Abstract
The state capitalism literature emphasizes the new roles played by states in global politics and domestic economies through heightened intervention and ownership of key resources and sectors. In Ireland, we instead find a reluctant state capitalism evinced by antipathy towards state ownership, the accommodation of private sector failures and embrace of hybrid governance. Rather than something new and unprecedented, the Irish state has been a long-standing feature of domestic market development and an important institution supporting private enterprise today as in the past. Urging a more academically robust conceptualization of state capitalism, this paper relinquishes innate assumptions of obvious boundaries dividing liberalized capitalism from state capitalism in favour of engaging the domestic state and sectoral developments on their own terms and within their proper historical context. We find reluctant state capitalism in Ireland's telecommunications sector through a continuum of state–market involvement in four phases: commercial, devolving, evolving and partnership state capitalism. By identifying temporal phases of state capitalism, we move beyond the here-and-now of more contemporary ‘new’ state capitalism analyses that suggest rupture with an idealized, liberalized past.
Highlights
The state capitalism literature emphasizes the new roles played by states in global politics and domestic economies through heightened intervention and ownership of key resources and sectors
We find that when pursuing some of the hallmark features of state capitalism, Ireland remains reticent to do so even when its hand is forced by market failure – charting a path of ‘reluctant state capitalism’
Rather than an on–off switch – state capitalism or the lack thereof – we find in Ireland a reluctant state capitalism expressed through a continuum of state–market involvement in four phases
Summary
The state capitalism literature emphasizes the new roles played by states in global politics and domestic economies through heightened intervention and ownership of key resources and sectors. In Ireland, we instead find a reluctant state capitalism evinced by antipathy towards state ownership, the accommodation of private sector failures and embrace of hybrid governance. We find reluctant state capitalism in Ireland’s telecommunications sector through a continuum of state–market involvement in four phases: commercial, devolving, evolving and partnership state capitalism. Sectoral contextualization illuminates how phases of state capitalism evolve through particular state orientations, namely antipathy towards state ownership and control, leading to new problems and collaborations Initiatives in this area demonstrate a willful ignorance of the failures of privatization and the persistent overriding preference by governments and policy makers for a privatist paradigm – favouring private sector regulatory models even where state intervention is significant. We analyse public–private collaborations in Ireland’s telecoms sector, identifying commercial, devolving, evolving and partnership forms of state capitalism across four phases of historical and contemporary development. The paper concludes by reflecting on how the Irish case can inform the state capitalism literature more generally
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