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Abstract
This article addresses recent theoretical discussion about the state under conditions of globalisation, focusing in particular on recently popular ‘world state’ theory, as articulated by Martin Shaw and Alexander Wendt. It suggests that while world state theory is useful to the extent that it historicises the function of the state, it can be challenged for its uncritical approach to the question of how state power is actually constituted. To make this argument, the article refers first to an emerging Marxist critique that focuses on liberal hypocrisy and the role of imperial violence in the formation of the world state. However, while this approach reveals the elision of many forms of violence in world state theory, it shares world state theory's tendency to avoid exploring the role of more constitutive forms of power. Challenging this view, the article turns to Foucault's theory of governmentality and some recent applications of it to Imperialism, Empire, and the War on Terror. These works speak not only to the importance of governmental reason in determining modes of sovereignty but encourage us to adopt an open-minded attitude towards the sorts of resistances it might provoke.
Notes
1 See, for example, John Gerard Ruggie, ‘International Responses to Technology: Concepts and Trends’, International Organization 29, no. 3 (1975): 557–83; Robert O. Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1977); and Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
2 Anthony McGrew, ‘Between Two Worlds: Europe in a Globalizing Era’, Government and Opposition 37, no. 1 (2002): 347.
3 See here especially Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 222–71; and Ian Clarke, Globalization and International Relations Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 62–5.
4 Martin Shaw, ‘The State of Globalization: Towards a Theory of State Transformation’, Review of International Political Economy 4, no. 3 (1997): 498.
5 See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992); and Alexander Wendt, ‘Why a World State is Inevitable’, European Journal of International Relations 9, no. 4 (2003): 491–542.
6 Wendt, ‘Why a World State is Inevitable’, 511.
7 Barry Hindess, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 131.
8 Shaw, ‘The State of Globalization’, 499.
9 Ibid., 500.
10 Ibid., 501.
11 Martin Shaw, Global Society and International Relations: Sociological Concepts and Political Perspectives (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 60.
12 Shaw, ‘The State of Globalization’, 504.
13 Michael Mann, cited in Shaw, ‘The State of Globalization’, 504–5.
14 See Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in Max Weber's Vocation Essays, ed. David Owen and Tracy Strong (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2004).
15 Michael Mann, States, War, and Capitalism: Studies in Political Sociology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 4.
16 Ibid., 53, 56.
17 Shaw, ‘The State of Globalization’, 506.
18 Ibid., 507.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 508.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 509.
24 Ibid.
25 Wendt, ‘Why a World State is Inevitable’, 492.
26 Ibid.
27 Alexander Wendt, ‘Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics’, International Organization 46, no. 2 (1992): 445.
28 Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 198.
29 Ibid., 10.
30 For a critique of the epistemological inconsistencies of this position, see Steve Smith, ‘Wendt's World’, Review of International Studies 26 (2000): 151–63.
31 Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, 213.
32 Ibid., 202.
33 Mann, States, War, and Capitalism, 4.
34 Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, 206.
35 Wendt, ‘Why a World State is Inevitable’, 505.
36 Ibid., 504.
37 Ibid.
38 Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, 207.
39 Wendt, ‘Why a World State is Inevitable’, 506.
40 Ibid., 505.
41 Fukuyama, End of History and the Last Man.
42 Wendt, ‘Why a World State is Inevitable’, 511.
43 Ibid., 513.
44 Ibid., 508.
45 See Daniel Deudney, ‘Nuclear Weapons and the Waning of the Real-State’, Daedalus 124, no. 2 (1995): 209–31; and Wendt, ‘Why a World State is Inevitable’, 517.
46 Wendt, ‘Why a World State is Inevitable’, 517–24.
47 Ibid., 504.
48 See here especially Gowan's criticism of Shaw in Peter Gowan, Leo Panitch, and Martin Shaw, ‘The State, Globalization and the New Imperialism: A Roundtable Discussion’, Historical Materialism 9 (2001): 3–38.
49 See, for example, Michael Doyle, ‘Liberalism and World Politics’, in International Relations Theory: Realism, Pluralism, Globalism, and Beyond, ed. P.R. Viotti and M. Kauppi (New York: Macmillan, 1993); Fukuyama, End of History and the Last Man; and J.S. Levy, ‘Domestic Politics and War’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 (1988): 653–73.
50 Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, ‘The Imperial Peace: Democracy, Force and Globalization’, European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 4 (1999): 404.
51 Ibid., 422.
52 Ibid., 406.
53 Julian Reid, ‘War, liberalism, and Modernity: The Biopolitical Provocations of “Empire”’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 17, no. 1 (2004): 69.
54 See, for example, Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy 1945–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1988); and William Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
55 Ross Hutchings, ‘Empire and the State: A Critical Theoretical Assessment’, Australian Journal of International Affairs 60, no. 3 (2006): 434.
56 Ibid.
57 Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, ‘Retreiving the Imperial: Empire and International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 31, no. 1 (2002): 111.
58 Hutchings, ‘Empire and the State’, 434.
59 Ibid., 435.
60 Ibid., 438.
61 Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, in Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), 122.
62 Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, discussion; Interactivist Info Exchange, 2003, 122, http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=03/01/13/0056200 (accessed December 9, 2006).
63 Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Faubion, Power, 343.
64 Ibid., 341.
65 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population; Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, Lectures at the College De France (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 109.
66 Ibid., 105.
67 Colin Gordon, ‘Governmental Rationality: An Introduction’, in The Foucault Effect; Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 4.
68 Barry Hindess, ‘Liberalism – What's in a Name?’ in Global Governmentality; Governing International Spaces, ed. Wendy Larner and William Walters (London: Routledge, 2004), 28.
69 Barry Hindess, ‘Politics as Government: Michel Foucault's Analysis of Political Reason’, Alternatives 30, no. 4 (2005): 403.
70 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 10.
71 Ibid., 182.
72 Ibid., 36.
73 Ibid., 313.
74 Ibid., 313.
75 See, for example, Ronnie D. Lipschutz, ‘The Clash of Governmentalities: The Fall of the UN Republic and America's Reach for Empire’, Contemporary Security Policy 23, no. 3 (2002): 214–31; Iver B. Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending, ‘“The International” as Governmentality’, Millenium: Journal of International Studies 35, no. 3 (2007): 677–701; Timothy W. Luke, ‘The Insurgency of Global Empire and the Counterinsurgency of Local Resistance: New World Order in an Era of Civilian Provisional Authority’, Third World Quarterly 28, no. 2 (2007): 419–34; Mark Kelly, ‘Racism, Nationalism and Biopolitics: Foucault's Society Must Be Defended, 2003’, Contretemps, 4 (2004): 58–70; Mitchell Dean, ‘Nomos and the Politics of World Order’, in Global Governmentality; Governing International Spaces, ed. Wendy Larner and William Walters (London: Routledge, 2004): 40–58; and Julian Reid, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror; Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity, and the Defence of Logistical Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
76 Michael Dillon, ‘The Security of Governance’, in Larner and Walters, Global Governmentality; Governing International Spaces.
77 Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, 210.
78 Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, 122–3.
79 Mihalis Mentinis, Zapatistas: The Chiapas Revolt and What It Means for Radical Politics (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2006).
80 Ana C. Dinerstein, ‘Lessons from a Journey: The Piquetero Movement in Argentina’, in Subverting the Present, Imagining the Future: Insurrection, Movement, Commons, ed. Werner Bonefeld (New York: Autonomedia, 2007).
81 See Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary’, in The Castoriadis Reader, ed. D.A. Curtis (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 319–37.