Social Policy, State, and ‘Society’

Bob Jessop

This contribution explores the relations among social policy, the state and ‘society’ in the

light of recent changes in the social formation. It builds on my earlier work on welfare

state restructuring but updates it in four ways. First, it provides stronger foundations in

the nature of capitalism, looking beyond a general historical materialist critique of the

capitalist mode of production to consider specific configurations of capitalist social

formations and their insertion into the world market. Second, it extends the analysis

beyond the economies of Atlantic Fordism and their crises to include export-oriented

economies and developmental states and the differential implications for welfare

regimes of the development of the knowledge-based economy and finance-dominated

accumulation as potential bases of post-Fordist accumulation. Third, especially in

relation to finance-dominated accumulation, it considers the problematic status of the

welfare state and/or social policy in social formations that have undergone a neoliberal

regime shift. And, fourth, it comments on the so-called global financial crisis and its

implications for the future of the welfare state in conditions of austerity. The discussion

ends with some general conclusions.

OFFE’S PARADOX

Writing in the 1980s, when the crisis of the Keynesian national welfare state was first

placed on the political as well as theoretical agenda, Claus Offe, the renowned German

critical theorist and sociologist, identified a paradox in the relation between capitalism

and the welfare state. He wrote that ‘while capitalism cannot coexist with, neither can it

exist without, the welfare state’ (Offe 1984: 153, italics in original). Some might dismiss

this as a mere rhetorical flourish without theoretical meaning or empirical application. In

fact, Offe grounded his argument in the nature of capitalism; and he also noted some of

its practical implications. Indeed, his analysis is generally compelling and repays careful

reading. Indeed, his identification of a paradox was not just a perceptive remark by a

social scientist looking at the welfare state as a disinterested observer but a paradox

directly experienced and expressed by capitalist interests, political parties, reformist

trade unions, think tanks, and official bodies – often in the same documents. For

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example, during the closing stages of the crisis of Atlantic Fordism, the Commission of

the European Union argued that:: '[t]he high level of non-wage labour costs [in the

European Union is prejudicial to employment, exerting a dissuasive influence‘

(Commission of the European Union, 1994, 154). Yet the same document had earlier

noted: ‘[e]conomic and social policy are inextricably linked: they are two sides of the

same coin … A new sort of welfare state is required to match an investment-led

industrial strategy‘ (op. cit.: 12).

This theme was especially strongly articulated in the arguments for a ‘Third Way’, with

its diagnoses of the rigidities of big government, big business, and big labour and their

impact of economic performance and social well-being and its associated calls for more

decentralized, more flexible, and more resilient economic and political arrangements.

This was reflected in network governance, active labour market policies, and a social

investment state (classically, Giddens 1998). The Third Way is most significant for

crises in social democratic regimes and involved a search for a via media. between

(1) the earlier forms of social democracy (national plans, tripartite corporatism,

Keynesian welfarism), to which, it is alleged, there can be no return; and (2) the

emerging economic, political, and social strategy of a newly resurgent capitalist

class, especially in its currently hegemonic neo-liberal form. The search for this

‘Third Way’ is necessarily contested and experimental and occurs in specific national

contexts as well as on a far broader transnational political and intellectual scene.

More recently, in 2011, well-after a shift to Third Way had occurred to provide flanking

and supporting mechanisms to neo-liberalism, the OECD remarked in a document on

Growth, Competitiveness, Employment that: ‘a deep and prolonged fiscal consolidation

process is needed to stabilise and then reduce debt levels to pre-crisis levels. In many

countries, pension systems are unsustainable and must be reformed. In some

European economies sovereign debt issue must also be addressed’. And also observed

that ‘we must tackle high unemployment. Better activation measures can help; social

welfare systems must become more job friendly; training must increase labour market

skills. Such investments also promote competiveness (OECD 2011).

If there are problems with Offe’s paradox, they lie elsewhere than in its rhetorical form. A

first difficulty is that, like much theorizing about the crisis of the welfare state in the

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1970s and early 1980s, it was shaped by the economic and political horizons of its time.

Offe developed his analysis in the context of the Keynesian welfare national state in

Europe, North America and Australasia and did not fully address the more general

difficulties involved in capital accumulation. As the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk, it

became easier for scholars to appreciate the nature and limitations of the Keynesian

welfare national state (hereafter KWNS) and, above all, to distinguish its particular

features from those that characterizing capitalism as a whole. In this context, in The

Future of the Capitalist State (Jessop 2002), I suggested that Offe’s paradox could be

deparadoxified in three steps. First, I made explicit what Offe had only implied when he

stated his paradox, namely, that this awkward relationship was one with a past, present,

and future. To use an extended metaphor, the ‘unhappy marriage’ of capitalism and the

welfare state was not permanent but passed through an experimental period of

cohabitation until a mutually satisfying modus vivendi reached and then experienced

difficulties as incompatibilities were discovered and, despite counselling and attempts at

reconciliation, gradually deteriorated until new horizons opened for capitalism and the

welfare state was, if not abandoned, left to play a secondary role in a new relationship.

Second, I emphasized that there were different varieties of capitalism and different

welfare regimes and argued that some couplings were more compatible than others –

the paradox became apparent when incompatibilities became more evident than

compatibilities. And, third, on this basis, I suggested that each variety of capitalism finds

through trial-and-error experimentation its own way of coping with this paradox for a

time, that each way leads sooner or later to crisis, and that this then prompts a search

for new solutions.

I illustrated how Offe’s paradox could be resolved through an extended analysis of the

processes that led to the eventual consolidation of Keynesian welfare national states

compatible with different modes of insertion into the economic and political circuits of

Atlantic Fordism and, after an extended honeymoon period of economic growth and

expanded social welfare, produced a crisis in and/or of this type of welfare regime. This

prompted a move away from Atlantic Fordism to search for new economic and social

bases for capital accumulation. This led to a partial dismantling (with complex

'conservation-dissolution' effects) of the KWNS. This suggests à la Offe that the post-

Fordist accumulation regimes that were emerging could not co-exist with the KWNS. But

the search for new economic and social bases of capital accumulation was also a search

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for new forms of state intervention that might help to secure the valorization of capital

and the social reproduction of labour-power in the new conditions. There was no single

successor regime to the Atlantic Fordist accumulation regimes but diverse responses.

We can distinguish two main types that were combined in different ways with path-

dependent legacies of the antecedent economic and political order. The two types are a

knowledge-based economy and finance-dominated accumulation – with the former type

more prominent initially in societies that had previously had more export-oriented

economies plus social democratic or corporatist welfare regimes and the latter more

prominent in societies that previously had more liberal welfare regimes and then went

through a neo-liberal regime shift (see below). This is associated in turn with different

kinds of coupling between post-Fordist capitalisms and new kinds of welfare state.

We can also look beyond (and dig beneath) the evidence for incompatibilities in the

relation between Atlantic Fordist capitalism and the Keynesian welfare national regime to

establish that there are basic structural contradictions and strategic dilemmas in the

capital relation that ensure that the relationship between market, civil society and state is

always problematic. Capitalist growth depends essentially on the market-mediated

exploitation of wage-labour – not on the inherent efficiency of unfettered markets.

Markets mediate the search for added value but cannot produce it themselves; and the

very process of commodification engendered by the spread of the market mechanism

generates contradictions that cannot be resolved by that mechanism itself. This is

evident in contradictions inscribed in the most basic forms of the capitalist market

society. Thus KWNS intervention often only modified the forms or sites of these

contradictions – introducing class struggles into the state and/or generating tendencies

towards fiscal crisis, legitimacy crisis, rationality crisis, etc.. And, as the capital relation

developed in ways that undermined the national economy as an object of state

management, the underlying contradictions re-emerged. It was in managing, at least for

a while, such contradictions and dilemmas within the spatio-temporal matrix of the

national economy and the national state that the 'welfare mix' associated with the KWNS

contributed to the Atlantic Fordist regime. However, if the KWNS proved to have failed to

compensate for the failures of the market in the Atlantic Fordist regime and, in addition,

generated its own failures, it does not follow that a return to the market would put things

right. The successor welfare regimes to the KWNS are the latest attempts to square the

capital accumulation-social welfare (reproduction) circle and, given the incompressibility

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of the contradictions on which capitalism is grounded, their development is likely to

demonstrate the continued (if now historicized) validity of Offe’s paradox.

CAPITALISM AND WELFARE STATES

The formulation of Offe’s paradox invites three major questions, each with a follow-up:

(1) What is capitalism? Is the paradox valid for all varieties? (2) What is the (welfare)

state? Are some welfare regimes more or less likely to display the paradox? And (3)

Where does paradox originate? Does it arise from the capital relation, social policies, or

their interaction? The following remarks address each question, focusing on the

supplementaries. Let me first note that Offe’s analysis of capitalism is grounded in

Frankfurt School and Weberian analyses of western, rational capitalism. He focuses on

free trade in markets and the rational organization of capitalist production (based on

double-entry book-keeping) in the circuits of Atlantic Fordism (economies based on

mass production and mass consumption in the heartlands of North American and North-

West European capitalism plus Australia and New Zealand) and on the crisis-

tendencies in the welfare states that developed in this context after 1945. He pays less

attention to semi-peripheral or peripheral economies in these circuits and to different

forms of political capitalism based on profits from force and domination, predation, and

unusual deals with political authority. Political capitalism is not confined to import-

substitution industrialization or developmental states, however, it is also found in

advanced capitalist societies, both in terms of accumulation through dispossession and

in terms of the use of economic power and lobbying to shape regulatory regimes

favourable to superprofits (most recently through neo-liberal deregulation, privatization,

marketization of the public sector, and reduced direct taxes on corporations and the

rich). By the same token he ignores the ways in which accumulation in some economic

spaces and the possibility of welfare states both depend on the articulation of different

varieties of capitalism (as well as pre- and non-capitalist relations of production) within

the world market. In the same way, his analysis of welfare states is focused on the role

of the state in economic and social reproduction in capitalist democracies characterized

by the rule of law and citizenship rights – exceptional regimes based on authoritarian

rule without competitive party systems and entrenched legal, economic, and social

rights remain outside the scope of his analysis. Yet, here, too, the existence of such

regimes may be a condition of existence of welfare regimes in the advanced capitalist

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economies. Two examples of this interdependence are the role of military dictatorships

and authoritarian rule in keeping oil flowing abundantly and cheaply in the 1950s to mid-

1970s, fuelling the Fordist growth regime, and, more recently, the role of authoritarian

one-party rule in China in enabling the export of low-cost consumer goods to post-

Fordist economies so that the costs of reproducing the labour force and wider

population became lower, compensating for declining nominal wages when the Fordist

link between productivity and wages was broken through neo-liberal ‘reforms’.

Capitalism

We can describe the capitalist mode of production as an ensemble of technical and

social relations of production organized around profit-oriented, market-mediated

accumulation and based on the generalization of the commodity form to labor-power,

i.e., its treatment as if were a commodity. This last feature is crucial to the dynamic

of capitalism and is a historically specific feature of the rational organization of

capitalist production. There are four key categories of fictitious commodity: land (or

nature), money, labour-power, and knowledge. Each of these becomes more fully

subordinate to market relations as rational capitalism develops but it is the treatment

of labour-power as if it were a commodity that gives capitalism its distinctive dynamic

and shapes the forms of economic, political, and social struggle more generally,

whether this is expressed through ‘old’ social movements based on the division of

labour or ‘new’ social movements based on identities, values, and interests anchored

in what is often called ‘civil society’.

Starting from the basic features of capitalism as a mode of production and an object

of régulation-cum-governance, stable capital accumulation is inherently improbable.

And, even where it is characterized by periods and zones of relative stability, the

preconditions for this opaque, indeteminate, and variable. This is why economic

imaginaries have a key role in envisaging these conditions, why poltical strategies

are often essential to delivering them, and why relative stability depends on trial-and-

error attempts to regularize and govern accumulation within any given set of spatio-

temporal horizons. This requires close attention to its co-constitution through the

interaction of market-mediated and non-market social relations and, in turn, to their

impact on the wider social formation. It is in this context that we can explore the role

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of institutions and practices beyond the market economy in reproducing the

conditions for differential accumulation.

The nature of labour-power as a fictitious commodity not only shapes the forms of

class- and class-relevant struggles but also shapes the competition among capitals

to secure the most effective valorization of labour-power and the appropriation of the

resulting surplus value. Competition and class struggle are major sources (but by no

means alone) of capitalism's open-ended dynamic as a mode of production. Lastly,

when capital accumulation becomes the dominant principle of organization in the

economy in its narrow sense, it also gains a major influence on societies more

broadly and, in certain circumstances, may become the dominant principle of

societal organization (on ecological dominance, see below).

In this context I have distinguished four dimensions of states (understood broadly as

a structured ensemble of practices of government and governance organized in the

shadow of a state apparatus – with this term defined in the next section). These

dimensions are the distinctive role of the state in securing the conditions for the

profitability of private capital; the distinctive role of the state in securing the

conditions for the reproduction of the labour force on a day-to-day basis, over the

lifecourse, and on an intergenerational basis; the primary scale on which policies for

economic and social reproduction are organized – local, regional, national,

supranational, through international regimes; and the primary governance

mechanism (e.g., hierarchical command, networks and partnerships, or solidarity)

used to compensate for market failure. This provides a way to define typologies of

welfare regimes and, on this basis, to consider different hybrid forms (see below).

The State as a Social Relation

As noted above, Claus Offe also takes for granted the state as an ensemble of social

relations defined in terms of general state theory. As such it combines: (1) territory

controlled by the state, (2) an apparatus that makes collectively binding decisions, and

(3) a resident population subject to state authority. This is already problematic as

internationalization challenges the territorial and temporal sovereignty of states, that is,

their ability to control what happens within their territories as firms and powerful states

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claim extra-territorial rights and immunities and, in addition, as states, faced with the

acceleration of economic activities through time-space compression, lose the capacity

to make decisions according to established procedures, especially where these should

involve democratic accountability. As we shall see, this loss of sovereignty is one factor

behind the crisis of the Keynesian welfare national state. Indeed, given Offe’s interest in

the pressures on the state apparatus (and the political class and state managers that

preside over it), this loss of sovereignty puts strong pressures on the axis of political

power based on the state’s interest in securing the conditions for profitable accumulation

and the conditions for political legitimacy in the context of competitive party democracy.

One response to this has been a shift towards authoritarian statism, in which citizenship

rights are rolled back and decision-making is less subject to democratic accountability.

This trend has recently been described as ‘post-democracy’ but the trend is much older

than the decade to which this label has been applied (Crouch 2004; see also Habermas

1962/1989; Poulantzas 1978; Jessop 2013a),

Rather than creating a ‘flat world’ (Friedmann 2005), these complexities reorder

economic, political, and socio-cultural differences and complementarities across

different scales, places, and networks. This offers opportunities for supra-national,

national, and local states to shape these differences and complementarities and

thereby influence their competitiveness and capacities to react to the problems

thrown up by ‘globalization’. But it remains a hierarchically ordered world too: some

‘spaces of flows’, some territorial states (e.g., USA, the People’s Republic of China,

and Germany), some places (e.g., global cities), some scales of economic and

political action (e.g., the European Union), matter more than others. In short, we

have an uneven terrain with uneven flows, differential frictions, and uneven power

with varying capacities for time-space compression and time-space distantiation.

In addition to their claim to territorial sovereignty, states also seek temporal

sovereignty. This involves the ability to make decisions according to the routines and

rhythms of the political system rather than those of other systems. World market

integration also puts pressure on this dimension of sovereignty due to its associated

forms of time-space distantiation, compression, and differentiation. As economic

decision-making and the rhythms of the world market accelerate relative to those of

the state and political decision-making, the time to determine and co-ordinate

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political responses to economic events shrinks – especially regarding hypermobile,

superfast capital. This reinforces conflicts between the time(s) of the state and the

time(s) of the market with some states more actively involved in and/or more

vulnerable to time-space distantiation and compression.

As these remarks indicate and common observation reveals, there is no general form of

state any more than there is a general form of capitalism. Different types of capitalst

regime are associated with different kinds of state and their coupling and co-evolution

depends not only on internal, domestic factors but also their insertion into the world

market. Furthermore, notwithstanding the formal equality among states that comes from

the mutual recognition of states as ‘formally sovereign’, states are not substantively

equal in terms of their capacities to shape the world of states, the governance of the

world market, or the forms of social policy.

ATLANTIC FORDISM AND WELFARE STATES

Atlantic Fordism as a type of capitalism was associated with a distinctive form of

welfare state: the Keynesian welfare national state (or KWNS). Each of the terms in

the ideal type KWNS refers to a major aspect of state involvement in promoting

capitalist expansion and, in this sense, it develops a broadly economic interpretation

of the state. Adopting alternative entry-points would highlight other aspects of state

transformation or, indeed, reveal certain continuities in the state. But a broadly

economic approach illuminates many of the issues noted above and can be

complemented by other approaches.

First, in promoting the conditions for profitable economic growth, the KWNS was

distinctively Keynesian insofar as it aimed to secure full employment in a relatively

closed national economy and did so mainly through demand-side management and

national infrastructural provision. Second, in contributing to the day-to-day, lifetime,

and intergenerational reproduction of the labour force, KWNS social policy had a

distinctive welfare orientation insofar as it (a) instituted economic and social rights for

all citizens so that they could share in growing prosperity (and contribute to high

levels of demand) even if they were not employed in the high-wage, high-growth

Fordist economic sectors; and (b) promoted forms of collective consumption

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favourable to the Fordist growth dynamic. Third, the KWNS was national insofar as

these economic and social policies were pursued within the historically specific (and

socially constructed) matrix of a national economy, a national state, and a society

seen as comprising national citizens. Within this matrix it was the national territorial

state that was mainly held responsible for developing and guiding Keynesian welfare

policies. Local and regional states acted mainly as relays for policies framed at the

national level; and the leading international regimes established after WW2 were

mainly intended to restore stability to national economies and national states. And,

fourth, the KWNS was statist insofar as state institutions (on different levels) were

the chief supplement and corrective to market forces in a 'mixed economy'

concerned with economic growth and social integration.

There was never a pure case of the KWNS (it is an ideal type) within the

international economic and political framework of Atlantic Fordism. Nor was there a

generic crisis that affected all such states identically. Nonetheless, they all faced

similar pressures from changes generated by internal crisis-tendencies and external

developments. The first signs of crisis in Fordist growth emerged in the mid-1970s

and the situation worsened in the 1980s. In addition, the structured coherence of

national economy-national state-national society was weakened by changes

associated with globalization, internationalization, the rise of multi-tiered global city

networks, the formation of triad economies (such as European Economic Space),

and the re-emergence of regional and local economies. The unity of the nation-state

was also weakened by the (admittedly uneven) growth of multi-ethnic and multi-

cultural societies and of divided political loyalties (with the resurgence of regionalism

and nationalism as well as the rise of European identities, diasporic networks,

cosmopolitan patriotism, etc.).

Atlantic Fordism and the KWNS experienced crisis as the conditions for its relatively

stable operation were undermined. In particular, internationalization made it harder to

treat the national economy as if it were relatively closed and to pursue Keynesian

demand management policies because boosts to demand could leak into the world

market. It also becomes harder to treat wages as a source of local demand – they are

increasingly treated as a cost of international production. This also holds for the ‘social

wage’ (i.e., social policy), which is construed as a competitive burden (‘we can’t afford

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welfare states’) that must be limited if national economies are to remain competitive and

deliver full employability. On similar grounds, the national scale loses its taken for

grantedness as state capacities and power are transferred upwards, downwards, and

sideways. Finally, the state is also seen to fail (state failure), which prompts a search for

new ways to compensate for both market and state failure

Internationalization also undermines the conditions behind that sustained the Listian

Workfare National State that was correlated with the export-oriented growth in East

Asian economies. Internationalization makes it harder to pursue neo-mercantilist

policies, especially as catch-up occurs and flexible innovation-oriented policies are

required. It is harder to treat wages just as cost of international production as mass

domestic demand expands and as democratic struggles and democratization develop.

Economic cycles and the decline of the extended household make it harder to rely on

company and/or informal ‘welfare’ and creates bottom-up demand and state responses

for new ‘workfare’ forms and/or new welfare regimes. Finally, the national ‘security state’

loses legitimacy and new forms of state guidance develop based on economic, political,

and social networks (guanxi).

What follows Fordism?

There were many suggestions about what follows Fordism: the hegemonic economic

and political imaginary in the 1980s and 1990s was the knowledge-based economy. But

finance-dominated accumulation also developed. Each with its own specific forms of

new welfare regime. Finance-dominated accumulation, promoted by neo-liberal,

transnational capital and financial capital oriented to maximizing exchange-value came

to dominate the organization of the world market.

• Liberalization: promote free competition

• De-regulation: reduce role of law and state

• Privatization: sell off public sector

• Market proxies in residual public sector

• Internationalization: free many flows in and out

• Lower direct taxes: boost consumer choice

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• [Also seen in structural adjustment programmes]

Growing imbalances in neo-liberal world market

The neoliberal world market involves more than financialization (the growing importance

of profit from financial services and interest-bearing capital): linked to importance of

fictitious capital (money capital as property) and debt as source of differential

accumulation. Breaks link between accumulation and welfare state: labour is now

production cost, welfare is a cost of production too, not source of demand. Prosperous

working class less necessary to transnational capital. At best favours neo-liberal SWPR;

at worst, a Ricardian workfare post-national regime backed by coercive state

THE CRISIS OF ATLANTIC FORDISM AND BEYOND

The crisis of Atlantic Fordism led to a search for possible post-Fordist scenarios. Many

economic imaginaries were proposed but two became dominant, if not hegemonic.

These were the knowledge-based economy and finance-dominated accumulation. The

former corresponds more to a profit-generating conception of capital accumulation, the

latter more to an interest-bearing capital perspective. In addition, the former scenario

was more prominent initially in societies that had previously had more export-oriented

economies plus social democratic or corporatist welfare regimes and the latter was more

prominent in societies that previously had more liberal welfare regimes and then went

through a neo-liberal regime shift (see below). An interesting observation requiring more

analysis is why the knowledge-based economy, although it became the hegemonic

imaginary of the 1990s and was adopted at many different sites and scales of economic

and political organization (and heavily promoted by the OECD, the European Union, and

other international bodies), was subordinated to finance-dominated accumulation, even

though this was not promoted as a serious alternative to the knowledge-based economy.

An important part of the answer may be found in three sets of causal mechanisms:

1. The difficulties of establishing knowledge-driven economies regardless of path-

dependent legacies and the time that it takes to develop the institutional supports

for such an economic model;

2. The appeal of neo-liberalism as a general economic, political, and social

imaginary in response to the crisis of Atlantic Fordism and its welfare state –

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which created the space for finance-dominated accumulation to emerge without

the need for an explicit articulation and promotion of this specific accumulation

regime as opposed to the general advantages of a more market-driven approach

to economic growth and prosperity; and

3. The ecological dominance of finance-dominated accumulation, that is, the extent

to which, once established and able to expand, it causes more problems for other

modes of growth than they can cause for it.

This is associated in turn with different kinds of coupling between post-Fordist

capitalisms and new kinds of welfare state.

In the following sections, I discuss the welfare state form that corresponds most

closely to the Knowledge-Based economy and then consider the welfare regime that

suits the finance-dominated accumulation.

THE SCHUMPETERIAN WORKFARE POST-NATIONAL REGIME

In ideal-typical terms, the welfare regime that corresponds to a knowledge-based

economy is the Schumpeterian workfare post-national regime (SWPR). This can be

presented along the same lines as the Keynesian Welfare National State. Thus, first,

the new state form is Schumpeterian insofar as it tries to promote permanent

innovation and flexibility in relatively open economies by intervening on the supply-

side and to strengthen their competitiveness. This notion invokes Schumpeter, the

theorist of innovation, entrepreneurship, and competition, rather than Keynes, the

theorist of money, employment, and national demand, as its emblematic economist.

Second, as a workfare regime, the SWPR subordinates social policy to the demands

of labour market flexibility and employability as well as economic competition. This

includes putting downward pressure on the social wage qua cost of international

production but, given the economic and political limits to welfare cuts, it is especially

concerned with the re-functionalization of the inherited welfare state to serve

economic interests. The state also attempts to create subjects to serve as partners in

the innovative, knowledge-driven, entrepreneurial, flexible economy and its

accompanying self-reliant, autonomous, empowered workfare regime.

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Third, the SWPR is 'postnational' insofar as the national territory has become less

important as an economic, political, and cultural 'power container'. This is associated

with a transfer of economic and social policy-making functions upwards, downwards,

and sideways. On a global level, this is seen in the growing concern of a growing

number of international agencies (such as the IMF, World Bank, OECD, and ILO)

and intergovernmental forums (such as the G8 and G20) with the shaping of current

social as well as economic policy agendas. In part, the European Union acts as a

relay for these agenda-shaping efforts and, in part, is playing an active role in

developing its own agenda for countries beyond its borders, whether near

neighbours or further afield. The EU level is also seeking to impose more numerous

and tighter restrictions on national economic and social governance, especially

through the norms of the Single Market and the economic policy and performance

criteria of the Eurozone. This is reflected in the tendential Europeanization of labour

market policies, the transformation of national corporatist and bargaining

arrangements to allow for greater local and regional differentiation, and the

development of 'social pacts' that bundle economic and social policies together to

advance worker, business, and national interests. Needless to say, these are not

always successful. What is emerging in this context is a series of multi-level

government and/or multi-level governance regimes oriented to issues of the inter-

scalar re-articulation of the economic and political -- with the EU just one among

many such emerging regimes. At the same time there are tendencies to devolve

some economic and social policy-making to the regional, urban, and local levels on

the grounds that policies intended to influence the micro-economic supply-side and

social regeneration are best designed close to their sites of implementation. In some

cases this also involves cross-border cooperation among regional, urban, or local

spaces. Paradoxically, this often leads to an enhanced role for national states in

controlling the interscalar transfer of these powers – suggesting a shift from

sovereignty to a primus inter pares role in intergovernmental relations.

The post-national moment of economic and social policy restructuring is complex

because of the proliferation of scales and the relativization of scale with which it is

associated. There are clear differences among the triad regions here. The EU

provides the only example among the three of a clear commitment to economic,

political, and social integration and, more ambivalently, to the development of

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supranational state structures. Nonetheless all three regions/triads are involved in

the internationalization of policy regimes not only in economic but also in the

juridical, political, social fields, etc. The rise of G20 to supplement the G8 is one sign

of this trend. Nonetheless continuing differences within and across regions indicates

that one should not push globalization too far as a general explanatory framework of

recent changes.

Fourth, and finally, the SWPR relies increasingly on governance to compensate for

market failures and inadequacies. There is an increased role for non-state

mechanisms in shaping and delivering state-sponsored economic and social

policies. One aspect is the increased importance of private-public networks to state

activities on all levels – from local partnerships to supranational neo-corporatist

arrangements. The shift from government towards governance means that traditional

forms of intervention are less important now in economic and social policy. This does

not mean that law and money have disappeared, of course; instead, active economic

and social steering now tends to run more through soft regulation and reflexive law,

additionality and private-public partnerships, organizational intelligence and

information-sharing, etc.. A key role is also played by metagovernance (see above)

both in normal times and in response to major shocks and crises.

As with all ideal types, there are no pure cases. Indeed, advanced capitalist

economies have developed along two lines in the past twenty years in regard to the

Schumpeterian dimension. Some have focused their efforts on promoting the

knowledge-based economy; others have promoted finance-dominated accumulation,

regarding de-regulated financial innovation as useful productive activity. The global

financial crisis has called this into question and encouraged renewed concern with

boosting industrial competitiveness.

RICARDIAN WORKFARE POST-NATIONAL REGIMES

The world market provides the ultimate horizon of economic analysis just as ‘world

society’ provides the ultimate horizon of social analysis. Historically, the world market

is both the presupposition and the result of the development of free trade in markets

and the rational organization of production (cf. Marx 1973; Weber 1961).

15

Nonetheless it has not developed in a linear fashion but has seen important

transformations, ruptures, and reversals. In particular, for our purposes, the

dominance of neo-liberalism on a global scale has introduced some interesting new

features into the dynamic of the world market that set it apart from earlier periods of

free trade imperialism as well as from more overtly statist periods of capitalist

development. In particular, neo-liberal globalization strengthens capital's chances of

avoiding the structural constraints of other institutional orders and their control

efforts, thereby increasing its ‘indifference’ to the operating environment. This is an

important achievement because capital's profit-oriented, market-mediated logic tends

to be 'ecologically dominant', i.e., to cause more problems for other systems than

they can cause for it. This tendency is greatly reinforced by the dominance of the

neo-liberal form of world market integration.

WORLD SOCIETY, WORLD MARKET, WORLD POLITY

‘World society’ is often presented as the ultimate horizon of meaning-making and

social communication but this is not the same as asserting that that world society is

an established societal reality, let alone one superior to other social formations. In

addition, world society does not develop evenly but takes different forms and

proceeds in different ways. One example is the world market organized under the

dominance of profit-oriented, market-mediated capital accumulation. Another

example is the world polity organized in the shadow of a world of states

(Staatenwelt) rather than as a world state (Weltstaat) but with a growing number and

range of international and transnational regimes that provide a further field in which

states compete for global influence. Other examples relevant to global social policy

include the emerging global education, health, legal, scientific, security, and

environmental regimes. This uneven development is complicated by the survival of

centre-periphery and segmented forms of societal organization (reflected in, for

example, hegemonic states and client states, core and excluded regions, and the

survival of territorial states in the world political system). Thus, alongside world

society, we can observe an international order based on interaction among

economic, political, and socio-cultural entities with clear national territorial

boundaries. This has implications for the issue of ‘global policy’, whatever specific

set of socially construed problems this might address and however adequate these

16

construals might be to underlying, extra-semiotic realities.

Whether one talks of world society and/or of world market, this does not entail that

the world scale is the primary (let alone sole) locus of globally significant causal

mechanisms or social forces. One should not mistake the field on which economic or

social processes unfold with their causal dynamics. For example, the global financial

crisis did not originate at some global scale above or beyond specific circuits of

capital anchored in particular places. It was made in the USA, broke out there, and

has spread unevenly through a mix of contagion and endogenous vulnerabilities

around the globe. Even during the most severe global economic crisis since the

1930s, some locales, regions, and national economies have expanded. Thus the

idea of the world market or globalization must be approached with care and

considered in relation to other spatial dynamics too.

In regard to global social policy, two interrelated concepts are useful: (1) the scalar

division of labour; and (2) the relativization of scale. Globalization does not mean

that the global is the dominant scale of policy formulation or implementation. On the

contrary, the national scale remains dominant but is increasingly influenced by

international regimes that are, in turn, sites of contestation among national states,

capitalist interests at different scales, and old and new social movements. In this

context we can observe an increasingly convoluted mix of scale strategies as

economic and political forces seek the most favourable conditions for insertion into a

changing international order, including the restructuring of social policy regimes. This

poses important issues around the coordination of strategies and policies on different

scales of action in various combinations of vertical, horizontal, diagonal, centripetal,

centrifugal, and vortical ways. This complexity cannot be captured in terms of simple

contrasts, such as global-national or global-local, or catchall hybrid concepts such as

'glocalization' or the 'tranversal'. Instead there is a proliferation of discursively

constituted and institutionally materialized and embedded spatial scales (whether

terrestrial, territorial, or telematic), that are related in increasingly complex tangled

hierarchies rather than being simply nested one within the other, with different

temporalities as well as spatialities. These complexities offer more opportunities for

rescaling, jumping scales, and so on; they also re-order spatial and scalar

hierarchies, producing new forms of uneven development. At the same time these

17

complexities add further to the complexity of spatial organization and create

pressures to mutual indifference and/or multi-spatial metagovernance.

Such a concern with the interaction (and potential antagonisms) between territorial

logics and the logics of flow-spaces provides an interesting entry-point into the study

of the world economic and political order. For it points to the inherent contradictions

that arise from the increasing integration of the world market – which reduces

frictions that slow the movement of capital (especially its hypermobile, superfast

forms) – and the continued survival of territorial states (typically national territorial

states) that find it hard to control these flows and even harder, in many cases, to

control the speed with which financial and economic crises unfold and, through

contagion effects, disrupt economic, political, and social life far from the initial sites of

crisis. In short, it is the interaction of the space of flows and the logic of territory that

provides a major challenge to effective global governance.

The co-existence and, indeed, entanglement of space and territory with the

complexities of multiple scalar divisions of labour and the many forms of connection

among particular places, we are faced with serious problems of unstructured,

unpredictable, and ungovernable complexity of socio-spatial relations.

These arguments can be applied to social policy as to other policy fields. The spatial,

territorial, scalar, place-based, and networked nature of social policy is shaped by

four key factors. First, all activities occur at particular places and times. Whereas

material control over these coordinates provides a means of intervening directly in

social practices, other technologies of power may also enable practices to be

steered at a distance. This latter possibility highlights a second factor. Activities are

not reducible to their coordinates in space and time: they have other discursive and

extra-discursive aspects. If we focus solely on their spatial and/or temporal

dimensions, we risk reifying or fetishizing space and time and neglecting potentially

more important causal factors in the generating, enabling, and constraining these

activities. Likewise, third, the existence and success of activities at specific

coordinates typically depends on conditions that exceed these times and places.

This implies that a multi-spatial and/or multi-scalar as well as multi-temporal

approach may be more appropriate and more effective than one that focuses

18

exclusively on the immediate and the local. Fourth, the consequences of social

activities also typically extend outwards in space and time. This highlights again the

importance of adopting multiple spatio-temporal horizons in the formulation of

strategies and exercise of governance.

Together these four factors make it impossible to govern all aspects of a given set of

social practices because of their extensive conditions of existence and spatio-

temporal ramifications. This suggests that relatively effective governance requires

the identification of a subset of features of relevant activities that are sufficiently

governable to enable the steering of their conditions of existence, of the substantive

activities themselves (including their location and timing), and of their repercussions.

This process of complexity reduction is organized along four axes: (1) the actual and

construed spatial aetiology of ‘social problems’; (2) the construed or imagined spatial

conditioning of solutions to these ‘social problems’ – in other words, the question of

whether spatial reorganization of some kind may help to resolve these problems; (3)

the proposed spatial, territorial, place-based, scalar or networked character of social

policy formation and its governance; and (4) the appropriate spatial location of social

policy delivery. Global social policy will have very different connotations, depending

on which of these four axes is prioritized in its analysis.

For social policy, there are three closely connected questions: changing definitions of

individual and social problems and their connection, the changing institutions

responsible for solving these problems in their interconnection, and the agents and

practices that deliver solutions to social problems. It is a social scientific

commonplace that governance practices (mediated by institutions) attempt to delimit,

unify, stabilize and reproduce their objects of governance as the precondition as well

as the effect of governing them. Spatial and temporal practices are important here.

Thus we must direct attention to the role of spatial, territorial, place-based and scalar

imaginaries, narratives and/or discourses in demarcating a specific spatial (TPSN)

aetiology of a common set of social problems from the potentially indefinite web of a

changing global-regional-national-local nexus as a focus of intervention. There is no

a priori reason why this space should coincide with a given political territory or

administrative unit rather than being grounded in specific places, particular scales of

social organization, or specific social networks. Nor is there any reason why the

19

temporalities of social problems should coincide with cycles or rhythms related to

one or another tier of government or mode of governance or with their

overdetermination by outside forces. It is an interesting question, then, whether the

organization of social policy is driven by administrative convenience or by actually

existing social problems. Indeed, social policy and social work interventions typically

fail because they are too place-specific and ignore the wider preconditions and

subsequent repercussions of social problems and their treatment. The rise of ‘global

social policy’ is one way to address such issues but is fragmented in turn by the

plurality of problems, imaginaries, agencies, sites of possible intervention, and so on.

5. Governance and Meta-Governance

Interest in governance, theoretically and normatively, is linked to growing recognition

(correctly or not) of the growing complexity of social life. ‘Governance’ sometimes

covers all possible modes of co-ordination of complex and reciprocally

interdependent activities or operations. The most commonly identified modes of

coordination are: ex post co-ordination through exchange (e.g., the anarchy of the

market), ex ante co-ordination through imperative co-ordination (e.g., the hierarchy

of the firm, organization, or state), reflexive self-organization (e.g., the heterarchy of

negotiated consent to resolve complex problems in a corporatist order and/or of

horizontal networking to co-ordinate a complex division of labour), and the solidarity

of unconditional commitments (e.g., within communities of fate) (see table 5).

Transposed to the global scale, these modes of coordination would correspond

roughly to the primacy of exchange in the world market, the primacy of imperative

co-ordination in a putative world state, the reflexive self-organization of governance

in global civil society, and the subsidiarity and solidarity that would be needed to

develop a world society based on principles of redistributive social justice and

respect for the environment that transcend the morality of specific functional

systems.

These trends appear to have promoted a shift in the institutional centre of gravity (or

the ‘institutional attractor’) for policy coordination towards heterarchy or reflexive self-

organization (which is sometimes conflated with governance tout court in claims

about a shift from government to governance). But disillusion with the utopias of

20

communism, the welfare state, and, more recently, the unfettered dominance of

market forces should not lead us to put all our trust in the atopic vision of good

governance based on horizontal and vertical solidarities and the mobilization of

collective intelligence (Willke, 2001). It is not just markets and imperative co-

ordination that are prone to fail; heterarchic governance and solidarity are also

failure-prone -- albeit for different reasons, in different ways, and with different

effects. In general, the greater the material, social, and spatio-temporal complexity of

the problems to be addressed, the greater are the number and range of interests

whose heterarchic co-ordination is necessary to resolve them satisfactorily. In

addition, the less direct and visible are reciprocally interdependent interests, the

more challenging is efficient, effective, and consensual co-ordination regardless of

the method of co-ordination.

Collibration can be defined as the judicious re-articulating and rebalancing of modes

of governance to manage the complexity, plurality, and tangled hierarchies found in

prevailing modes of co-ordination with a view to achieving optimal outcomes as

viewed by those engaged in metagovernance. In this sense it also means the

organization of the conditions of governance in terms of their structurally-inscribed

strategic selectivity, i.e., the asymmetrical privileging of different modes of co-

ordination and their differential access to the institutional support and the material

resources needed to pursue reflexively-agreed objectives. Collibration is no more the

preserve of one actor or set of actors than it is confined to one site or scale of action.

Instead it should be seen, like the various first-order forms of coordination of

complex reciprocal interdependence and the various second-order forms of meta-

coordination, as fractal in character, i.e., as taking self-similar forms in many different

social fields.

Governments play a major and increasing role in all aspects of metagovernance in

areas of societal significance, whether these are formally private or public. They get

involved in redesigning markets, in constitutional change and the juridical re-

regulation of organizational forms and objectives, in organizing the conditions for

networked self-organization, in promoting social capital and the self-regulation of the

professions and other forms of expertise, and, most importantly, in the collibration of

21

different forms of first-order governance and metagovernance. This is especially true

during periods of crisis that threaten system integration and/or social cohesion.

More specifically, governments provide the ground rules for governance and the

regulatory order in and through which governance partners can pursue their aims;

ensure the compatibility or coherence of different governance mechanisms and

regimes; create forums for dialogue and/or act as the primary organizer of the

dialogue among policy communities; deploy a relative monopoly of organizational

intelligence and information in order to shape cognitive expectations; serve as a

'court of appeal' for disputes arising within and over governance; seek to re-balance

power differentials and strategic bias in regimes by strengthening weaker forces or

systems in the interests of system integration and/or social cohesion; take material

and/or symbolic flanking and supporting measures to stabilize forms of coordination

that are deemed valuable but prone to collapse; subsidize production of public

goods; organize side-payments for those making sacrifices to facilitate effective

coordination; contribute to the meshing of short-, medium- and long-term time

horizons and temporal rhythms across different sites, scales, and actors, in part to

prevent opportunistic exit and entry into governance arrangements; try to modify the

self-understanding of identities, strategic capacities, and interests of individual and

collective actors in different strategic contexts and hence alter their implications for

preferred strategies and tactics; organize redundancies and duplication to sustain

resilience through requisite variety in response to unexpected problems;1 and also

assume political responsibility as addressee in last resort in the event of governance

failure in domains beyond the state (based in part on Jessop 2002: 219; see also

Bell and Hindmoor 2009).This emerging role means that networking, negotiation,

noise reduction, and negative as well as positive co-ordination occur 'in the shadow

of hierarchy'. In all cases, despite significant differences between their respective

modes of complexity reduction (which always and inevitably marginalizes some

features essential to effective governance), the continuing excess or surplus of

complexity – especially deep complexity -- is a major cause for failure.

Metagovernance involves not only institutional design but also the transformation of

subjects and cultures. Whereas there has been much interest in issues of

institutional design appropriate to different objects of governance, less attention to

22

the reform of the subjects of governance and their values. Yet the neoliberal project,

for example, clearly requires attempts to create entrepreneurial subjects and

demanding consumers aware of their choices and rights as well as actions to shift

the respective scope and powers of the market mechanism and state intervention.

This is an area where Foucauldian students of governmentality offer more than

students of governance. For they have been especially interested in the role of

power and knowledge in shaping the attributes, capacities, and identities of social

agents and, in the context of self-reflexive governance, in enabling them to become

self-governing and self-transforming (cf. Miller and Rose 2008). This raises important

questions about the compatibility of different modes of governance insofar as this

involves not only questions of institutional compatibility but also the distribution of the

individual and collective capacities needed to pursue creatively and autonomously

the appropriate strategies and tactics to sustain contrasting modes of governance.

Of particular interest is how new forms of governance fit into the overall configuration

of class power and political domination more generally. By analogy with Gramsci’s

own definitions, I argue that ‘the state in its inclusive sense’ could also be defined as

‘government + governance in the shadow of hierarchy’. In these terms, state power

involves not only the exercise of state capacities that belong specifically to the state

(e.g., legal sovereignty, a constitutionalized monopoly of organized coercion,

taxation powers); but also resort to practices of collibration, i.e., the rebalancing of

different forms of governance within and beyond the state in the shadow of

hierarchy. Collibration is more than a technical, problem-solving fix: it always

involves specific objects, techniques, and subjects of governance and it is tied to the

management of a wider ‘unstable equilibrium of compromise’. Indeed, it is typically

conducted in the light of the ‘global’ (or most general) function of the state, i.e.,

maintaining social cohesion in a class-divided (or, better, socially-divided) social

formation. In other words, governance and meta-governance cannot be reduced to

questions of how to solve issues of a specific techno-economic, narrowly juridico-

political, tightly focused social administrative, or otherwise neatly framed problem.

This is not only because of the material interconnections among different problem

fields in a complex world but also because every governance (and, a fortiori, meta-

governance) practice has implications for the balance of forces.

23

7. Multi-Level Government vs Multi-Spatial Metagovernance

Reflections on the socio-spatial complexity and inherent ungovernability of some

problems has prompted proposals for multilevel governance as a ‘third way’ between

supranational imperative coordination through a world state and a relatively anarchic,

negatively co-ordinated, and fragmented pursuit of common economic, social, and

political objectives in international society. This has been understood in terms of the

logic of territorialization based on multi-level government and/or in terms of the logic

of flows leading to network governance.

Multi-level Government

Multi-level government involves imperative coordination through a territorial state (a

multi-level but unified hierarchy of command) that is charged with (or claims

responsibility for) that manages the relations among bounded areas that are under

the state’s exclusive control. This state can be a large national territorial state (with

two or more tiers of government) or a confederation of national territorial states that

has delegated some competences to a supranational political authority. The two

most prominent cases are: (1) the break-up of the Soviet Union – a multi-state

imperial regime dominated by Russia that underwent decomposition – and its

reorganization into a Commonwealth of Independent States; and (2) the European

Union as a multi-state federal state in the process of formation, in which the

relationship between different tiers of political organization (cities, regions, national

states, and European institutions) must be settled and has evolved to date through

incremental innovation in stable periods and crisis-induced radical integration in

periods of turbulence.

In the case of the EU, debates range between two polar positions. At one pole, we

find calls for subsidiarity, i.e., maximum possible devolution of powers and

competences to the lowest tier of government with higher tiers responsible for policy

problems that cannot be settled at lower levels; at the other pole, we find arguments

for a United States of Europe with power concentrated in European level institutions

24

and lower tiers acting as relays for decisions made at the European level. In between

these extremes is a wide range of competing proposals and, more importantly,

competing tendencies or trends in development. A key part of European experience

in this regard is that crises that affect European economic development tend to

generate greater political integration to generate more effective crisis-management.

Network Governance

This political regime relies on a mix of well-ordered market relations (economic

exchange), commitment to negotiation (consensus-oriented deliberation), and

solidarity (credible commitments to cooperation). It can emerge spontaneously, in

response to particular initiatives by a key stakeholder or stakeholders, or through

state initiatives to reduce the burdens of government by pooling sovereignty and/or

sharing responsibilities for governing complex problems with a range of public,

private, and third-sector partners. Network governance is oriented to securing the

conditions for the flow of goods, services, technologies, capital, and people across

different territories, for connecting different places in different territories in new

divisions of labour (e.g., networks of cities, interdependent centres of production,

different forms of centre-periphery relation), over different scales of social

organization (that may not coincide with territorial boundaries), and different sets of

social bonds based on mutual trust. This pattern is less concerned with the

integration of government in an emerging supra-national or federal state system and

more concerned with creating the conditions for integrated markets with agreed

governance arrangements but no overall coordination.

In the European Union, this pattern of governance is most often associated with the

officially recognized Open Method of Coordination (OMC). This mechanism involves

common agreement on mission, policy objectives, and desired outcomes plus

decentralized methods of pursuing these objectives (chosen at national or sub-

national level) as well as monitoring and reporting mechanisms to check progress.

The development of the OMC can be seen as part of continuing efforts (often at

cross-purposes) by key economic and political actors to produce an appropriate

balance between different modes of economic and political coordination across

25

functional and territorial divides and to ensure, under the primacy of the political, a

measure of political apparatus unity and political legitimacy for the European Union.

Multi-Spatial Metagovernance

Neither multi-level government nor network governance adequately describes the

European Union. This combines elements of both forms plus other transversal

arrangements – complicated in the last few years by a new political axis based on

Franco-German interest in keeping the Eurozone intact with decisions being

imposed on weaker member states (notably Greece but with Portugal and Italy also

subject to Franco-German dictates). In this sense, the EU can be seen as a major

and, indeed, increasingly important, supranational instance of meta-governance in

relation to a wide range of complex and interrelated problems. Indeed, because the

sources and reach of these problems go well beyond the territorial space occupied

by its member states, the EU is an important, if complex, point of intersection (or

node) in the emerging, hypercomplex, and chaotic system of global governance (or,

better, global meta-governance). It is still one node among several within this

emerging system of global meta-governance and cannot be fully understood without

taking account of its complex relations with other nodes located above, below, and

transversal to the EU. Indeed, while one might well hypothesize that the European

scale is becoming increasing dominant within the multi-spatial metagovernance

regime of the European Union, it is merely nodal in the emerging multi-scalar

metagovernance regimes that are developing on a global scale under the

(increasingly crisis-prone) dominance of the United States.

The concept of multispatial metagovernance as a theoretical, strategic, and policy

paradigm can be developed by recognizing the complex interrelations between

territorial organization, multiple scalar divisions of labour (and other practices),

networked forms of social interaction, and the importance of place as a meeting point

of functional operations and the conduct of personal life. To escape the traps of

methodological nationalism and reification of world society, I propose multispatial

metagovernance as an alternative approach to the world state and global

governance. It has four potential advantages over multilevel governance. First, it

affirms the irreducible plurality of territorial area, social scales, networks, and places

26

that must be addressed in attempts at governance. Second, it recognizes the

complex, tangled, and interwoven nature of the relevant political relations, which

include important horizontal and transversal linkages – indicated in notions such as

‘network state’ or ‘network polity’ – as well as the vertical linkages implied in

multilevel governance. Third, in contrast to a one-sided emphasis on heterarchic

coordination, it highlights the role of metagovernance as the reflexive art of balancing

government and other forms of governance to create requisite variety, flexibility, and

adaptability in coordinated policy-formulation, policy-making, and implementation.

And, fourth, it insists on the plurality and, indeed, heterogeneity of actors potentially

involved in such institutions and practices, which stretch well beyond different tiers of

government and well beyond the confines of any given administrative, political, or

economic space.

At this stage of theoretical elaboration, the concept of multispatial metagovernance is

admittedly a place-holder that identifies a range of problems to be addressed in

research on the inevitably fractal, multi-dimensional nature of governance in an

emerging world society. It does not plot the ‘high road’ to an effective world state or

global governance but serves to warn against investing too many hopes in the

search for a quick, one-dimensional fix to the problems of world governance. In

particular, it reflects the rescaling of the complexities of government and governance

rather than a simple rescaling of the sovereign state or the emergence of

international regimes as just another arena in which national states pursue national

interests. In short, multispatial metagovernance operates through multiple modes of

governance and with multiple stakeholders in the shadow of post-national statehood.

Some states are more important in this regard than others and there is no simple

scalar division of labour that ensures the primacy of one particular scale. Each scale

and node is involved in complex, tangled relations with others located above, below,

or transversal thereto. Many parallel power networks are involved in the emerging,

hypercomplex, and chaotic system of global metagovernance.

A further complication is the growing disjunction in an increasingly integrated global

economy between the formal structures of political power associated with sovereign

territorial states and the substantive circuits of transnational power. If representative

democracy is based on territorial representation, it is rendered problematic by the

27

relativization of scale (the loss of primacy of the national scale), by de- and re-

territorialization (the territorial re-scaling of government powers and authorities), the

resulting increase in variable geometries and tangled hierarchies of political power

(the loss of territorial congruence and/or of neatly nested hierarchies of power across

a growing range of fields of government action), and the challenge to many of the

traditional bases of national citizenship and mutual solidarity in some national states

that come from multi-ethnicity, multiculturalism, and divided political loyalties.

Moreover, given the increasing interdependence among functionally differentiated

systems with their own operational codes, logics of appropriateness, temporalities,

spatialities, etc., it becomes harder for one system (even the state as the core of the

political system) to control the operations of other systems from outside and above.

8. Conclusions

Acknowledgment: This paper derives from research conducted within the

framework of an ESRC-funded Professorial Fellowship, ‘Great Transformations: a

Cultural Political Economy of Crises of Crisis-Management’. Award: RES-051-27-

0303. As readers will have noted, it also draws heavily on my earlier work on diverse

of theoretical and substantive issues, some of which is cited in the bibliography.

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1 One implication is that alternative modes of co-ordination should not be destroyed too

hastily –they may need to be re-invented in one or another form in response to particular

forms of coordination failure. Witness the current financial crisis.