Privatising the State by Béatrice Hibou , Jonathan Derrick (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 267 Béatrice Hibou (ed.), Jonathan Derrick (trans.), Privatising the State (London: Hurst; New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 279. ISBN 0-231-13464-9. $37.00 (pbk). Against the trend of many edited books, this collection successfully argues a focused theoretical point across a range of country case studies. In essence, the authors do not represent processes of privatization in terms of their success or failure; nor do they wish to look at privatization as an unproblematic concept, which can then be used to derive analyses of the changing forms of states and markets. Rather, the impetus of this book is in a sense more profound: it aims to define privatization as a social realm in which the meaning of the distinction between the state and the civic/private is nullified. The repercussions of this argument are considerable. There is now an established literature on privatization that—in normatively critical fashion—demon strates how the (neo)liberal tenets of privatization are misleading because the insti tutions of the market and the state are constantly being 'straddled' by well-placed elites. However, Hibou and her co-authors are much more determinedly TiminaT: it is not the violation of familiar categorizations (state/market, private/public, bureau cratic/ civic) that are being undermined but the categorizations themselves. Thus, there are processes of 'stateification' (perhaps its original French phras ing is more elegant!), marketization, forms of political regulation, forms of legiti mization, and negotiation which all locate the meaning of privatization in a complex social realm in which public authority is economic power and vice versa. The concern of the book is not to evaluate the processes that are captured within this perspective as much as to map them and make the core revisionist point that we need to rethink the way we look at privatization before we might then comment on its desirability, performance, and so on. The book is divided into three sections, each of which focuses on a different aspect of the politics of privatization. Part I uses the cases of China and Poland to demon strate how privatization has not led to an emaciation of the state, but a displacement of state authority into new areas of economic activity. Both cases show how states use new forms of regulation (by 'remote control' in Kernen's words), new ideolog ical constructions, and numerous 'revolving doors' of personnel to maintain state influence in privatized firms. Reading these chapters, one is persuaded that priva tization has done nothing for the 'free market' but has produced quasi-marketized public/ private forms of production and trade. Part II focuses on the state's interna tional sovereignty and shows how ostensible weaknesses or absences in sovereignty are in fact manifestations of more complex private/ public constructions. Thus, the use of foreign mining companies and security firms, which look for all the world like some form of contemporary Royal Chartered Company, are contracted to boost state revenues or to shore up a military presence against a rebel army. In Chad, borders are more akin to frontiers in which local militias, bureaucratic elites, and traffickers maintain order and regulate/ tax trade. For the Taiwanese case, an absence of jurid ical sovereignty has led to the construction of private commercial representations that also take guidance from governments. Part III explores the ways in which priva tization has changed state practices, away from universal national programmes and towards negotiated and quasi-formal forms of economic management which might be called 'governance' if it was not for the illicit features that these practices involve. Much of the focus here (as in the rest of the book) is on everyday practices rather ) Max Weber Studies 2008. 268 Max Weber Studies than declarations, legislation, and constitutions. The latter have indeterminate pur chase, and might even constitute ruses to mislead external agencies form the more pedestrian and opaque realities of state power. Each of the case studies is of high quality and refreshingly theoretically engaged (as opposed to empirical and comparative in approach). I will finish with a few criti cal comments, none of which should be taken as a reason not to read the book, which is an important...