State and Society in the Age of the Global Economy

Abstract

Since the end of the cold war, no single question has rivalled that of globalization in its ability to galvanize debate in the world's industrial nations. Indeed, 'globalization' has become the touchstone for a vast constellation of issues which continues to determine the evolution of the international system and of national societies. These issues include, in no particular order, multinational strategy, state sovereignty, territoriality, nationalism, capital markets, individualism, consumerism, technology, security, international regimes, and culture. Making sense of these related issues is a great challenge, and Daryl Copeland is right to warn at the outset of his essay, 'Globalization, enterprise, and governance' (winter 1997-8), that it is 'extremely difficult to assign precise cause and effect to the various impacts of globalization.'The collapse of the Soviet empire released these cross-cutting forces into an international environment which had long functioned as an historical anomaly. The bilateral balance of terror which was the defining feature of the cold war not only assured the enduring division of the world into opposing blocs, it also slowed down the natural progression of history. As long as the world remained divided along ideological faultlines, the shift to fully globalized production, although technologically possible, could not be realized. If we are troubled by the return to a more chaotic, destabilizing movement of events, it is because we had not anticipated that global integration would be accompanied by local fragmentation, that the extension of universal values to international politics and economics would be met by the reemergence of diverse forms of tribalism. These national, ethnic, and religious expressions of identity reject the 'new world order' that is being fashioned jointly by multinational corporations (MNCs) and national governments. At the same time, the convergence in accounting standards, commercial law, banking regulations, and intellectual property rights as the decisions and activities of MNCs have internationalized have opened countries to the turbulence of the global economy. This has created considerable apprehension over the traditional legitimacy of the nation-state as a repository of distinctive, common cultural values.Copeland's piece reads as an impassioned indictment of global capitalism's excesses, a most eloquent defence of the values of Canadian public service before the 'apostles of the marketplace' triumphed at the highest levels of the federal mandarinate. As such, it is a refreshing voice against the current that reminds us of a time not long ago when Canada's elites saw the state as 'the embodiment of shared convictions, arbiter of competing demands, and agent of distributive justice' and not simply as the facilitator of trade and the architect of the constitutive components of a 'competitive nation.' For those of us who admired the representatives of this ethic and saw Canada as the ideal compromise between American capitalism and European social democracy, the transition to the new imperative of competitiveness has been rather brutal and, I would suggest, the source of considerable nostalgia. Although the wellspring of this nostalgia does not run as deep or with as much force as it does in more virulent movements of protestation elsewhere, it is nonetheless the expression of a sense of disillusionment which demands consideration and response.While sharing Copeland's nostalgia and agreeing with his analysis of the impact of the new technoeconomic order on the evolution of public policy in Canada, I think that it is important to raise a few ideas which might bring into sharper focus the place this wrenching series of transformations holds in the broader current of history. The principal danger of nostalgia is that it sometimes encourages analyses which overplay the significance of events as they unfold. Too strong an interpretation of the forces reshaping relations within and between nations risks mythologizing globalization and reinforcing those neoliberal arguments which minimize the importance of the cultural and social spheres of communal life. …