Transnational State

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Discussion

Towards a Transnationalisation of the state, rather than a transnational state

Kanishka Jayasuriya:

"I find the general approach of the transnational state or globality useful in examining some key aspects of the global political economy. It moves us beyond unhelpful debates about the return of the state and/or misguided attempts to perceive global conflict in terms of a return to national developmentalism. In sum, I think it usefully takes us beyond the methodological nationalism that troubles much of the mainstream and critical Political Economy literatures.

Having said this, my own approach differs from these perspectives in that I see the crucial issue as the transformation of the state rather than the emergence of a new transnational state. At the same time, we need to see the development of these transnational forms of governance as an ongoing process that involves accommodation and contestation between various ‘national’ and transnational regimes within the state. I would emphasize the strategic choices and conflicts between key actors in rescaling projects. It is these kinds of conflicts that drive state transformation, and I think this should be at the centre of a research agenda on transnational regulation.

In addition, I think we should place more emphasis on the nature and dynamics of the emerging transnational administrative/regulatory law, even if this is often of the soft law variety. As I indicate in my responses above, it is the complex and fragmented nature of this global administrative law that defines the new transnational governance. This transnational law and governance is likely to be very different from what is usually associated with the national state. This is something that is neglected by notions such as globality or the transnational state." (http://www.criticalglobalisation.com/Issue3/127_138_INTERVIEW_JAYASURIYA_JCGS3.pdf)


The Transnational State vs. nation-state global imperialism

(W. I. Robinson / Historical Materialism 15 (2007) 71–93; from a review of Empire of Capital)

William I. Robinson:

"Wood dismisses the proposition that a ‘global state’ – or what I have termed in my own work a transnational state (TNS) apparatus – may be coming into existence because, in her view, any such argument is based on the idea that the territorial state is increasingly obsolete. In Wood’s view, those who refer to current world processes as globalisation define them as ‘the decline of the territorial state’.22 Yet this is an outright straw-man. No one, beyond a few bourgeois commentators,23 suggests that the nation-state is disappearing. I know of no Marxist or critical analysis of globalisation that maintains that capital can now, or ever has been able to, exist without a state. Wood’s claim that global capital needs (local) states is neither original nor particularly controversial. Indeed, I, among others, have argued for many years that a fundamental contradiction of global capitalism is that, for historical reasons, economic globalisation has unfolded within the political framework of a nation-state system. Th e real issue is not whether global capitalism can dispense with the state – it cannot. Rather, it is that the state may be in a process of transformation in consort with the restructuring and transformation of world capitalism. Th e question is: to what extent and in what ways may new state forms and institutional configurations be emerging, and how may we theorise these new configurations?

Wood, here as elsewhere,24 sees the nation-state not as an historical outcome but as immanent to capitalist development. But why should we assume that the nation-state is the only possible political form for organising social life in the capitalist system? Wood’s reasoning in emphasising territoriality seems to be tautological: capital needs the state and the states that we have happen to be national states. What is the theoretical justification for assuming that the state is necessarily territorial? If the state is an institutionalised class relation, why must it have to be territorially conceived? Concomitantly, why should we assume that social classes – and specifically with regard to the topic at hand, the capitalist class – are necessarily organised along national lines? That they have been is something which must be problematised, that is, explained with reference to how the course of history actually unfolded and not by reference to some abstract law or principle of the capitalist system and the modern world. Th e nation-state system, or inter-state system, I suggest, is an historical outcome, the particular form in which capitalism came into being based on a complex relation between production, classes, political power and territoriality.

In order to understand the transformation of the state and the rise of a TNS, not to mention twenty-first-century imperialism, we need to return to an historical-materialist theoretical conceptualisation of the state, not as a ‘thing’, or a fictional macro-agent, but as a specific social relation inserted into larger social structures that may take different, and historically-determined, institutional forms, only one of which is the nation-state. Nothing in the current epoch suggests that the historic configuration of space and its institutionalisation is immutable rather than itself subject to transformation. Th is is to say that the political relations of capitalism are entirely historical, such that state forms can only be understood as historical forms of capitalism.25

There are vital functions that the national state performs for transnational capital, among them, sets of local economic policies aimed at achieving macroeconomic equilibrium, the provision of property laws, infrastructure, and, of course, social control and ideological reproduction – and, here, Wood and I are in agreement. However, there are other conditions that transnational capitalists require for the functioning and reproduction of global capitalism. National states are ill-equipped to organise a supranational unification of macroeconomic policies, create a unified field for transnational capital to operate, impose transnational trade regimes, supranational ‘transparency’, and so forth. Th e construction of a supranational legal and regulatory system for the global economy in recent years has been the task of sets of transnational institutions whose policy prescriptions and actions have been synchronised with those of neoliberal national state that have been captured by local transnationally-oriented forces. Marxists who theorise a TNS apparatus do not argue, as Wood would have us believe, that supranational institutions such as the IMF or the WTO replace or ‘render irrelevant’ the national state. Rather, 25. Although the proposition cannot be explored here, I suggest that the explanation for the particular geographic expression in the nation-state system that world capitalism acquired is to be found in the historical uneven development of the system, including its gradual spread worldwide. Territorialised space came to house distinct market and capital accumulation conditions, often against one another, a process that tended to be self-reproducing as it deepened and became codified by the development of national states, constitutions, legal systems, politics and culture, and the agency of collective actors (e.g., Westphalia, nationalism, etc.). This particular spatial form of the uneven development of capitalism is being overcome by the globalisation of capital and markets and the gradual equalisation of accumulation conditions this involves.


We cannot, as Wood does, simply shrug off the increasingly salient role of a transnational institutional structure in co-ordinating global capitalism and imposing capitalist domination beyond national borders. Even if one were to disagree with my particular thesis of a TNS, this transnational institutionality needs to be theorised. Clearly, the IMF, by imposing a structural adjustment programme that opens up a given country to the penetration of transnational capital, the subordination of local labour, and the extraction of wealth by transnational capitalists, is operating as a state institution to facilitate the exploitation of local labour by global capital, and is hence engaging in imperialism as defined by Wood. How are we to understand these IMF practices? Standard dogma would reduce them to instruments of ‘US’ imperialism. Yet I know of no single IMF structural adjustment programme that creates conditions in the intervened country that favours ‘US’ capital in any special way, rather than opening up the intervened country, its labour and resources, to capitalists from any corner of the world. Th is outcome is in sharp distinction to earlier imperialism, in which a particular core country sealed off the colonised country or sphere of influence as its own exclusive preserve for exploitation. Th erefore it is more accurate to characterise the IMF (or for that matter, the World Bank, other regional banks, the WTO, etc.) as an instrument not of ‘US’ imperialism but of transnational capitalist exploitation."


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In Summary:

"We argue that the national state is being transformed and increasingly absorbed functionally into a larger transnational institutional structure that involves complex new relations between national states and supra- or transnational institutions, on the one hand, and diverse class and social forces, on the other. A TNS apparatus is emerging under globalisation from within the system of nation-states. An emergent TNS apparatus need not have a centralised form as historically developed in modern nations; it may exist in both transnational institutions and the transformation of national states. Transnational bodies such as the IMF and the WTO have worked in tandem with national states to re-articulate labour relations, financial institutions and circuits of production into a system of global accumulation. As national states are captured by transnational capitalist forces, they tend to serve the interests of global over local accumulation processes. Th e TNS, for instance, has played a key role in imposing the neoliberal model on the old Third World and therefore in reinforcing the class relations of global capitalism." (http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/robinson/Assets/pdf/woods.pdf)


Bibliography

Robinson, W. I. 2001a. Social Theory and Globalization: The Rise of a Transnational State. Theory and Society , 30(2): pp. 157-200.

---. 2001b. Theory of the Global State: Globality as an Unfinished Revolution. By Martin Shaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000. American Political Science Association, 95 (4): pp 1045-1047

---. 2004. A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Shaw, M. 2000. Theory of the Global State: Globality as an Unfinished Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.