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New Follies on the State of Globalisation Debate?

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New Follies on the State of Globalisation Debate? Review of International Studies (2004), 30, 133–147 Copyright © British International Studies Association DOI: 10.1017/S0260210504005868 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 connec- tions 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 engage- ment, 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:
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