While eclipse is a possibility, it is not a likely one? What the “discourse of eclipse” has done is to make responses to a genuine crisis of state capacity unrelentingly negative and defensive Changing in theoretical perspectives cannot be separated from real historical changes in the state’s position.
The danger is not that states will end up as marginal institutions, but that meaner, more repressive ways of organizing the state’s role will be accepted as the only way of avoiding the collapse of public institutions.
In the classic realistic world, traditional military forms of statecraft were closely intertwined with possibilities for economic gain. Successful participation in global markets may be best achieve through more intense state involvement. The effect of global ideological consensus on individual states goes well beyond the constraints imposed by any structural logic of the international economy.
The fact that private transnational actors need competent, capable states more than their own ideology admits does not eliminate the possibility of eclipse. Bent on maximizing its room to manoeuvre, transnational capital could easily become an accomplice in the destruction of the infrastructure of public institutions on which its profits depend. The state is perceived, not as the ultimate representative of national interest, but instead as the instrument of dimly understood but somehow “foreign” interests. As an economy produces more ideas, authoritative enforcement of property rights become both more difficult and more crucial to profitability. Powerful transnational economic actors may have an interest in limiting the state’s ability to constrain their own activities but they also depend on capable states to protect their returns, especially those from intangible assets.
Transnational economic actors.
Rescuing “embedded liberalism” would require a very different configuration of state-society relations and a correspondingly different kind of institutions and a broadly organized civil society. Whether the future unfold in the probable direction of a leaner, meaner state or embodies more unlikely elements of state-society synergy does not just depend on the economic logic of globalization.
", keyword0="Capital", keyword1="Civil Society", keyword2="Economic Globalization", keyword3="Globalization", keyword4="Hegemony", keyword5="International Economy", keyword6="State", keyword7="Transnational Capital", keyword8="World Politics", type="journal" }