PO942 Theories and Issues in International Political Economy

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PO942Theories and Issues in International
Political Economy

• Week 15
• Issue 4 Debating the role of the state in IPE

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TERRORISM AND IDENTITY POLITICS IN BRITAIN
Professor Stuart Croft PaIS,
University of Warwick 4.30 pm Wed 7 February
2007 Room S0.18
Forthcoming Events
Wednesday 14 February (week 6) 4.00-5.00 p.m.
S0.18 Professor Nicola Phillips, University of
Manchester Migration and the new political
economy of inequality in the United States
Lord Prof. Anthony Giddens will be speaking in
PAIS  on Tues 20th Feb, in the Physics Lecture
Theatre between 4.00 - 6.00. The title of the
talk is 'Over to you Mr Brown How Labour Can
Win Again'
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• This weeks objectives
• consider the implications of the trends
  discussed in the past three sessions for the
  state
• (re-)inspect the state versus markets issue
  that seems to lie at the heart of IPE
• expose to critical scrutiny some of the more
  important claims made about globalisation
• consider whether IPE generally has underplayed
  the continuing significance of the state

Trade Production Finance
Power Autonomy Authority Capacity Organisation Str
ategy
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Is the state in retreat?
What does it mean to say that the state is in
retreat under conditions of globalisation?
Spend a few minutes writing down some basic
ideas. This will allow us to develop a general
framework for further discussion as the seminar
progresses.
global integration acts as a force that
constrains states and reshapes institutions,
severely restricting the room for manoeuvre,
standardising domestic institutions and
dispersing decision-making authority downwards,
upwards and sideways to other power actors. In
the new global drama of multilayered governance,
states are metamorphosing not into minor figures,
but into supporting players in a cast led by ever
new protagonists. This is the influential
constraints view of state transformation. Linda
Weiss The state augmenting effects of
globalisation, New Political Economy 10(3), 205,
p. 345.
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• Changing character of trade from
• exchanges between domestic productive systems to
• flows of goods within globally organised private
  production networks
• Exposure to global capital markets and capital
  mobility (dictatorship of international
  financial markets Fred Block)
• Exit power of TNCs/FDI flows
• Participation in rule bound multilateral
  institutions (e.g. WTO)
• Membership of supranational regional
  organisations (e.g. EU)

• Loss of public (i.e. state) control
• Enforced policy convergence
• some policies prohibited
• others implausible
• Openness brings aggregate benefits, but forces
  states into competition with one another
• reduced accountability to domestic citizens
• increased accountability to external economic
  agents

Rise of the competition state
Welfare cutbacks, decline of industrial
strategic trade policy
Foster conditions for FDI, competitive taxation
rates, de-regulation
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Interrogating the retreat thesis
1. Does globalisation provide a compelling set
of imperatives to which states must respond. If
so, what are they? If not, then why is there so
much debate about the effects of globalisation
upon states?
2. How does the evidence stack up in favour of
the retreat thesis? How, if at all, would you
qualify the widespread claims that are made about
the retreat of the state under globalisation?
3. Do the facts that states (a) subscribe to the
rules set by global institutions (the WTO, IMF
etc) and (b) are prone to join regional
organisations (like the EU) indicate a loss or a
recapture of their autonomy and policy capacities?
In each case, try to integrate both theoretical
and empirical arguments into your analysis.