Context construction through competition: the prerogative of public power, intermediary institutions, and the expansion of statehood through competition

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between the evolution of statehood and competition in the European context. To begin with, a particular take on the evolution of modern political power in the state form in Europe is developed. Against this background, the article reconstructs how the institutionalization of competition as a specific type of policy tool has been used by emerging modern states to establish their authority vis-à-vis competing claims to public authority in society. The article, furthermore, engages in an examination of (neo-)corporatist and governance-based attempts both to curb and to expand the use of competition as a tool for organizing social processes, and the implications of these attempts for the state of statehood.

Keywords:

• competition
• corporatism
• Franz Neumann
• governance
• neo-corporatism
• public power
• state-building
• state theory

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the ITEPE conference The Role of Competition in European and International Integration, Copenhagen 19 – 20 June 2014. I am grateful to the two external reviewers as well as Eva Hartmann, Bob Jessop, and Tobias Werron for instructive comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Poul F. Kjaer is Professor at the Department of Business and Politics Copenhagen Business School, Denmark and Grant of the European Research Council project ‘Institutional Transformation in European Political Economy – A Socio-legal Approach (ITEPE-312331 – www.itepe.eu). He holds degrees in political science, law and sociology from Aarhus University, European University Institute (Florence) and Goethe University Frankfurt respectively. He is the author of Constitutionalism in the Global Realm – A Sociological Approach (London: Routledge, 2014) and Between Governing and Governance: On the Emergence, Function and Form of Europe's Post-national Constellation (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2010).

ORCID

Poul F. Kjaer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8027-3601

Notes

1. For a detailed outline of this perspective and a reconstruction of the evolution in the meaning of the notion of competition over time, see Werron (2015) in this special issue.

2. At the organizational level, a common trait of these structures was, however, that the household institution served as their central organizational nucleus and thus that they were based upon an integrationist logic in which multiple functional processes related to everything from economic transactions, religious manifestations, and intimate reproduction, to the exercise of political power, all unfolded in a manner which meant that they were not easily distinguishable. One consequence of this was that the pre-modern context was characterized by the absence of a clear-cut distinction between public and private, as also expressed in the distinction between public and private law, in which public law refers to the structuration of the relationship between legal subjects and the state, and private law to the horizontal relationship between legal subjects (see, also, Kjaer 2011b).

3. For more on this, see, in particular, the work of Chris Thornhill (in particular, Thornhill 2015).

4. Another reason is, of course, the emergence of extensive forms of public and private forms of transnational ordering located beyond the state through the European integration process and various forms of ‘global governance’. For further reading on this dimension and its implication for statehood see Kjaer (2014).

5. Although this distinction was somewhat unlucky in so far as it indicated that the state was external to society and not itself a part of society, it clearly indicated that the modern state was to be understood as an autonomous structure with distinct normative and functional features.

6. For a similar view, see Foucault (2008, 111).

7. For a critique of the concept of neo-corporatism from an US-American critical theory perspective, see Sciulli (1992, 73 ff.).

8. Due to the Europeanization of competition law and politics, this development is, of course, not only pursued by states but also by the European Union, acting as another centre of public power and authority.

Additional information

Funding

This article was developed with the support of the European Research Council within the framework of the project ‘Institutional Transformation in European Political Economy – A Socio-legal Approach (ITEPE-312331 – www.itepe.eu)’ [ITEPE-312331 is the grant number].