State power in the war on terror: A comparative analysis of the UK and USA

Abstract

This paper analyses the patterns and extent of state power in the war on terror. The paper argues that the War on Terror has seen important extensions in state power, which pose challenges not only for globalisation theorists and advocates of international law, but also theorists of the managerial or limited state, or those who see the state as over-determined in various ways by societal mechanisms or actors. Recent analyses, prompted by events in the War on Terror, have begun to focus on the extent of state power, rather than its perceived fundamental limits in late modern society. This reflects a need to analyse the politics and processes of national security. Having made this point, extensions in state power must be viewed in context and dynamically with regard to their effect on civil liberties, necessary to avoid a ‘flattened’ a-historical approach to state power and civil society. The problem of state power will be examined with regard to the UK and USA. The UK and the USA represent different constitutional arrangements, jurisdictions, legal and administrative intelligence and law enforcement powers, systems of accountability and political cultures. However as late modern liberal democracies they also display remarkable similarities and stand as illuminating examples to contrast structural patterns of state power, politics and civil society. 1 They have also been identified as representing the evolution of the limited late modern state. State power in context The War on Terror provides an interesting context in which to situate debates on state power, particularly in the light of globalisation theory. Globalisation theory, in its ‘hard’ form prevalent in the mid 1990s to the turn of the century postulated that the solidity of the nation state was being overwhelmed by a series of economic, political, legal and technological developments. State power, once construed as the ability of the nation state to order societal relations within a juridically mapped territory, was being fragmented or even dissolved by the development of the global economy following the fall of