first review www.theglobalsite.ac.uk 2001
Leo Panitch
Theorising the 'global-Western state'
Martin Shaw, Theory of the Global State: Globality as Unfinished Revolution, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2000, pp. 295
Theorizing globalization without the state is like playing Hamlet without the Prince, as Martin Shaw nicely puts it. In the survey of ‘the literature’ that constitutes Part I of this book, he offers an incisive critique of the type of ‘social science as stamp collecting’ that studies discrete nation-states while leaving out the relations between them, as well as of the ‘economism and sociologism’ of ‘global theorizing’ which finds it ‘difficult to conceive of globality except as the negation of statehood and politics’. On this basis he offers a welcome antidote, on the one hand, to the ‘tendency to discuss globalization as though it were primarily a set of socio-economic processes linked to the market liberalization of recent decades, which undermine the state’; and, on the other hand, to ‘easy rebuttal(s) which shows how much of world trade, investment, etc. remains within national economies. The debate then becomes trapped in this stale dilemma of globalization versus the nation-state’ (81-2). Shaw’s identification of this trap and his insistence on the need to escape is useful and timely.
Shaw’s own theorization properly involves insisting not only that ‘social relations are defined to a considerable extent by state or political relations’, but that the principle of ‘nationality-internationality’ is the ‘prime categoric framework’ for understanding even the ‘pre-global, modern social order’ (29). As set out in Part II of the book, he argues that ‘the hey-day of the nation state (roughly 1870-1945) was also that of modern European empire’ in which the ‘dominant form of state was not, therefore, simply a nation-state, but the nation-state-empire within an interimperial state system (104)’ For him, the crucial turning point that laid the foundation for what is today called globalization was the replacement of the classic (imperial) nation-state after World War II by a new ‘revolutionary’ international state form that represented the ‘unprecedented integration of many autonomous major centres of state power in the world, under US leadership’. The new ‘bloc order’ of the West, whereby the American superpower reconstructed the former nation-states of Europe and oversaw the creation of ‘legitimate international institutions’ (NATO, the UN, the Bretton Woods financial institutions, etc.), was primarily constituted in terms of American military predominance. The nation-state lived on in the Western bloc-state, but did so in only ‘neutered form, in most cases a shadow of its former existence’(120). The national form of the state was reinforced in the context of a cooperative international form through which ‘national state entities were penetrated by the international organizations of the Western state and adapted accordingly, finding new roles in pressing redefined, chiefly economic interests within their frameworks.’ (128)
Shaw’s notion of penetration here is especially important in terms of his insistence that what defines a state as ‘a power centre’ is its capacity to be ‘to a significant degree inclusive and constitutive of other forms and layers of state power (190).’ Analogous to municipal state forms (and colonial ones in the earlier era), the nation-states in the Western bloc-state were constituted by it as well as included within it. The EU does not represent a separate power centre in this sense: Shaw rightly argues that ‘European integration should not be opposed to the Atlantic alliance’. The latter was the ‘essential framework’ into which the former was historically ‘fitted’ (132); and even today, in terms of Shaw’s central criterion of organized violence, ‘Europe remains a secondary derivative form of state’ which is ‘dwarfed by the continuing transatlantic Western military political thrust led by the United States’ (190).
The Western bloc-state of the Cold War, in the context of the implosion of the USSR, is presented by Shaw, in Part III of the book, as now being transformed into a ‘global-Western state’. It includes the juridicially defined states of North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australasia, non-NATO states such as Finland, Ireland and Switzerland, and many non-Western states in central and eastern Europe, Latin America, East Asia and Africa which are so ‘closely dependent on and increasingly integrated with the Western state as not to constitute autonomous centres of state power’. It primarily functions as ‘a single centre of military state power’ but it is now also ‘multiply determined by a complex, overlapping set of relations and institutions’ through which ‘formally distinct centres of state power are mediated by highly developed and still extending linkages of economic and cultural as well as military-political kinds.’ (200-1) For the states within its orbit (and this tendentially means virtually all states today as economic globalization proceeds through the WTO and international commercial treaties), the ‘internationalization of the Western bloc-state [has] meant that rather than one nation-state intervening in another, internationalized power became part of the real constitution of each national state apparatus.’ The states involved actually define their national interest in terms of their participation in the global-Western state, while the latter’s political-military ‘interventions’ in states outside its orbit are legitimated (by Shaw himself, as well as by the agents of the global-Western state) as extending the principles of liberal democracy and human rights to the citizens of those ‘rogue’ states.
Unfortunately, however much there is to recommend this identification of the global-Western state, there is also a great deal that is problematic about Shaw’s theorization of it. There is, first of all, really no account, let alone a theorization, of the economic processes of globalization and the role of the state in relation to them over the past few decades. Most of the key texts that provide, from a variety of theoretical perspectives, accounts of the role of states in this respect (not only my own work, but that of Arrighi, Gowan, Helleiner, Moran, Sassen, Sobel, Tabb, Vogel just to name a few) are not listed in Shaw’s bibliography. This suggests that Shaw himself is still too closely tied to the conventional academic international relations literature, limiting himself largely to a fairly superficial reading of the international political economy literature that has developed within that discipline in recent years.
This in turn reflects a deeper problem. Shaw, an erstwhile Marxist of some notoriety, is very much concerned, in what is a constant sub-theme of this book, to insist that explanations of state behaviour in terms of class strategies or the dynamics of capitalism are ‘intrinsically problematic’ (118). He rightly identifies ‘a fundamental ambiguity’ in Marxism (which I have argued before goes all the way back to The Communist Manifesto) ‘over the relationships between capitalism… and the national-international framework within which it has been organized’ (41). He ascribes economistic interpretations of the changing role of states amidst globalization in good part to ‘the over-reliance of critical theorists on broadly Marxist approaches’ (82), but at the same time he notes that the Marxist theory of the state developed in the 1970s, which would provide an antidote to this, has been ‘curiously neglected’. Yet having said this much, he then entirely neglects Marxist state theory himself. He credits it (in passing) for recognizing organized violence and coercive apparatuses as central to state power. But he then seems to think it sufficient to cite Mann or Giddens to resolve the problem traditionally faced by ‘Marxists in failing to make clear enough the distinction between capitalism and the capitalist class, on the one hand, and state development on the other (184)’. In fact what Shaw himself fails to show is that Mann, let alone Giddens, has resolved that problem. It is not enough to repeatedly assert that it is wrong to assume that state strategies are bourgeois class strategies: even though this is true, we need some purchase on the relationship between the two. Shaw simply avoids the whole issue, offering not even an empirical account, let alone any theorization of the relationship between state and capital.
This is an astonishing omission. Shaw insists that ‘it is not possible to resolve the contradictions between capitalism and the state, within the framework of a theory of capitalism’ (42). But if this is so, then he must at least try to resolve the contradictions within his theory of state. To largely ignore them, as he does, impoverishes his contribution considerably in a world that he does not deny is, more than ever, capitalist. The failure to have any theory of capitalism, moreover, also renders almost vacuous his repeated references to the ‘social relations’ that the Western bloc-state and now the global-Western state are ‘rooted in’ (128). In theoretical terms, his overestimation of Clausewitz’s ‘fundamental contribution’, not only to strategic theory, but to ‘the general tradition of social theory’ founded by Hegel, Comte and Marx, would appear to be a central problem here, for as Shaw admits, Clausewitz’s ‘sociology was rudimentary - really nothing more than suggestive’ (59-61). We come away feeling, after reading this book, so is Shaw’s.
This set of problems bears directly on the question that Shaw poses, and the inadequate answer he gives, as to whether imperialism is a useful category for analyzing the dominance of the global-Western state. He is right to say that the classical Marxist writings on the concept at the beginning of the 20th century (he partially excepts Kautsky on ultra-imperialism) are inadequate. But to the extent this is so, it hardly can be because, as Shaw contends, among the specific set of features they saw as associated with imperialism, such as the ‘incorporation of pre-capitalist regions, export of capital, dominance of banking over industrial capital’, are no longer part of our contemporary landscape. The relationship between these phenomena and the state are precisely what needs to be examined and theorized in any serious political economy of globalization. To be sure, they need to be theorized in non-economistic ways, as classical theorists (including Kautsky to a considerable extent) failed to do. Bereft of such a theory, Shaw has recourse himself only to an economistic metaphor in trying to characterize state power today, seeing the global-Western state as ‘loosely analogous with corporate conglomerates [that] take over other corporations, to produce larger and larger, more or less integrated units of commercial power, which penetrate more and more markets’ (201-2). Rather than see the Western state’s incorporation and penetration of ‘more and more state machines’ as akin to this, he would have done much better to ask how and why the latter, through mechanisms that are indeed fundamentally political, facilitate capitalist conglomerates, domestically and internationally.
We do need a new theory of imperialism to properly understand the role of the state in this respect. Shaw’s specification of the two-stage development of the global-Western state makes a contribution to this, but his reluctance to see it as imperialistic (because the states integrated within it participate in the over-all system of power, and because these states are constituted in liberal democratic forms) is dubious. These very characteristics are precisely what make it a new imperialism. The fact that interventions against authoritarian states not integrated into the global-Western state are more or less credibly cast in human rights terms (Shaw’s endorsement of NATO’s Kosovo intervention lurks in this book like Stoppard’s rewriting of Hamlet through the characters of Rosencrantz and Gildenstern) is also relevant here, but this does not itself make these interventions any less imperialistic.
This is entirely apart from Shaw’s overly benign view of these interventions. Whatever one thinks of the interventions against Iraq and Yugoslavia in relation to the question of how large a role considerations of human rights entered into them (and how effective they were in this respect), the imperial nature of those interventions (and the imperial arbtrirariness that governed non-intervention in worse cases like Rwanda) is nicely captured in Stephen Lewis’s (Canada’s social democratic Ambassador to the United Nations at the time) description of how, in the case of Iraq, the UN was ‘conscripted into the role of providing cover for US foreign policy… serving as an imprimatur for a policy that the United States wanted to follow and either persuaded or coerced everyone to support… [This] may have been the UN’s most desolate hour - a demonstration of the enormous power of US influence and diplomacy when it is unleashed.’ The same might be said of NATO in the case of Kosovo: the fact that participation by all its nation-states was more ‘consensual’ hardly disposes of the matter of imperialism - on the contrary, it precisely speaks to the effects of their integration in the American-led global-Western state.
We also need a new theory of imperialism precisely because no other term captures so clearly the global system of power represented by the ‘global-Western state’, its general relation to the capitalist classes that it both leads and serves (and often saves), and, more specifically, the structural penetration of other states by the American state and by its capitalist classes that takes place through this system. Shaw leaves us with a vague sense that the vast inequalities of power and wealth over which the global-Western state presides has something to do with American capitalism, yet he has no theory of what it has to do with it. Especially since Shaw apparently rejects (almost in passing but nevertheless correctly in my view) the notion of a transnational capitalist class of which states are the mere agents (86-7), we need to ask what is the empirical and theoretical status and import of statement like this one: ‘Since the majority of the large transnational corporations are American-based, the USA has a profound interest in the internationalization of law, especially commercial law (250).’ Insofar as American state and capitalist power is at the centre of this process, we need to try to understand, in historical perspective, whether it is because the American penetration of the European states by the bloc-state of the post-war era left them much less autonomy in economic policy making than Shaw (rather conventionally) thinks it did. Shaw concentrates on the penetration of military apparatuses, and (albeit to a much lesser extent) on the role of international financial institutions, but what were the implications of direct American investment in Europe in terms of the penetration of American capital as a social force inside the European states? To answer this question by pointing to the increasing penetration of the American economy itself by foreign investors amounting to the same thing going the other way today is facile. Foreign capital entering the USA is not at all about challenging American supremacy. On the contrary, it reinforces it and depends on it.
We also need to be aware (as Shaw is not when he speaks of a Dollar-Yen-Euro triad of currency domination) of the implications of the dollar’s pre-eminence as a world currency (which the yen and Euro hardly match even today) and the complementary supremacy of the US Treasury and Federal Reserve vis a vis the other national (and regional) state economic apparatuses in the global-Western state. There is nothing wrong about Shaw’s insistence on the importance of American political-military power as one irreducible constitituve dimension of global power, but the importance of (and the contradictions faced by) American political-economic power especially needs analyzing and theorizing at a time when, as Shaw himself admits in relation to the post-bloc era, the pattern of determination shifts towards economic and cultural integration.
In this respect, Shaw’s discussion of international institutions, while important in locating them within the framework of global-Western state’s role in integrating and reconstituting states, is unfortunately rather superficial as regards the nature and significance of American power within them. He also only barely skims the surface as regards the international financial institutions and the determining role the central economic institutions of the American state play within and through them. Shaw, who appears to sympathize with anti-globalization movements that are struggling against those institutions today, is right to insist that the notion of transforming the global order through ‘global civil society’ without reconstituting global state power is a pipedream. He says he wants changes in this respect that are ‘far more radical than that envisaged by globalist Western social democrats’. But apart from democratizing local state structures and integrating them within the Western-centred global and regional state networks, he has nothing more radical to say than that these latter power networks need to be ‘tamed’ (‘to make their messy leadership structures and bureaucracies a great deal more accountable and responsive to the needs of society world-wide’). This is pretty thin stuff.
The problematic role of the USA in relation to the exercise of global-Western state power today gets recognized by Shaw mainly in terms of the constraints on human rights interventions posed by the American state’s ‘inordinate’ dependence (read accountability and responsiveness?) on isolationist domestic US politics. Nothing systematic is said, however, about what else determines American policy in terms of how it exercises its central role in managing, extending and reproducing global capitalism. Shaw insists repeatedly on the need for the democratization of the authoritarian states outside the orbit of the global-Western state. He is right about this, although one wishes he had more to say about the fundamental change in class power that would be needed to attend such a democratization to make it really substantive rather than cosmetic. But unless he now turns to developing his theory of the global-Western state so as address seriously its relation to the profoundly undemocratic character of global capitalism, and tries to develop a more substantial understanding of the social relations, the class forces and the contradictions embedded in it, his theoretical contribution will not only remain very limited but will continue to get in the way of his radical democratic goals.