Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism
Wolfgang Streeck
MPIfG Book
Abstract
The era of hyperglobalization once hailed as the ’end of history‘ was characterised by boundless capitalist expansion. The neoliberal revolution gave rise to a politics of scale aimed at the centralization and unification of states and state systems: the replacement of national with global governance or, in Europe, of the nation-state with a supranational superstate, the European Union.
The ’New World Order‘ proclaimed by the United States in the wake of the Soviet collapse proved to be ungovernable by democratic means. Instead, it was ruled through a combination of technocracy and mercatocracy, failing spectacularly to provide for political stability, social legitimacy and international peace. Marked by a series of economic and institutional crises, hyperglobalization gave rise to various kinds of political countermovements that rebelled against and ultimately stopped the upward transfer of state authority in its tracks.
Taking Back Control? analyses the ongoing tug-of-war between the forces of globalism and democracy, of centralization and decentralization, and unification and differentiation of states and state systems, and how they are tied to the advance of global capitalism and the prospects for its social and democratic regulation. Exploring the possibility for states and the societies they govern to take back control over their collective fate, the book is an attempt at a renewed theory of the state in political economy. Inspired by the work of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes, it discusses the potential outlines of a state system allowing for democratic governance within and peaceful cooperation between sovereign nation-states.
Contents
Introduction: Political Economy beyond Globalism: States, War, and Capitalist Democracy
Part I The Demise of Centralism
1 Global Politics and Regional Planning
2 The Demise of the New World Order
3 Stuck: Between Globalism and Democracy
4 Breaking the Deadlock: Democracy and the Politics of Scale
Part II After Three Decades
5 A Dual Crisis I: Capitalism
6 A Dual Crisis II: Democracy
Part III States and State Systems
7 Integration and Differentiation
8 The European Union: From Neoliberal to Geopolitical Integration
Part IV Beyond Globalist Centralisation
9 Mega-Statism and Its Limitations
10 Small-Statism and Its Possibilities
Author
Wolfgang Streeck
Reviews
“In this wild ride of a must-read book, Wolfgang Streeck clarifies the depth of current crises in both capitalism and democracy, offers a detailed condemnation of the disastrous post-1989 unipolar neoliberal politics of enforced hyper-globalization, and suggests his own rules and structure for a more diverse, democratic, and peaceful state system we might begin to build, but that a long-tired politics and now mindless militarism still keep from public view.”
Joel Rogers, co-author of American Society: How it Really Works
“Taking Back Control? provides both a brilliant diagnosis of what has gone wrong with globalization and a persuasive prescription for renewing democratic governance. Wolfgang Streeck synthesizes arguments from politics, economics, and sociology in a book that deserves a place besides those of his 20th century intellectual forebears – Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes.”
Fred Block, author of Capitalism: The Future of an Illusion
“To me, one crucial question emerges from this masterclass in contemporary political economy: does the current breakdown of a neoliberalism underpinned by US hegemony portend a regression to fascism and war as in the 1930s, or is there a more hopeful prospect? Drawing on Dani Rodrik’s critique of hyper-globalisation and the democratic alternative offered by the ‘Keynes-Polanyi state’, Wolfgang Streeck argues compellingly for a deglobalised world polity founded on a humane economic nationalism. ‘The nation state’, he claims, ‘is the only institution capable of asserting the primacy of society over capitalism’. Agree or disagree, Streeck offers a radical and necessary challenge to conventional wisdom.”
Robert Skidelsky, author of The Machine Age
“This Maverick Thinker Is the Karl Marx of Our Time“
Christopher Caldwell, New York Times, Opinion, November 28, 2024
