![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
Following recent criticism of the concept of a transnational state, this paper attempts to defend the concept by focusing on the role that property plays in organizing societies. Through an analysis of how the rise of private property reoriented the role of feudal absolutist states, the paper argues that contemporary free trade agreements are transforming nation-states into transnational states by restricting their ability to legislate against corporate interests.
Notes
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
About the author
J. Z. Garrod is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Notes
1 See Burbach and Robinson, “The Fin De Siecle Debate”; Demirović, “Materialist State Theory”; Harris, “To Be Or Not To Be”; Liodakis, “The New Stage”; Liodakis, Totalitarian Capitalism; Liodakis, “Recent Developments of Totalitarian Capitalism”; Robinson and Harris, “Global Ruling Class”; Robinson, “Nation-Centric Thinking”; Robinson, “Debate on Globalization”; Robinson, Theory of Global Capitalism; Robinson, “Global Capitalism”; Robinson, “Beyond the Theory”; Robinson, “Capitalist Globalization”; Robinson, Crisis of Humanity; Robinson, “New Global Capitalism.” The most popular theorist of the TNS, William Robinson, Theory of Global Capitalism, 88, defines it as “an emerging network that comprises transformed and externally integrated national states, together with the supranational economic and political forums, and has not yet acquired any centralized institutional form.” In his more recent work, Robinson, Crisis of Humanity, 67, has added some key modifiers: “We can conceptualize a TNS apparatus as a loose network comprised of inter- and supranational political and economic institutions together with national state apparatuses that have been penetrated and transformed by transnational forces, and have not yet acquired and may never acquire any centralized form.” Liodakis, Totalitarian Capitalism, 63, is another theorist who claims that the TNS is “constituted by international organizations (UN, IMF, World Bank, WTO, OECD, and so on), in close interconnection with the most powerful capitalist states and various international capitalist groupings (G7 or G20, World Economic Forum, the Trilateral, and so on), and plays a crucial and increasingly powerful role in forming the conditions for cooperation, the basic policies and the strategy for capital on a world level.” Alex Demirović, “Materialist State Theory,” 56, provides a similar definition of what he terms the “transnational network state” in which there is an emerging “apparatus that consists of an ensemble of state apparatuses on a local, national and international scale as well as formerly private organizations.” Similar to other definitions, Demirović, “Materialist State Theory,” 53, sees the transnational network state as having the specific function “of organizing the transnational element, developing policy and controlling the reproduction of the global accumulation process in the interest of this capital sector.”
2 Critics have pointed out, for instance, that transnational accumulation is not particularly new (Lacher, Beyond Globalization; McMichael, “Transnational State”; Tabb, “Globalization Today”; Teschke and Lacher, “Capitalist Competition”; Wood, “Global Capital”; Wood, “Reply to Critics”); that TNS theory is built upon a mechanical relationship between the rise of transnational capital and the emergence of the TNS (Block, “Using Social Theory”; Cammack, “Transnational State”; Carroll, “Global, Transnational, Regional”; Mann, “Globalization”; McMichael, “Transnational State”; Tabb, “Globalization Today”); that TNS theory makes a “category error” by including supranational forums as part of the TNS apparatus (Arrighi, “Global Capitalism”; Mann, “Globalization”; Van Der Pijl, “Globalization”); that TNS theory is based on an arbitrary periodization schema (Moore, “Capital, Territory”; Wood, “Reply to Critics”); and that TNS theory makes the “global” into an abstract space (Cammack, “Transnational State”; Carroll, “Global, Transnational, Regional”; McMichael, “Transnational State”; Moore, “Capital, Territory”). There are other critiques that are much harder to swallow, however: that globalization is nothing new (Lacher, Beyond Globalization; Teschke and Lacher, “Capitalist Competition”; Tabb, “Globalization Today”; Wood, “Global Capital”; Wood, “Reply to Critics”); that the reality and extent of transnational capital is overstated (Anievas, “Global State”; Panitch and Gindin, American Empire; Prashad, “World on a Slope”; Wood, “Global Capital”); and that multiple nation-states are a necessary and immutable part of capitalism (Anievas, “Global State”; Cammack, “Transnational State”; Davidson, “Multiple Nation-States”; Panitch and Gindin, American Empire; Tabb, “Globalization Today”; Wood, “Global Capital”; Wood, “Reply to Critics”).
3 See Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century; Cammack, “Transnational State”; Callinicos, Imperialism; Harvey, New Imperialism; Panitch and Gindin, American Empire; Wood, Empire of Capital.
4 Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 4. As Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 223, notes, under globalization “particular components of the national state begin to function as the institutional home for the operation of powerful dynamics constitutive or critical for ‘global capital.’ In so doing, these state institutions reorient their particular policy work or broader state agendas toward the requirements of global economy even as they continue to be coded as national.”
5 McMichael, “Transnational State,” 203.
6 See Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century; Harvey, Spaces of Hope; Tabb, “Globalization Today”; Wallerstein, “Globalization.”
7 Lacher, Beyond Globalization; Teschke and Lacher, “Capitalist Competition”; Wood, “Global Capital”; Wood, “Reply to Critics.”
8 Despite their many differences, contemporary theories of imperialism and dependency tend to share the view that globalization represents some form of return to the conditions of the earlier stage of imperialism and financialization that characterized the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like their classical counterparts, contemporary theorists continue to see the global political economy as made up of competing nation-states that “act” on behalf of “their” capitals. This is why they often prefer the label multinational corporation (MNC) as opposed to TNC (for example, Anievas, “Global State,” 196; Panitch and Gindin, American Empire, 112) and are skeptical of claims that nation-states are being transformed or transcended by transnational capital. They frequently argue that nation-states are not victims of globalization, but, rather, “its authors and enforcers” (Panitch and Gindin, “Superintending,” 101), and that “global capitalism is more than ever a global system of national states” (Wood, “Global Capital,” 25). They all believe that globalization is not so much a stage, period, or phase, but, rather, something that is inherent to the expansionary logic of capital itself. Tabb, “Globalization Today,” 1, writes, for instance, that “the most significant features of what is called globalization have always been part of capitalist development, even if the forms are different in different periods (including our own).” In the view of these theorists, the earlier stage of imperialism was also characterized by financialization, and so globalization is simply more of the same; in other words, the most recent version of a pre-existing tendency. The main problem, however, is that in none of these theories is there any attempt to discuss how states (or types of state) are made and transformed over time. For all their various positions, they all put forward a vision of the global political economy as constituted by rival capitals and their respective nation-states; that is, they assume the existence of an immutable, territorial state system in which rival states exist (and have always existed) in unequal relationships with other states. As put by Wallerstein, “Globalization,” 56, “States are by definition rivals, bearing responsibility to different sets of rival firms.” Nowhere do these theorists ask what a state is, what states are made of, or how they are changing.
9 Wood, “Reply to Critics.”
10 See Barrow, Critical Theories of the State; Jessop, The State.
11 See Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society. The point is made most coherently by Abrams, “Studying the State.” As Abrams, “Studying the State,” 75, notes, “The internal and external relations of political and governmental institutions (the state-system) can be studied effectively without postulating the reality of the state. So in particular can their involvements with economic interests in an overall complex of domination and subjection.”
12 Jessop, The State, 17–18.
13 Teeple, Globalization, 83.
14 Teeple, Globalization, 83. While many see property rights as being created by the state, it is important to note that the state is merely the vehicle by which property rights are codified and enforced. As Clement, Class, Power, Property, 214, notes, “While the state appears to be the source of private property and is justifiably seen as its guardian, it would be more accurate to see the state in capitalism as arising to sanction private property and protect it from the antagonisms of civil society.”
15 This is not to suggest that state managers or military officials, and so on, do not have their own interests, but rather that the state does not, as such, possess its own interests because it is merely an institutional ensemble through which real people act.
16 Marx, “Critical Notes,” 8.
17 Teeple, “Honoured in the Breach,” 137. This approach is one suggested (but not often taken) by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology. The concept of a mode of production was used to explain the emergence of capitalism and distinguish it qualitatively from other historical forms of the division of labour, mainly feudalism. Empirically, it refers to a combination of the productive forces (raw materials and labour power) and associated property relations of an age. The concept came out of Marx’s critiques of Hegel, Bauer, and the classical political economists (among others) for their failure to explain “civil society,” the sphere of private interests that would later become known as the capitalist economy. Where other writers sought to explain the emergence of this type of society on the basis of human nature or the development of the human mind, Marx, “A Contribution,” 4, argued that it was instead the result of a transformation in “the material conditions of life”; the result of the long process by which mobile private property came to dominate feudal landed property.
18 Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 5.
19 In Sassen’s periodization schema, tipping points refer to events, defined “by their significance as markers of transition” (Abrams, Historical Sociology, 195). Sewell, “Historical Events,” 843, describes them as “sequences of occurrences that result in transformations of structures.” Organizing logics are defined as the prevailing dynamic through which capabilities are institutionalized. Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 10, identifies three: the centrifugal logic of the medieval epoch, consisting of several encompassing normative orders; the centripetal logic of the national epoch, consisting of one master normativity; and the centrifugal logic of the global that is currently in the process of separating that master normativity “into multiple partial normative orders, thereby leaving open the question as to its sustainability.”
20 Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 14.
21 Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 9.
22 See Robinson, “Saskia Sassen.”
23 Marx, “A Contribution,” 4.
24 Winters, Oligarchy. See also, Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 186–87: “In the case of the nations which grew out of the Middle Ages, tribal property evolved through various stages—feudal landed property, corporative movable property, capital invested in manufacture—to modern capital, determined by big industry and universal competition, i.e. pure private property, which has cast off all semblance of a communal institution and has shut out the State from any influence on the development of property. To this modern private property corresponds the modern State, which, purchased gradually by the owners of property by means of taxation, has fallen entirely into their hands through the national debt, and its existence has become wholly dependent on the commercial credit which the owners of property, the bourgeois, extend to it, as reflected in the rise and fall of State funds on the stock exchange. By mere fact that it is a class and no longer an estate, the bourgeoisie is forced to organize itself no longer locally, but nationally, and to give a general form to its mean average interest. Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil society; but it is nothing more than the form of organization which the bourgeoisie necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests.” See also, Hardt, “The Common.”
25 See Carruthers and Ariovich, “Sociology of Property.”
26 Prudham and Coleman, “Introduction,” 13.
27 Prudham and Coleman, “Introduction,” 14.
28 Blomley, “Cuts, Flows,” 205.
29 Prudham and Coleman, “Introduction,” 13.
30 Prudham and Coleman, “Introduction,” 15.
31 Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 32.
32 See Tomba, “Accumulation and Time.”
33 Marx, “First Draft of Letter,” paragraph 41.
34 Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 75.
35 Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 85. On page 420, she also notes that “even as industrial capitalism was becoming the dominant dynamic, most people, most firms, and most political debates were not centred on it. Objectively the most prevalent condition remained agriculture and trade.”
36 Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 15.
37 Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 15.
38 Lacher, Beyond Globalization, 155.
39 Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 8.
40 The Ecologist, Whose Common Future?, 23.
41 See Polanyi, Great Transformation; Wood, Origin of Capitalism.
42 Slater, Modern England, lxxii.
43 See Comninel, “Marx’s Context,” 472; Dufour, “Social-Property Regimes,” 595.
44 Teeple, Globalization, 156.
45 Teeple, Globalization, 156.
46 Teeple, Globalization, 156.
47 See Pollard, European Economic Integration.
48 Heilbroner, Nature and Logic of Capitalism, 89.
49 See McMichael, “Transnational State,” 204: “Absolutism emerged out of medieval political domains, reformulating power as a politicized form of class rule by the European aristocracy. Capitalism emerged in the political alliance of ‘proto-capitalist’ absolutist states and long-distance traders, where absolutist states ‘crystallized merchant wealth into capital by the political and legal regulation of commerce, thereby sponsoring the foundations of a world market which constituted the precondition of industrial capital.’ Absolutism integrated foreign and local commodity circuits, developing public authority and private property simultaneously through the recovery of Roman law and aristocratic power. That is, historically, capitalism emerged as a political-economic phenomenon. The subsequent episodes of mercantilism, colonialism, and the movement towards ‘free-trade imperialism’ of the nineteenth century all accompanied the maturation of the state as a national territorial, but world-historical, entity.”
50 Marx, Capital: Volume 1, 915–16.
51 See Neveling, “Export Processing Zones.”
52 On tax havens, see Deneault, Offshore; Deneault, Canada A New Tax Haven; Norfield, The City. On dark pools, see Lewis, Flash Boys; Sassen, Expulsions. On temporary foreign worker programs, see Robertson et al., “Long List of Canadian Firms.”
53 Gilman, “Twin Insurgency,” 3.
54 Gilman, “Twin Insurgency,” 10.
55 McBride and Shields, Dismantling a Nation, 161. TAFTA focuses on the removal of regulatory differences between the United States and European nations, while the TPP involves the removal of similar barriers between Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam, and is open to all 21 countries in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) region. TiSA involves the European Union, the United States, and 23 other predominantly high-income countries.
56 Harvey, New Imperialism; Panitch and Gindin, American Empire; Wood, Empire of Capital.
57 Macpherson, Theory of Possessive Individualism.
58 The transformation of rights is incredibly nuanced at the national level. Perhaps one of the best early examples is the emergence of modern banking (see, for example, Galbraith, Money; Kim, “Modern Banking”). Kim, “Modern Politics,” 811, provides a brief description: “Modern banking finds its origins in the practices of London goldsmiths in the second half of the seventeenth century. The historical event that led to this invention (by goldsmiths) was the appropriation of cash deposited in the London Mint by King Charles I. In 1638, in order to raise funds for war, Charles I appropriated £200,000 in coin and bullion deposited by London merchants in the Mint. Even though the Crown returned the sum on the condition that the depositors would loan him £40,000, property owners sought alternatives. A number of London goldsmiths offered an alternative safekeeping service by using the scheme of double ownership. They printed additional deposit certificates and loaned them to numerous third parties, while still offering depositors the right of withdrawal on demand. This use of loans for safekeeping was not unique in history. Around the middle of the seventeenth century, bankers in Seville (Spain) loaned most deposited money to private industry and commerce to escape Charles V’s attempt to confiscate the funds remaining in their vaults. But goldsmith-bankers were more innovative. Instead of emptying their vaults, they introduced transferable banknotes. This strategy was very successful in ‘merging’ the interests of numerous third parties in the same funds. Creating simultaneous ownership interests among third parties and depositors would make it harder for the Crown to appropriate the funds and would elicit greater opposition to the Crown’s further efforts do to so.”
59 As many authors note, a significant part of these agreements is the transfer of power away from subnational governments (states or provinces) towards national governments (see, for example, Clarkson, “Multi-Level State”; Clarkson, “Global Governance”; Clarkson, Does North America Exist?; Clarkson and Wood, A Perilous Imbalance; McBride, Paradigm Shift; McBride, “New Constitutionalism”). Since subnational governments may have significant rights over substantial areas of the economy, as in Canada, this may lead to the creation of new jurisdictional conflicts with unclear outcomes.
60 Brennan, “Trade and Investment Liberalisation in Canada,” 24.
61 See Shields and McBride, Dismantling a Nation, 168.
62 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, “Investor-State Dispute Settlement.”
63 McBride, Paradigm Shift, 142.
64 I am not asserting that these agreements are the same, but, rather, that they are similar in that they both provide new rights to TNCs to sue national and subnational governments; in other words, to protect global investors’ property (that is, the rights of the corporation of which they are part owners) in a variety of national jurisdictions. The specifics and intricacies of the agreements are different, relating to different sectors of the economy as well as the competitive strengths of the countries involved. What is being identified here as similar is merely the tendency to limit state action.
65 Geist, “CETA’s Details,” paragraph 3.
66 McQuaig, “Canadian Democracy,” paragraph 6.
67 See Sinclair, “NAFTA Chapter 11”; Trew, “Harper’s Corporate Rights Deals.”
68 McQuaig, “Canadian Democracy,” paragraph 8.
69 Sinclair, “CETA investment reforms,” paragraph 4.
70 Cited in Whittington, “Canada-EU free-trade,” paragraph 15.
71 Beltrame and Blanchfield, “EU Boasts,” paragraph 18.
72 Whittington, “Canada-EU free-trade,” paragraph 19.
73 There is a significant literature detailing how and why these agreements act as corporate constitutions (see, for example, Clarkson and Wood, A Perilous Imbalance; Cutler, “The Privatization of Authority”; Gill and Law, “Global Hegemony”; Hirschl, “New Constitutionalism”; McBride, “New Constitutionalism”; Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights; Teeple, “Human Rights”).
74 See Geist, “CETA’s Details,” paragraph 5: “The insistence on including investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions is particularly puzzling. These rules, which allow companies to seek damages where local regulations interfere with their economic expectations, are commonly found in foreign-investment treaties with developing countries whose court systems are unknown or viewed as risky by potential investors. There are no such risks in Canada and Europe, however, because both offer reliable, respected court systems that are widely used by companies from around the world. Moreover, Canada has first-hand experience with the dangers associated with ISDS, as it infamously lost a major environmental case involving Delaware-based Bilcon, which had proposed the expansion of a quarry on the shore of the Bay of Fundy, in September 2002, that was rejected by the Nova Scotia and federal governments after a joint review panel recommended it not to proceed. The government also faces hundreds of millions of dollars in liability stemming from a patent claim by pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly.”
75 Robinson, “Capitalist Globalization,” 411.
76 See Teeple, “Honoured in the Breach.”
77 See Dolack, “TPP is Not Dead.”
78 See Barber, “Brexit and the City.”
79 Robinson, Crisis of Humanity.