1) Bibliographic data
Evans, Peter B. (1997) “The Eclipse of the State? Reflections on
Stateness in an Era of Globalization.” World Politics v. 50 Oct:62-87.
2) Question(s) addressed by the author and working arguments
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.
3)
Conceptual references to transnational – transnationalism
Transnational economic actors.
4) Conclusions or Final Remarks
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 unfolds 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.
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