distributions of international power, hegemonic relations, state resources and the determining inﬂuence of a global economic system. Modes of fragmentation are, alternatively, driven by resistance to the hegemony of Westernisation, ﬁssiparous tendencies created by the world capitalist system, and the splintering effects of ethno-nationalism, separatism and individual identities.36 The relationship between globalisation, state practices and the Cold War is then analysed through an historical framework to argue that globalisation was encour- aged by the bipolar nature of the Cold War; the universalism of US cultural values, morals, and ideological forms; as well as the unique hegemonic power of US leadership.37 The resultant view of globalisation is that of a complex multi-faceted process, which is subsequently presented within ‘a form of constructivist analysis’ to

32 Supriya Roy Chowdhury, ‘Neo-statism in Third World Studies: A Critique’, Third World Quarterly, 20:6 (1999), pp. 1089–1107. 33 Peter Evans, ‘The Eclipse of the State? Reflections on Stateness in an Era of Globalisation’, World Politics, 50:1 (1997), pp. 62–87. 34 Ian Clark, Globalisation and Fragmentation: International Relations in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) and Ian Clark, Globalisation and International Relations Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 35 Clark, Globalisation and Fragmentation, pp. 1–2. 36 Ibid., pp. 23–31. 37 Ibid., pp. 130–3. The globalisation debate 141 deny the dichotomy between globalisation as external cause and state transformation as internal effect across several functional state spheres related to sovereignty, the economy, security, citizenship, and democracy.38 ‘Globalisation’, Clark avers, ‘shapes the state and, is at the same time, what states make of it.’39 A ‘template’ of mutual constitution, or a ‘model of globalisation’, is thus said to proceed from this attempt to overcome constructed divisions between internal and external develop- ments across the spheres of sovereignty, the economy, security, citizenship, and democracy.40 This leads to the conclusion that a ‘brokerage’ role is played by the state, which entails both mediating and constituting the pressures of globalisation and fragmentation. As outlined earlier, the primary problem throughout this analysis is common to preceding ‘follies’ within globalisation theory. It revolves around confusion over the relation between explanandum (globalisation as the developing outcome of historical processes) and explanans (globalisation as itself explaining the changing character of the modern social world in interaction with the state).41 For example, the analysis of the relationship between globalisation, the state and the Cold War is extremely coy in emphasising multi-dimensional relations of complexity but is ultimately timorous in establishing which phenomena have been determinate. There is a tendency to constantly emphasise multifaceted reflexivity, reconstitution, transcription, or transformation in the analysis of the relationship of mutual constitution between globalisation and the realms of sovereignty, economy, security, citizenship, and democracy. Yet globalisation is ultimately treated as a benign ‘multi-dimensional process’ so that, in addition to confessions about ‘complex circularity’, the argument eschews any definitive answers on cause and effect.42 There are statements about how ‘the cold war happily generated and sustained processes of globalisation’ and how it is mediated through the activities of states.43 Yet the question ‘is there evidence that it was not the end of the cold war which engendered renewed globalisation and fragmentation but, instead, that it was a shift in the balance between these two trends that brought the cold war to an end?’, is never clearly answered.44 Did the Cold War nurture globalisation? Was the process of globalisation a creation of the Cold War itself? Or is globalisation autonomous of the Cold War and a reflection of more general processes of change in the global political economy? These pressing questions, despite the inherently difficult subject matter, are never directly and clearly answered within these books. As E. H. Carr forewarned, historians are

38 Ibid., pp. 20, 31, 197. This is part of a wider objective to overcome the ‘Great Divide’ between the international and domestic within IR theory, see Ian Clark, ‘Beyond the Great Divide: Globalisation and the Theory of International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 24:4 (1998), pp. 479–98. 39 Clark, Globalisation and Fragmentation, p. 55. The idiom of ‘globalisation makes of states, what states make of it’, is also repeated in John M. Hobson, The State and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 234 and John M. Hobson and M. Ramesh, ‘Globalisation Makes of States What States Make of It: Between Agency and Structure in the State/Globalisation Debate’, New Political Economy, 7:1 (2002), pp. 5–22. 40 Clark, Globalisation and International Relations Theory, pp. 69, 125, 172–3. 41 Rosenberg, The Follies of Globalisation Theory,p.3. 42 Clark, Globalisation and International Relations Theory, pp. 166, 167. 43 Clark, Globalisation and Fragmentation, pp. 149, 195. 44 Ibid., p. 176. 142 Adam David Morton always regarded for the causes they invoke, and dealing in a multiplicity of causes, setting out one after the other within a vague form of eclecticism, is little advance on invoking a single cause or passe-partout to explain events.45 Hence the importance of turning to Clark’s The Post-Cold War Order: The Spoils of Peace that should be seen as the latest addition to a trilogy of monographs all grappling with what he calls ‘the “causal” story of globalisation’.46 The importance of this latest book is the connection traced by Clark between globalisation and the post-Cold War peace settlement: a settlement that had both distributive aspects (German unification within NATO; the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact; the disintegration of the Soviet Union; NATO and European Union enlargement; and a diminished role for Russia in world affairs) as well as regulative aspects (norms attached to the global political economy; the dominance of Western-controlled multilateralism; the reformulation of collective security; and the continued assertion of a liberal rights order). Globalisation is regarded as a ‘key architectural feature’ of the post-Cold War order, straddling the distributive and regulative domains of the peace settlement, and thus one of the key aspects that brought the Cold War to an end.47 Perhaps with less circumspection than previously exhibited, it is also declared that globalisation represents a transformation of the nature of the state itself and that ‘globalisation rather than the cause of this shifting identity, is substantially an effect of this process of state transformation’.48 Moreover, globalisation is also regarded as an effect of the Cold War that was significantly present at the creation of the post- Cold War order and the reconfiguration of US hegemony.49 Yet, at the same time, globalisation is also claimed to have brought about the very same redistribution of power in the post-Cold War order and is again heralded as part of the causal story that brought the Cold War itself to an end.50 So, once more, it becomes very troublesome to discern the causal argument at the heart of the state-globalisation- cold war triptych. It is therefore very difficult to trace which phenomena are actually generating the processes leading to differentiated outcomes that are recognised as globalisation or where these processes are unfolding given the muddled relationship of mutual constitution between the state, globalisation and the Cold War. By extension, it is equally difficult to discern what precisely is at stake in this theory of change dependent upon the notion of mutual constitution. What are the political stakes or stances behind a form of social constructivism that is taciturn in high- lighting the actors or powerful interests involved in constructing globalising tendencies? Finally, despite the attempt to elaborate a theory of the state, there is very little offered on this subject beyond the problematic notion of state corporatism. This generally involves a system of interest representation between competing factions within which such factions are granted a stake vis à vis the state whilst, in turn,

45 E. H. Carr, What is History? (London: Penguin, 1990 edition), pp. 89–90. 46 Ian Clark, The Post-Cold War Order: The Spoils of Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 28. 47 Ibid., pp. 139, 143. 48 Ibid., p. 146 emphasis added. 49 Ibid., p. 149. 50 Ibid., pp. 161, 163. The globalisation debate 143 limitations are imposed on such demands.51 Yet, rather than conceptually contribut- ing to a theory of the state, there is a common tendency within state corporatist arguments to swing toward state-privileging by overlooking the roots the state has apropos civil society. For example, state corporatist regimes have been ‘characterised by strong and relatively autonomous governmental structures that seek to impose on the society a system of interest representation.’52 Hence the state is conceived of, and defined as, independent of and standing above, civil society with the latter treated as a constraining influence on the former. This can then usher in misleading charac- terisations of ‘strong’ states separate from ‘weak’ societies or ‘strong’ societies making demands on a ‘weak’ state, based on empirically observable state capacity, as evidenced earlier. In short, it is disconcerting to note that there is a neglect of these problems linked to theories on state corporatism and thus a wider lack of engagement with theorising on the state. Attention to the latter might have necessitated addressing debates on the state as a site of strategic selectivity between various class (-relevant) fractions within global relations that also affirms a relational approach to transcending agents and structures.53 Then Clark’s discussion of the state and globalisation might well have needed to address more directly the historically specific conditions of class struggle and class (-relevant) identities, which would seem pertinent to any dissection of globalisation and fragmentation in the course of the twentieth-century. As Andrew Linklater points out, ‘the tension between globalisation and fragmentation which is at the heart of much contemporary thinking about international relations was crucial in the thinking of Marx and Engels and it has remained central to later Marxist reflections on nationalism, imperialism and the stratified capitalist world-system’.54 More piercing social explanation along such lines is surely necessary to ascertain what strategies might actually be at stake in the historical process of globalisation and how this constitutes and transforms the social modalities of power relations, viz. class struggle, mediated through the state.

Towards a global state form?

In some ways this is the task attempted by Martin Shaw in Theory of the Global State: Globality as an Unﬁnished Revolution, which is an ambitious effort to reconstitute some of the central concepts of social science in global terms through an exploration of what the state means in the context of global transformation.55 Whereas Eric

51 Philippe C. Schmitter, ‘Still the Century of Corporatism?’, in Philippe C. Schmitter and Gerhard Lehmbruch (eds.), Trends Towards Corporatist Intermediation (London: Sage, 1979). 52 James M. Malloy, ‘Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America: The Modal Pattern’, in James M. Malloy (ed.), Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), p. 4. 53 Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in Its Place (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990) and, more recently, Bob Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). 54 Andrew Linklater, ‘Marxism’, in Scott Burchill and Andrew Linklater et al. (eds.), Theories of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1996 edition), p. 120. 55 Martin Shaw, Theory of the Global State: Globality as an Unﬁnished Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 173. 144 Adam David Morton

Hobsbawm sees practical merit in recognising history through stamp collecting – by bringing alive changes in war, revolution, or inflation through the changing images on postage stamps56 – Shaw rejects the vocation of ‘social science as stamp collecting’. This is understood as the dominance of the comparative method within the social sciences and the study of discrete states without analysing social relations between them.57 Rather, Shaw’s theorisation embarks on an understanding of globality as a process of becoming that has been emerging out of distinctively global state relations and global state forms. The former are ‘the social relations of state power, through which society constitutes state institutions and state forms constitute the framework of society’ and the latter are ‘the structures of state institutions themselves, and the relations between institutions within and across distinct states’.58 The modern social order is characterised as one of nationality-internationality within which previous principles of social thought have been embedded. This means that state relations have been shaped by the contradictions of national-international relations but since the post-World War II period these structures have become more globalised. Hence the ‘need to evaluate the Cold War as a particular stage in the crisis of the national-international world, and the transition to a global world.’59 The Cold War is described as a conflict between competing bloc-states that has been gradually transformed into an incipient global state-system. This rather ‘tectonic’ presentation of state development during the Cold War is subsequently altered as global layers of state power have arisen as a result of changing social relations amongst which interstate warfare has been paramount. Emergent from this process is the ‘global-Western state’ that functions as a centre of military state power with linkages to economic, cultural as well as political forms. It is a conglomeration of global-Western state power that encompasses the juridically defined states of North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australasia; non- NATO states such as Finland, Ireland and Switzerland; as well as many non- Western states in central and eastern Europe, Latin America, east Asia and Africa that have relations of integration and dependence with the West. Beyond this remit are ‘quasi-imperial nation-states’ across Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East – that have the capability to launch conventional interstate wars whilst being, at the same time, subject to ‘internal’ conflict – and new ‘proto-’ or ‘quasi-states’ that emerge out of the fracturing of statehood or wars of state collapse.60 In the aftermath of the Cold War it is through the crucible of politico-military conflict that the relationship between changes in the global-Western state and forms of state power beyond this sphere is being forged. The contradiction at the centre of this process of state globality is the compulsion of democratic movements to reclaim local state structures through global networks, which is the ‘unfinished revolution’. A point well made within this reconceptualisation of global state forms is the failure of much critical thinking in international studies to include a theory of the

56 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 272 and Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Allen Lane, 2002), p. 9. 57 Shaw, Theory of the Global State, pp. 68–70. 58 Ibid., pp. 16–17. 59 Ibid., p. 116. 60 Ibid., pp. 199–201, 208–10, 211–13. The globalisation debate 145 state within conditions of globalisation. The ‘bowdlerised Marxism’ of Robert Cox, amongst others, receives opprobrium for no real attention to the structural changes in state power itself and for no ‘explicit reconsideration of the nature of states and state forms’ in this process or ‘any overall evaluation of the role of military power in the state’.61 Yet it is questionable whether the alternative theory surrounding the global-Western state succeeds in achieving a theory of state transformation in conditions of globality either. Principally, there is no account of the political economy of globalisation and the role of the state within such processes. This might have emerged from a confrontation with Marxist theories of the state but, despite declaring that the ascription of class meaning to state actions is intrinsically problematic and that Marxist theories of the state have been neglected, these issues are left undeveloped and/or are startlingly sidestepped.62 There is no appreciation of the long-running debates on theorising state-forms in relation to the social relations of production in their specific historical development, that affords insight into a broad range of class (-relevant) social forces linked to contemporary processes of capitalist development.63 Also, assertions such as ‘states are paradoxically both obstacles to global transformations and central means through which change comes about’,64 might need to be problematised more, again in light of the failure to distinguish between explanans and explanandum. Finally, despite the conviction to historically examine a theory of the state within conditions of globality there seems to be a remarkable lack of consideration given to the specific predicament of post-colonial state formation. Too much credence is acceded to the dubious notions of ‘rogue states’, on the one hand, and state breakdown afflicting ‘failed’ or ‘quasi-states’, on the other hand, without due regard for the distinct historicity, political trajectory and social foundation of post-colonial state formation. There are profound problems in compliantly accepting Hedley Bull and Adam Watson’s original definition of post-colonial ‘pseudo-’ or ‘quasi-states’ as those that ‘are not states in the strict sense, but only by courtesy’.65 Normalised modes of subjectivity in relation to state identity, or stateness, are thereby perpetu- ated and unquestioningly accepted. The analysis is therefore complicit with the work of Migdal in its indulging in the language of ‘weak’, ‘failed’ or ‘quasi-states’ and their degeneration into conditions of ‘warlordism’ and ‘gangsterism’.66 Such characteris- ations commonly share barely revised Weberian understandings of statehood that are universalised throughout the divergent conditions of the post-colonial world.67 Perhaps, then, these images expose a deep-seated attachment to Westphalian notions of

61 Ibid., pp. 84–90. 62 Ibid., pp. 118, 187. 63 See Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton, ‘Globalisation, the State and Class Struggle: A “Critical Economy” Engagement with Open Marxism’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 5:4 (2003). 64 Shaw, Theory of the Global State, p. 232, original emphasis. 65 Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (eds.) The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 430. The notion has been further propagated, among others, by Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 66 Martin Shaw, ‘The State of Globalisation: Towards a Theory of State Transformation’, in Neil Brenner, Bob Jessop, Martin Jones, and Gordon MacLeod (eds.), State/Space: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 118–19, 129. 67 Migdal, State in Society, pp. 15–16 and Shaw, Theory of the Global State, pp. 43–7. 146 Adam David Morton statehood not attuned to the institutions of post-colonial states that shape domestic social relations and their complex instantiation in global power relations.68 Here, again, a focus on strategies of extraversion involving different logics of productivity and accumulation, patterns of wealth creation, and predatory logics of power linked to state and transboundary formations could be constructive.69

Some conclusions: understanding capitalism and globalisation

It is argued that the above theories on the state and globalisation succumb to a series of follies based on presenting globalisation in descriptive terms, so that at worst globalisation itself comes to explain the changing nature of the modern world – rather than being understood as the developing outcome of historical processes – or at best becomes trapped within the electicism, circularity and indeterminacy of mutual constitution. Additionally these ‘new follies’ on the state and globalisation submit further problematic analysis in terms of their appreciation of state capacity in the post-colonial world. One could argue that the following proposition might be the present author’s own folly, but what seems to be at issue across the books under review is the understanding of the connections between capitalism and processes of state formation and the way in which capital relies on the state as a conduit for the imperatives of accumulation and exploitation in the present era of globalisation. This review article has tried to demonstrate that there is still a need to open up additional critical avenues of inquiry about the relationship between state and capital in times of globalisation. This endeavour could, perhaps, proceed by further revealing the ‘neo-Smithian’ disposition underpinning wider approaches within international studies (including that of a critical theoretical mien) meaning reliance on a deﬁnition of capitalism that implicitly derives from the doctrines of Adam Smith.70 This would entail raising questions about whether understandings of capitalism are based on the functional expansion and development of market relations – or globalisation as a movement in both the intensity and extent of international interactions71 – rather than exploitative social property relations and the accumulation of capital. For example, to broaden for a moment the ambit of this review, one could question whether alter- natives to the above works, such as a ‘world-economy’ approach grounded within the work of Fernand Braudel, succumb to a view of capitalism that gives primacy to market exchange relations rather than production relations,72 thereby disregarding

68 Siba N. Grovogui, ‘Regimes of Sovereignty: International Morality and the African Condition’, European Journal of International Relations, 8:3 (2002), pp. 315–38. 69 Jean-François Bayart, ‘Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion’, African Affairs, 99:396 (2000), pp. 217–67 and Thomas Callaghy, Ronald Kassimir and Robert Latham (eds.), Intervention and Transnationalism in Africa: Global-Local Networks of Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 70 Robert Brenner, ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review, 104: 1 (1977), pp. 25–92. 71 Clark, Globalisation and Fragmentation,p.1. 72 Randall D. Germain, The International Organisation of Credit: States and Global Finance in the World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 13–16. The globalisation debate 147 the processes by which the appropriation of surplus value and capital accumulation advance. ‘Braudel’, after all, ‘viewed capitalism in a way that . . . could only be termed seeing it “upside down”’.73 Hence Eric Hobsbawm’s assertion that such a view of history ends up privileging permanent structures rather than appreciating conditions of historical social change.74 Even Braudel himself confesses that his aim was to take ‘a new, and somewhat more peaceful route [when analysing civilisation patterns from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries], to avoid and by-pass the passionate disputes which the explosive word capitalism always arouses.’75 Yet it is a moot point whether such disputes can be easily circumvented. To further elaborate, one needs to question whether there is a view of capitalist development within and beyond the works under review here that relies too heavily on assumptions about the quantitative expansion of the market and the growth of commercial activity – known as a ‘commercialisation model’ – that fails to explain imperatives specific to capitalism linked to social property relations and specific modes of exploitation.76 Theories of social change could therefore be scrutinised and whether the exploitative character of social property relations (class struggle) is continually overlooked within International Relations. This might then even lead to the very demystification and reconceptualisation of some of the founding principles of the discipline itself, based on the myth of Westphalia.77 Taking this approach might then assist in recognising the internal link between capitalism and modern sovereignty, meaning that ‘the structural specificity of state sovereignty lies in its “abstraction” from civil society – an abstraction which is constitutive of the private sphere of the market, and hence inseparable from capitalist relations of production’.78 It is therefore particularly troubling that globalisation theory within international studies is generally based on orthodox assumptions about political economy, linked to what can be termed ‘question-begging explanations of capitalism’.79 Perhaps, then, finally, we need to reconsider some of the disconcerting practices exposed by Ngu˜gı˜ Wa Thiong’o in Petals of Blood, raised at the very beginning of this review article. Namely, those practices related to the historical and contemporary manifest- ation of the political economy of imperialism deriving from variations in social property relations – that are the basis for changes in state forms and world order configurations of geopolitical power – rather than relying on arguments that tend to fall into mainstream traps when analysing the state and globalisation.

73 Immanuel Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1991), p. 207. 74 Eric Hobsbawm, The New Century, conversations with Antonio Polito, trans. Allan Cameron (London: Abacus, 2000), p. 5. 75 Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, trans. Siân Reynolds (London: Fontana Press, 1985), p. 25, original emphasis. 76 Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 11–21. The theme of a ‘bourgeois paradigm’, based on the problems that lie behind assumptions about capitalism itself, was ﬁrst raised in Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 1–19, 163. 77 Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003). 78 Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 123–4. 79 Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism,p.70. 148 Adam David Morton