What Can the State Do?

Abstract

In the social sciences, as John Hall points out in his helpful introduction to The Nation-State in Question, the study of the state has had a checkered history. Largely ignored after 1945, during the early 1970s the state was “brought back in,” largely in response to the developing corporatist tendencies in many European societies. The neoliberal currents of the 1980s temporarily put consideration of the state on the back burner again, as attention switched to the economy. The belief was that the state was retreating in the face of powerful economic forces, especially at the global level. But after 1989, conflicts in the post-socialist societies (especially in the Balkans), the continuing anarchy in Africa, and the rise of international terrorism (especially after September 11, 2001) have brought the state firmly back onto the agenda. This volume is, therefore, both timely and important. What is the state these days? What are its functions and capacities? What can it do, and how does that compare with what it did in the past? One perspective that is almost entirely lacking in The Nation-State in Question is the old Marxist view that the state is in some sense an executive agent of the ruling class—the kind of analysis associated with such works as Ralph Miliband's The State in Capitalist Society (1969) or Bob Jessop's The Capitalist State (1982). The contributors to this volume are mostly, as John Ikenberry says, firm Weberians; they are committed in general to the view that “the state is an organizational entity that is at least partially separate from the larger society of which it is a part” (p. 350). This commitment is perfectly reasonable, and it is certainly consonant with the dominant theoretical position among scholars today. The omission of a Marxist perspective is nevertheless regrettable. It would have been intriguing to have someone attempt to update Miliband, assessing the state within the context of global capitalism and the interests and aspirations of global capitalist elites. More generally, The Nation-State in Question suffers from a somewhat rarefied air. States do things without any clear specification of the human actors who, however institutionally bound, are presumably the agents of state action. An exception is Minxin Pei's hair-raising account of the “predatory state” in contemporary China, as state agents—mostly at the local level—rip off state property and accumulate fortunes that are then safely invested or banked off-shore.