The State and Globalisation

1
The State and Globalisation
2
The Keynesian Welfare State

• Provision of welfare and pursuit of goals such as
  full employment and public health
• Regulation of business, and fine tuning of
  business cycles to promote growth, nurture
  strategic industries and national champions
• Integration of labour movements into corporatist
  processes to promote stability and labour
  discipline
• Imposition of controls on speculative
  international movements of capital

3
The Crisis of the Keynesian Welfare State

• The crisis of Fordism itself
• Heightening of KWS contradictions (Offe)
• 1) KWS was expected to protect society from
  the market, and provide conditions for capitalist
  profit.
• 2) Fiscal crisis of the state. Viability of
  capitalist growth required ever larger
  investments. Continuing rise in the cost of
  social decommodification.
• The response of political and economic elites was
  the neoliberal project.

4
Hyperglobalism and the Retreat of the State

• The state is no longer an important political
  entity, and is powerless to shape global
  processes.
• Capital can exit at low cost, and can play states
  off against each other.
• States must compete for FDI, they are locked in a
  Darwinian survival of the fittest. Need for ever
  greater deregulation.

5
Empirical Evidence

• Advanced industrial states are still welfare
  states. The World Bank recognises the role of
  social welfare in ensuring stability. The
  emergence of a Schumpetarian workfare state?
• Globalisation of production an exaggeration.
  Thus, states are not powerless.
• Global financial markets are not beyond
  regulation. Business also requires stability.

6
State vs. Globalisation?

• Does globalisation exist outside of the state?
• This suggests an ontological distinction between
  politics and markets. Or in Gilpins framework,
  an antagonistic relationship between states and
  markets.
• The political construction of helplessness.

7
The Competition State (Cerny)

• 1) a shift from macroeconomic to microeconomic
  interventionism as reflected in both deregulation
  and industrial policy
• 2) a shift in the focus of interventionism from
  development and maintenance of strategic
  industries and self-sufficiency to flexible
  responses to competitive conditions
• 3) an emphasis on the control of inflation and
  general neoliberal monetarism
• 4) a shift in politics away from general
  maximisation of welfare to promotion of
  enterprise, innovation and profitability in
  public and private sectors

8
Convergence? Different forms of the Post-Fordist
state (Jessop)

• The Neoliberal model for the public sector,
  privatisation, liberalisation, and the imposition
  of commercial criteria. For the private sector,
  deregulation. Replacement of social partnership
  with managerial prerogatives.
• Neocorporatism negotiated concerted approach to
  economic strategies, balancing competition and
  cooperation.
• Neo-statism market conforming but
  state-sponsored approach to restructuring. Active
  industrial policy in which state organises new
  technologies, technological transfer, innovation
  systems, infrastructure, etc.

9
The Myth of the Powerless State (Weiss)

• The example Japan (again) globalisation and the
  changing nature of Japanese industrial strategy.
• Some forms of industrial policy have seen a
  decline, e.g. capital, foreign exchange and
  licensing controls.
• However, MITI has created new tools more suited
  to the new environment, such as supporting
  self-governing cartels, promoting technological
  innovation, and internationalisation of corporate
  activity.
• The internationalisation/regionalisation of the
  Japanese economy was a deliberate strategy of the
  state.