State Power E-Book

Bob Jessop

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 618

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Bob Jessop presents an up-to-date account of his distinctive approach to the dialectics of structure and strategy in the exercise of state power. While his earlier work critically surveys other state theories, this book focuses on the development of his own strategic-relational approach. It introduces its main sources, outlines its development, applies this approach to four case studies, and sketches a strategic-relational research agenda. Thus the book presents a comprehensive theoretical statement of the approach and guidelines for its application.

Key features of the book include: an account of the authors theoretical development; a review of recent developments in state theory and the cultural turn in political economy; critical strategic-relational re-readings of major state theorists Marx on political representation, Gramsci on the spatiality of state power, Poulantzas on the state as a social relation, and the later Foucault on statecraft; applications of the strategic-relational approach to important issues concerning the contemporary state: its gendered selectivity, the future of the national state, the states temporal sovereignty, and the relevance of multi-scalar meta-governance in Europe for the more general future of the state. The book concludes with recommendations for future strategic-relational research in political economy and state theory.

Leseprobe

State Power

State Power

A Strategic-Relational Approach

BOB JESSOP

polity

Copyright © Bob Jessop 2008

The right of Bob Jessop to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2007 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5767-7

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For my students, past, present, and future

Contents

List of Boxes, Figures, and Tables

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

General Introduction

What is the State?

A Preliminary Definition of the State

‘Putting This Book in Its Place’

Part I Theorizing the State

  1  The Development of the Strategic-Relational Approach

Three Sources of the Strategic-Relational State Approach

The First Phase in the Strategic-Relational Approach

The Second Phase in the Strategic-Relational Approach

The Third Phase in the Strategic-Relational Approach

Interim Strategic-Relational Conclusions

  2  Bringing the State Back in (Yet Again)

The Marxist Revival and the Strategic-Relational Approach

Strategic-Relational Tendencies in the Second Wave

New Directions of Research

Conclusions

Part II Sources of the Strategic-Relational Approach

  3  Marx on Political Representation and the State

What Does The Eighteenth Brumaire Accomplish?

On Periodization

The Political Stage

The Social Content of Politics

The State Apparatus and Its Trajectory

More on Political Representation

Conclusions

  4  Gramsci on the Geography of State Power

Spatializing the Philosophy of Praxis

Gramsci and the Southern Question

Gramsci on Americanism and Fordism

Gramsci on Territoriality and State Power

Gramsci and International Relations

Conclusions

  5  Poulantzas on the State as a Social Relation

Marxist Theory and Political Strategy

New Methodological Considerations

The State and Political Class Struggle

The Relational Approach and Strategic Selectivity

Re-Reading Poulantzas

Exceptional Elements in the Contemporary State

Periodizing the Class Struggle

The Spatio-Temporal Matrix of the State

Conclusions

  6  Foucault on State, State Formation, and Statecraft

Foucault and the ‘Crisis of Marxism’

Poulantzas and Foucault Compared

The Analytics of Power versus State Theory

Foucault as a Genealogist of Statecraft

With Foucault beyond Foucault

Conclusions

Part III Applying the Strategic-Relational Approach

  7  The Gender Selectivities of the State

Analysing Gender Selectivities

Gender Selectivities in the State

Strategic Selectivity and Strategic Action

Conclusions

  8  Spatio-Temporal Dynamics and Temporal Sovereignty

Globalization Defined

Globalization and the Spatial Turn

Some Spatio-Temporal Contradictions of Globalizing Capitalism

The Implications of Globalization for (National) States

Conclusions

  9  Multiscalar Metagovernance in the European Union

State-Centric Perspectives

Governance-Centric Approaches

Changes in Statehood in Advanced Capitalist Societies

The EU as a Schumpeterian Workfare Post-National Regime

The European Union and Multiscalar Metagovernance

Conclusions

10  Complexity, Contingent Necessity, Semiosis, and the SRA

Complexity and Contingent Necessity

Complexity and the Strategic-Relational Approach

Complexity Reduction and Cultural Political Economy

Towards a New Strategic-Relational Agenda

Conclusions

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Boxes, Figures, and Tables

Boxes

Box 4.1        Some spatial metaphors in Gramsci

Box 9.1        Trends and counter-trends in state restructuring

Figures

Figure 1.1    Structure–agency beyond structuration theory

Tables

Table 8.1     Marx’s Capital, time, and space

List of Abbreviations

18B

Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

CPE

cultural political economy

ISA

ideological state apparatus

KWNS

Keynesian Welfare National State

MLG

multi-level governance

OMC

open method of coordination

RSA

repressive state apparatus

SRA

strategic-relational approach

SWPR

Schumpeterian Workfare Post-national Regime

Acknowledgements

Many people have contributed, wittingly or otherwise, to the writing of this book. Because the strategic-relational agenda has been developed over some thirty years and has undergone a very uneven, zigzag development, it is difficult to recall all the intellectual debts incurred at different times over this period. The most important influence in the last few years has been Ngai-Ling Sum – especially regarding the arguments about time-space governance, the nature of post-disciplinarity, and cultural political economy. At the risk of neglecting those who have made significant contributions through their ad hoc informal comments and sustained written work, I would like to record inspirational conversations with Henrik Bang, Neil Brenner, Simon Clarke, Alex Demirovic´, Jupp Esser, Norman Fairclough, Jerzy Hausner, Colin Hay, Joachim Hirsch, Martin Jones, Michael Krätke, Gordon MacLeod, Jamie Peck, Moishe Postone, and Andrew Sayer. In addition, at different times, the following friends and colleagues have shaped some of the ideas in this book: Ash Amin, Jens Bartelson, Ulrich Beck, Robert Boyer, Gerda Falkner, Steve Fleetwood, Edgar Grande, Jamie Gough, Ray Hudson, Jane Jenson, Sven Kesselring, Rianne Mahon, Andrea Maihofer, David Marsh, Frank Moulaert, Yoshikazu Nakatani, Pun Ngai, Mark Neocleous, Claus Offe, Stijn Oosterlynck, Joe Painter, Ramon Ribera-Fumaz, Birgit Sauer, Alvin So, George Steinmetz, Rob Stones, Erik Swyngedouw, Gunther Teubner, Nik Theodore, Adam Tickell, Helmut Willke, Ruth Wodak, and Erik Olin Wright. I would like to acknowledge the support from Alvin So and his colleagues (especially Frida Ching) at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for their friendly support over recent years and, in particular, for providing an excellent office with superb views over Clearwater Bay and an endless supply of green tea during the penultimate stages of writing. Bob Muir diverted me on our cycle rides. My editors at Polity Press, Emma Hutchinson and Louise Knight, displayed exemplary patience with the delays in submitting the typescript, and two anonymous referees (plus Ramon Ribera-Fumaz) made excellent recommendations on how to put the different chapters in their place. Justin Dyer provided excellent and eagle-eyed service and advice during the preparation of the typescript for publication and more than lived up to his reputation as one of Polity’s best free-lance copy-editors. I dedicate this book to the changing group of scholars from whom I have drawn the most inspiration from day to day and from whom I have learnt so much through our joint intellectual endeavours: my graduate students.

Bob Jessop, Lancaster, 25 May 2007

General Introduction

The first and most difficult task confronting analysts of the state is to define it. For the state is a complex phenomenon and no single theory or theoretical perspective can fully capture and explain its complexities. States and the inter-state system provide a moving target because of their complex developmental logics and because continuing attempts to transform states and the state system leave their own traces in turn on their forms, functions, and activities. Theorizing the state is further complicated because, despite recurrent tendencies to reify it as standing outside and above society, there can be no adequate theory of the state without a theory of society. For the state and political system are parts of a broader ensemble of social relations and one cannot adequately describe or explain the state apparatus, state projects, and state power without referring to their differential articulation with this ensemble. This calls for a distinctive type of theoretical orientation that can take account not only of the state’s historical and institutional specificity as a distinctive accomplishment of social development but also of its role as an important element within the overall structure and dynamic of social formations. It is just such an approach to the paradox of the state and state power that is elaborated in the present book, an approach that treats the state apparatus and state power in ‘strategic-relational’ terms.

The strategic-relational approach (hereafter SRA) starts from the proposition that the state is a social relation. This elliptical statement, first proclaimed by Nicos Poulantzas, requires extensive unpacking. Indeed, the strategic-relational approach in its state-theoretical application could be described as the meta-theoretical, theoretical, and empirically informed process of elaborating the implications of this initial proposition. Thus it is an ongoing project rather than a finished product, and the changing nature of the state and state power continues to generate new theoretical and empirical problems for strategic-relational analysts to address. However, while the SRA as presented below originated in critical engagement with debates about the state, it has a much wider field of application – one that is potentially co-extensive with social relations and, indeed, the increasingly complex interactions between the human and natural worlds. This book does not apply the strategic-relational approach so expansively – even though an adequate critique of political ecology (itself a small, if significant, part of this potential field) would certainly require serious examination of humankind’s changing interactions with nature. Instead it explores the development of the SRA regarding state theory and critical political economy and its subsequent extension as a heuristic to social relations in general. It follows that the SRA is presented and elaborated below in a very uneven manner. Thus I present the overall strategic-relational heuristic in relatively abstract-simple terms through some basic ontological propositions with limited empirical content, with the result that the dialectical form of the argument takes precedence over the substantive content. In contrast, the strategic-relational analysis of the state, state power, and political economy more broadly is developed through a much richer set of increasingly substantive concepts as the argument moves towards more concrete-complex accounts (for the methodological principles informing this argument, see Jessop 1982: 211–20; 2002a: 91–101; see also M.J. Smith 2000).

What is the State?

No definition of the state is innocent because, as the strategic-relational approach itself implies, every attempt to define a complex phenomenon must be selective (for one review of attempts to define it, see Ferguson and Mansbach 1989). Moreover, as Bartelson remarks about attempts to define the state:

If we accept that the state concept is foundational and constitutive of scientific political discourse, we should not be surprised to find that it cannot easily be subjected to the practices of definition [i.e., making stipulations about its meaning and reference within a given context of employment and according to given criteria], since the term state itself figures as a positive and primitive term in the definitions of other, equally central, concepts. This is what makes clarification both seem so urgent and yet so difficult to achieve. Hence, and as a consequence of its centrality, the concept of the state cannot be fully determined by the character of its semantic components or by its inferential connections to other concepts, since it is the concept of the state that draws these components together into a unity and gives theoretical significance to other concepts on the basis of their inferential and metaphorical connections to the concept of the state, rather than conversely. (2001: 11)

These problems of centrality and ambiguity, of the foundational nature of the state for political discourse and the constitutive nature of definitions of the state for political imaginaries and political practice, pose real difficulties for a rigorous analysis of the state. Indeed the variety of attempts to solve (or dissolve) them could be used to organize a critical review of state theory. They raise interesting questions about historical semantics as the concept of the state emerged hesitantly in the early modern period and was then selected and consolidated as an organizing concept of political practice in the high early modern period (cf. Luhmann 1990e; Skinner 1989). They also pose serious questions for historians, political geographers, and social scientists concerned with the process of state formation and transformation and with political practices oriented to the state both in Europe (where the ‘modern state’ first arose) and in other historical-geographical contexts. The same problems occur in more prosaic forms in everyday discourses, ordinary politics, and routine statal practices (cf. Bratsis 2006; Painter 2006). I consider these first.

Everyday language sometimes depicts the state as a subject – the state does, or must do, this or that. Sometimes it treats the state as a thing – this economic class, social stratum, political party, or official caste uses the state to pursue its projects or interests. But the state is neither a subject nor a thing. So how could the state act as if it were a unified subject, and what could constitute its unity as a ‘thing’? And how do social actors come to act as if the state were a real subject or a simple instrument? Coherent answers are hard because the state’s referents vary so much. It changes shape and appearance with the activities it undertakes, the scales on which it operates, the political forces acting towards it, the circumstances in which it and they act, and so forth. When pressed, a common response is to list the institutions that comprise the state, usually with a core set of institutions with increasingly vague outer boundaries. From the political executive, legislature, judiciary, army, police, and public administration, the list may extend to education, trade unions, mass media, religion, and even the family. Such lists typically fail to specify what lends these institutions the quality of statehood. This is hard to do because, as Max Weber famously noted, there is no activity that states always perform and none that they have never performed (1948: 77–8). Moreover, what if, as some theorists argue, states are inherently prone to fail in the tasks they undertake? Should the features of failing or failed states (ignoring for the moment the typically ideological construction of this term in contemporary political discourse) be included as part of the core definition of the state or treated as contingent, variable, and eliminable? Does a theory of the state require a theory of state failure? Finally, who are the principals and who are the agents in the activities that states undertake? Are the principals restricted to ‘state managers’, or do they include top advisers and other direct sources of policy inputs? Likewise, where does the boundary lie between (a) state managers as principals and (b) state employees as routine agents or executants of state programmes and policies? And do the agents include union leaders involved in policing incomes policies, for example, or media owners and media workers who circulate propaganda on the state’s behalf ?

An obvious escape route from these problems is to define the state in terms of its formal institutional features and/or the foundational instruments or mechanisms of state power. The Allgemeine Staatslehre (general state theory) tradition pursues the first approach. It focuses on the articulation of three key features of the state: state territory, state population, and state apparatus (e.g., Heller 1992; Jellinek 1921; Oppenheimer 1908; Schmitt 1928, 2001; Smend 1955; and for commentary, Kelly 2003; Stirk 2006). Max Weber largely follows the second approach. This is reflected in his celebrated definition of the modern state as the ‘human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ (Weber 1948: 78, parenthesis and italics in original; cf., more elaborately, 1978: 54–6). Yet other definitions highlight the modern (especially Westphalian) state’s formal sovereignty vis-à-vis its own population and other states. This does not mean that modern states exercise power largely through direct and immediate coercion – a sure sign of crisis or state failure. For, where state power is regarded as legitimate, it can normally secure compliance without such recourse. Indeed, this is where the many state-theoretical traditions concerned with the bases of political legitimacy and/or social hegemony are so important in exploring the character of the state projects that endow the state with some institutional and operational unity as well as the nature of the societal projects that define the nature and purposes of government in relation to the social world beyond the state and/or inter-state systems. Nonetheless, organized coercion is a legitimate last resort in enforcing decisions. Even when blessed with political legitimacy, of course, all states reserve the right – or claim the need – to suspend the constitution or specific legal provisions and many also rely heavily on force, fraud, and corruption and their subjects’ inability to organize effective resistance. Indeed, for theorists such as Carl Schmitt, it is the effective power to declare a state of emergency that defines the locus of sovereignty within the state system (Schmitt 1921, 1985; for a critique, see Agamben 2004).

Another solution is to regard the essence of the state (pre-modern as well as modern) as the territorialization of political authority. This involves the intersection of politically organized coercive and symbolic power, a clearly demarcated core territory, and a relatively fixed population on which political decisions are collectively binding. The key feature of the state would then become the historically variable ensemble of technologies and practices that produce, naturalize, and manage territorial space as a bounded container within which political power can be exercised to achieve various, more or less well-integrated, more or less changing policy objectives. Nonetheless a system of territorially exclusive, mutually recognizing, mutually legitimating national states exercising formally sovereign control over large and exclusive territorial areas is a relatively recent institutional expression of state power that is historically contingent rather than an inevitable and irreversible result of social development (Teschke 2003, 2006). The existence of such an inter-state system is also the source of the increasingly artificial division between domestic and international affairs (Rosenberg 1994; Walker 1993). This is reflected in recent debates about the future of the national territorial state and attempts to define emergent forms of political organization of a statal, semi-statal, or non-statal character. For other modes of territorializing political power have existed, some still co-exist with the so-called ‘Westphalian system’ (allegedly established by the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648 but realized, as Teschke notes, only stepwise during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), new expressions are emerging, and yet others can be imagined. Earlier modes include city-states, empires, protectorates, enclaves, the medieval state system, absolutism, and modern imperial-colonial blocs. Emerging modes that have been identified, rightly or wrongly, include cross-border regional cooperation, a new medievalism, supranational blocs (e.g., the EU), a Western conglomerate state, and an embryonic world state. Nonetheless, while state forms shape politics as the ‘art of the possible’, struggles over state power also matter. State forms have been changed before through political activities and will be changed again.

While there are significant material and discursive lines of demarcation between the state qua institutional ensemble and other institutional orders and/or the lifeworld, the SRA emphasizes that its apparatuses and practices are materially interdependent with other institutional orders and social practices. In this sense it is socially embedded. Indeed, as Tim Mitchell argues,

The state should be addressed as an effect of detailed processes of spatial organization, temporal arrangement, functional specification, and supervision and surveillance, which create the appearance of a world fundamentally divided into state and society. The essence of modern politics is not policies formed on one side of this division being applied to or shaped by the other, but the producing and reproducing of this line of difference. (1991: 95; on the construction of sovereignty, see also Bartelson 1995)

These detailed processes also divide the globe fundamentally into different states and societies and thereby create a more or less complex inter-state system within an emerging world society.

The manner in which these divisions are drawn, reproduced, and changed influences political processes and state capacities. These are always strategically selective. First, although the state apparatus has its own distinctive resources and powers, which underpin its relative autonomy, it also has distinctive liabilities or vulnerabilities and its operations depend on resources produced elsewhere in its environment. Second, state structures have a specific, differential impact on the ability of various political forces to pursue particular interests and strategies in specific contexts through their control over and/or (in)direct access to these state capacities – capacities whose effectiveness also depends on links to forces and powers that exist and operate beyond the state’s formal boundaries. Third, the nature and extent of the realization of these capacities-liabilities – hence the nature and impact of state power – depend on the structural relations between the state and its encompassing political system, on the strategic ties among politicians and state officials and other political forces, and on the complex web of structural interdependencies and strategic networks that link the state system to its broader social environment. Together these considerations imply that, from a strategic-relational perspective, the state’s structural powers or capacities, their structural and strategic biases, and their realization do not depend solely on the nature of the state as a juridicopolitical apparatus – even assuming its institutional boundaries could be precisely mapped and prove stable. They also depend on diverse capacities-liabilities and forces that lie beyond it. Putting states in their place like this does not exclude (indeed, it presupposes) specifically state-engendered and state-mediated processes. It does require, however, that they be related both to their broader social context and to the strategic choices and conduct of actors in and beyond states (Jessop 1990b, 2002d).

States do not exist in majestic isolation overseeing the rest of their respective societies but are embedded in a wider political system (or systems), articulated with other institutional orders, and linked to different forms of civil society. A key aspect of their transformation is the redrawing of the multiple ‘lines of difference’ between the state and its environment(s) as states (and the social forces they represent) redefine their priorities, expand or reduce their activities, recalibrate or rescale them in the light of new challenges, seek greater autonomy or promote power-sharing, and disembed or re-embed specific state institutions and practices within the social order. This holds for the international as well as national dimensions of state relations. The state’s frontiers may display a variable geometry and its temporal horizons regarding the past, present, and future are also complex. There are also continuing attempts to redesign its institutional architecture and modes of working to enhance state capacities to achieve particular political objectives.

Two conclusions follow from this. First, we must recognize that the distinction between the state apparatus and the wider political system makes a real difference and is defined (and redefined) both materially and discursively. Thus analysing its constitution and its effects is an important task for the SRA. Second, it is important to accept the idea implicit in systems theory that the political system is self-substituting: that is, that a crisis in the political system leads normally not to its demise but to its reorganization. Clearly a fundamental part of such reorganization is the redefinition (or restructuring) of the forms of institutional separation between the economic and political systems and their relationship to the lifeworld, and, in this context, the redefinition of the ‘line of difference’ between the state and the political system. This is especially clear for the European Union insofar as it is a polity in the course of (trans)formation and this process is being contested by many different social forces. Indeed, as chapter 9 shows, the process of state formation in Europe provides a real-time experiment in the complexities and contingencies of state formation.

This suggests that an adequate theory of the state can only be produced as part of a wider theory of society, and that this wider theory must give due recognition to the constitutive role of semiosis in organizing social order. Even the neo-statists’ principled rejection of a society-centred approach depends critically on arguments about the wider society both to reveal the state’s distinctive logic and interests and to explore the conditions for its autonomy and effectiveness. Foucauldian, feminist, and discourse-analytic studies clearly have wider concerns too (see chapter 1). It is precisely in the articulation between state and society, however, that many of the unresolved problems of state theory are located. For the state involves a paradox. On the one hand, it is just one institutional ensemble among others within a social formation; on the other, it is peculiarly charged with overall responsibility for maintaining the cohesion of the social formation of which it is merely a part. Its paradoxical position as both part and whole of society means that it is continually called upon by diverse social forces to resolve society’s problems and is equally continually doomed to generate ‘state failure’ since so many of society’s problems lie well beyond its control and may even be aggravated by attempted intervention. Many of the differences between theories of the state considered above are rooted in contrary approaches to various structural and strategic moments of this paradox. Trying to comprehend the overall logic (or, perhaps, ‘illogic’) of this paradox could be a fruitful route to resolving some of these differences as well as providing a more comprehensive analysis of the strategic-relational character of the state in a polycentric social formation.

In this context it should be noted that ‘societies’ (or, better, ‘imagined human communities’) can be dominated by different principles of societal organization (Vergesellschaftung) associated with different projects and priorities (e.g., economic, military, religious, political, social ranking, cultural). This will be reflected in the state as a key site where social power relations may be crystallized in different forms (Mann 1986) and, indeed, where struggles over these principles of societal organization are often conducted because of the part–whole paradox in which the state is so heavily implicated. Thus a state could operate principally as a capitalist state, a military power, a theocratic regime, a representative democratic regime answerable to civil society, an apartheid state, or an ethico-political state. There are competing principles of societalization linked to different functional systems and different identities and values anchored in civil society or the lifeworld, and, in principle, any of these could become dominant, at least for a while. There is no unconditional guarantee that the modern state will always (or ever) be essentially capitalist – although exploration of state forms may indicate certain strategically selective biases in this regard. Moreover, even where capital accumulation is the dominant axis of societalization by virtue of structural biases and/or successful political strategies, state managers typically have regard to the codes, programmes, and activities of other functional systems and the dynamic of the lifeworld in their efforts to maintain a modicum of institutional integration and social cohesion within the state’s territorial boundaries and to reduce external threats. But such structural coherence and social cohesion is necessarily limited insofar as it depends on one or more spatio-temporal fixes to displace and/or defer the effects of certain contradictions and lines of conflict beyond its (or their) socially constituted spatio-temporal boundaries and action horizons. Different kinds of fix exist and they depend in various ways on specific forms of government, governance, and meta-governance (‘governance of governance’) (Jessop 2002d, 2004f, 2006b, 2006c).

Even these few preliminary remarks should have revealed the complexity of the state. They also imply that no definition can be given once-and-for-all; rather, the state will be redefined continually as the analysis unfolds. Moreover, as theoretical and empirical research on the state continues, whatever the initial starting point, as the analysis moves from the abstract-simple to the concrete-complex there could be an increasing overlap in concepts, arguments, and analysis in the case of progressive research paradigms or an increasing decomposition and incoherence as anomalies and exceptions emerge (on this distinction among research programmes, see Lakatos and Musgrave 1970). My previous work has been especially concerned to develop a coherent set of concepts with comparable ontological depth and complexity in order to facilitate a concrete-complex critique of political economy.

A Preliminary Definition of the State

Given the preceding remarks, I will now define the state in terms of a ‘rational abstraction’ that must be re-specified in different ways and for different purposes as a strategic-relational analysis proceeds. In short, in order to initiate the analysis rather than pre-empt further exploration, the core of the state apparatus can be defined as a distinct ensemble of institutions and organizations whose socially accepted function is to define and enforce collectively binding decisions on a given population in the name of their ‘common interest’ or ‘general will’ (cf. Jessop 1990b: 341). This broad definition identifies the state in terms of its generic features as a specific form of macro-political organization with a specific type of political orientation; it also indicates that there are important links between the state and the political sphere and, indeed, the wider society. Thus not all forms of macro-political organization can be classed as state-like nor can the state simply be equated with government, law, bureaucracy, a coercive apparatus, or another political institution. Indeed this definition puts the contradictions and dilemmas necessarily involved in political discourse at the heart of work on the state. This is because claims about the general will or common interest are a key feature of the state system and distinguish it from straightforward political domination or violent oppression (contrast Tilly 1973). This approach can also serve as a basis for describing specific states and political regimes and exploring the conditions in which states emerge, evolve, enter into crisis, and are transformed. A particular benefit of this initial cluster definition is its compatibility with diverse approaches to the analysis of the state and with recognition of what Mann (1986) terms the polymorphous crystallization of state power associated with alternative principles of societalization.1

This said, six qualifications are required if this multidimensional definition is to be useful in orienting a strategic-relational research agenda:

1Above, around, and below the core of the state are found institutions and organizations whose relation to the core ensemble is uncertain. Indeed the effective integration of the state as an institutional ensemble pursuing relatively coherent polices is deeply problematic and generates different governmental rationalities, administrative programmes, and political practices oriented to achieving such integration. Moreover, while statal operations are most concentrated and condensed in the core of the state, they depend on a wide range of micro-political practices dispersed throughout society. States never achieve full closure or complete separation from society, and the precise boundaries between the state and/or political system and other institutional orders and systems are generally in doubt and change over time. In many circumstances this ambiguity may even prove productive in pursuit of state policies. Similar problems emerge in relation to inter-state relations in the emerging world political system. 2The nature of these institutions and organizations, their articulation to form the overall architecture of the state qua institutional ensemble, and its differential links with the wider society will depend on the nature of the social formation and its past history. The capitalist type of state differs from that characteristic of feudalism, for example;2 and political regimes also differ across capitalist social formations. 3Although the socially acknowledged character of its political functions for society is a defining feature of the normal state, the forms in which this legitimacy is institutionalized and expressed will also vary. Indeed the whole point of describing such political functions as ‘socially acknowledged’ is to stress that their precise content is constituted in and through politically relevant discourses. Here lies the significance of contested discourses about the nature and purposes of government for the wider society and the relationship of these discourses to alternative hegemonic projects and their translation into political practices. 4Although coercion is the ultimate sanction available to states, they have other methods of enforcement to secure compliance. Violence is rarely the first resort of the state (especially in consolidated capitalist societies), and it would often prove counterproductive. A full account of the state must consider all the means of intervention at its disposal, their capacities and limitations, and their relative weight in different contexts. This is especially important, as chapter 9 shows, for evolving forms of statehood in an increasingly interdependent world society. 5The society whose common interest and general will are administered by the state should no more be interpreted as an empirical given than should the state itself. The boundaries and identity of the society are often constituted in and through the same processes by which states are built, reproduced, and transformed. Indeed it is one of the more obvious conclusions of the state-centred approach that state- and nation-building are strongly influenced by the emergent dynamic of the emergent international system formed through the interaction of sovereign states. An effect of globalization and its associated relativization of scale is the increasing difficulty of defining the boundaries of any given society – to the extent that some theorists claim that only one society now exists, namely, world society (Luhmann 1982b, 1997; Richter 1996; Stichweh 2000). Interestingly, the tendential emergence of world society reinforces the importance of national states in many areas of social life (Meyer et al., 1997). 6Whatever the political rhetoric of the ‘common interest’ or ‘general will’ might suggest, these are always ‘illusory’ insofar as any attempt to define them occurs on a strategically selective terrain and involves the differential articulation and aggregation of interests, opinions, and values. Indeed, the common interest or general will is always asymmetrical, marginalizing or defining some interests at the same time as it privileges others. There is never a general interest that embraces all possible particular interests (Jessop 1983). Indeed, a key statal task is to aid the organization of spatio-temporal fixes that facilitate the deferral and displacement of contradictions, crisis-tendencies, and conflicts to the benefit of those fully included in the ‘general interest’ at the expense of those who are more or less excluded from it. This in turn suggests clear limits to the possibility of a world state governing world society because this would exclude a constitutive outside for the pursuit of a ‘general interest’ or require a fundamental shift in social relations to prevent social exclusion.

In listing these six preliminary qualifications, I hope to have indicated the limitations of starting analyses with a general definition of the state that is presented once-and-for-all and is never re-specified as the analysis unfolds. It is said that Marx was once asked why he did not begin Capital with a definition of the capitalist mode of production and that he replied that the whole of Capital was concerned with this topic. It would only be possible to provide such a definition at the conclusion of the work. Apocryphal or not, such a response would have been very apt for any request to define the state at the outset of this study. We will certainly return to this topic when we provide more detailed accounts of the state from different theoretical perspectives and, later still, present some strategic-relational analyses of contemporary states.

‘Putting This Book in Its Place’

This is my fifth book directly concerned in one way or another with developing and applying a strategic-relational approach to the analysis of the state. My theoretical reflections on the state began in the mid-1970s as part of the revival of West European Marxist interest in the state in capitalist societies and have now provided the guiding thread of my intellectual project for more than three decades. I did not set out to develop a strategic-relational approach. Yet it has become an important heuristic perspective for my contributions to the critique of political economy and for addressing more general issues in the social sciences (for a well-informed and sympathetic account of this development, see M.J. Smith 2000). The driving force behind its development is a still incomplete project: to write a theoretically informed critical history of the changing political economy of post-war Britain and, in particular, to put the transformation of the British state into its broad economic, political, and socio-cultural context. This project provided the initial ‘knowledge interest’ for my work in state theory and, while the preparatory theoretical work often seems to have acquired an enchanted (and enchanting) life of its own, this continuing project has also prompted many of the twists and turns in my later theoretical investigations.

The first book in this strategic-relational series, The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods, was published in 1982. It reviewed the various approaches of Marx and Engels to the analysis of the state, how they were deployed, and their overall development, and then explored the three main methodological approaches to theory construction in subsequent Marxist analysis. Subsumptionist essentialism was illustrated from Marxist-Leninist theories of state monopoly capitalism that treated different cases as just so many empirical illustrations of the overall validity of a set of general propositions. Logical derivation was investigated via West German theories that sought to derive the necessary form and functions of the capitalist type of state from Marx’s critique of the economic categories of capitalism. And the method of articulation, with its emphasis on contingent necessities and social practices, was analysed through the work of Gramsci and three of his post-war interpreters – Poulantzas, Laclau, and Mouffe – who explored the relative autonomy of the state in terms of expanded concepts of politics and the struggle to articulate a national-popular hegemonic project to secure the political, intellectual, and moral leadership of the dominant class(es). The book concluded by rejecting the idea of a general theory of the capitalist state (let alone of the state in general). Instead, it offered some methodological and substantive guidelines for the analysis of the state as a concrete-complex object of inquiry (1982: 211–59). These guidelines and their elaboration were based on a ‘relational’ approach (1982: 252) that has continued to inform my subsequent analyses. The core of this approach was its focus on ‘the relations among relations’, that is, ‘an analysis of the relations among different relations comprising the social formation’ (1982: 252). Accordingly, after presenting the guidelines for a relational approach to the state, the concluding chapter developed their implications for the more general analysis of structure, conjuncture, power, identity, subjective and objective interests, and strategic action. Chapter 1 discusses these guidelines and their implications in more detail and also comments on their initial reception.

My next major intervention in state theory was a monograph concerned with just one theorist. Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Strategy (1985a) provided an exhaustive account of Poulantzas’s intellectual biography in terms of successive steps in his theoretical development and political activities, and the impact on this development of often surprising shifts in the course of political events in his native Greece and adopted French homeland. After many years of study and at least three major shifts in theoretical orientation, Poulantzas claimed to have discovered the mystery of the Marxist theory of the state in his elliptical proposition that the state is a social relation. His last three books and associated outputs marked successive attempts to develop this intuition. However, while his insight and its subsequent elaboration are hugely significant (and not just for Marxist approaches to the state), Poulantzas’s claim to have completed the Marxist theory of the state was certainly misleading. For his account was elaborated largely in and through a set of theoretical and historical reflections that covered many different topics rather than in a systematic movement from abstract-simple to concrete-complex. In this sense, his work was concerned to develop some core propositions in what I termed a distinctive ‘relational theory’ (in contradistinction to Poulantzas’s earlier ‘regional theory’3), and to apply these in some arguments about the state and politics in general, the capitalist type of state and bourgeois politics in particular, and the transformation of contemporary capitalism and the rise of authoritarian statism. Poulantzas never codified these propositions and arguments in one coherent statement and even the first principles of his ‘strategic-theoretical approach’ had to be reconstructed from a close symptomatic reading of his work. This probably reflected two facts. First, as he himself noted, no theorist is ever completely contemporary with his/her theoretical development with the effect that more time for reflection would have been required for him to have attempted a full systematization of its current stage of development – by which time, of course, the theory would already have been undergoing further changes. And, second, because actually existing states are so complex and changing (as the relational approach indicates in its rejection of any general theory of the state), any attempt at a rigorous, systematic, and complete analysis would be doomed to fail. This is why my critical exploration sought only to clarify some basic implications of Poulantzas’s relational approach to the state and to introduce some additional middle-range concepts to facilitate the transition from abstract-simple to more concrete-complex analyses of the state apparatus and state power.

Some of these concepts were deployed in a co-authored book that falls outside the series under discussion – a set of interventions on the periodization of Thatcherism as a social movement, political project, accumulation strategy, state project, and hegemonic vision, and its implications for the economic transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, the restructuring of the British state, and the growing inequality in a society polarized into ‘two nations’ (Jessop et al., 1988, 1990; and Jessop 1980, 1989a, 1992a, 2002c). The critique of other positions and our own interpretation of Thatcherism were strongly informed by the strategic-theoretical approach (as it was then called). In particular, it applied some important middle-range concepts derived from Poulantzas’s theoretical studies, his analyses of exceptional regimes (including Nazism, Italian fascism, and the Southern European military dictatorships), and his identification of increasing signs of exceptionalism in contemporary liberal democratic regimes. This work has continued with further explorations of the Major Government and the continued consolidation and extension of neo-liberalism under New Labour (cf. Jessop 2003a, 2004e, 2006a).

The third book in the SRA series proper was State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in Its Place (1990b). As the subtitle indicates rather elliptically, this study sought to locate the form and functions of the state within capitalist social formations as a whole. Its various chapters developed the strategic-theoretical approach through (a) critical re-evaluations of recent contributions to Marxist state theory and the partly Marxist-inspired regulation approach in political economy; and (b) an exploration of structure–strategy dialectics in other types of state theory, including mainstream historical sociological and political scientific attempts to ‘bring the state back in’, recent work in systems theory, especially theories of self-organizing (or autopoietic) systems, and further developments in discourse analysis. In turn this book marked a departure from its precursors because it included, alongside critiques of other approaches, original studies directly concerned to develop some new strategic-theoretical arguments. In particular, it explored the implications of the argument that the state is a social relation that can be analysed as the site, the generator, and the product of strategies (1990b: 260). In short, this book marked an important transition in the movement from the critique of other contributions to state theory towards the elaboration of an original strategic-theoretical approach.

Following this work my attention turned towards a strategic-theoretical analysis of the profit-oriented, market-mediated economy typical of capitalist social formations. This adopted the same general heuristic as my work on the state but developed a different (but commensurable) set of substantive concepts suited to capital accumulation rather than political domination in analogous terms to those that had been developed for the state. This was partly a response to criticisms of ‘politicism’, that is, the one-sided concern with the political at the expense of the economic, in the critique of political economy, and partly an attempt to provide strong economic foundations for analysing the state’s role in the crisis of Fordism and the transition to post-Fordism. These studies bore fruit in the fourth book in the series, The Future of the Capitalist State (2002d). This marked an even more radical move away from commentary on other theorists to provide my own strategic-relational (as it was finally called) analysis of recent and continuing economic and political restructuring in advanced capitalist social formations. The introduction to this book presented a relatively unified and minimum set of form-analytical, strategic-relational concepts for describing accumulation regimes, modes of regulation, and state projects and for analysing contemporary transformations in the state in terms of four key moments of state restructuring: economic and social policies broadly defined, re-scaling, and changing modes of governance. This monograph remains my most systematic presentation of a strategic-relational, form-analytical analysis to date but it is self-evidently more concerned with the structural than strategic dimensions of the transformation. This reflects the attempt to explore the formal and functional adequacy of the emerging state form rather than to explore its historical development on a case-by-case basis, for which serious engagement with the changing balance of forces would be required. Nonetheless, a key feature of The Future of the Capitalist State has been taken much further in current work in the field of cultural political economy, in which discursivity and agency acquire a far more central role (see Jessop and Oosterlynck 2007; Jessop and Sum 2001, 2006; Jessop 2004b; Sum 2002, 2003, 2005; Sum and Jessop 2006; Sum and Pun 2005).

It remains to explain what a fifth book might add to these studies in advancing the strategic-relational research agenda in state theory. The answer is found in five new contributions in State Power. Specifically, this book:

•  reviews the development of the strategic-relational approach, beginning with reflections on state theory, generalizing the SRA to basic issues of structure and agency, growing concern with the spatio-temporal aspects of structure and agency, and increasing integration of the discursive (or, better, semiotic) moment of structure–agency dynamics;

•  extends my critiques of basic trends and problems in Marxist state theory to other theoretical approaches and more recent emerging issues to show how strategic-relational themes seem to have arisen independently in quite different theoretical contexts, thereby indicating that the SRA may have a more general applicability grounded in basic ontological problems of social life rather than in the peculiar concerns of historical materialism;

•  presents strategic-relational readings of ‘classic’ state-theoretical texts and/or bodies of work by Marx, Gramsci, Poulantzas, and Foucault with a view to developing further strategic-relational arguments and concepts;

•  applies the strategic-relational approach to some familiar themes where it has not previously been applied: the gender selectivities of the state, the significance of globalization for the transformation of the state, its temporal sovereignty, and the changing nature of European statehood;

•  grounds the SRA in complexity, complexity reduction, and semiosis, and also notes some of its implications for future research on the state.

These contributions are reflected in the overall organization of the book. Chapter 1 introduces the intellectual and political background to the strategic-relational approach (or SRA) and its principal intellectual and theoretical sources. This may provide useful context for readers to understand how and why it has been developed but it cannot, of course, establish the adequacy, let alone the validity, of the approach itself. Indeed, as the SRA has developed, its principal concepts and arguments have been disentangled from the immediate theoretical and historical contexts in which they were developed, and I and others have engaged in serious efforts to make them more generally applicable. Nonetheless my particular application still tends to combine the general approach with concepts drawn from geographical historical materialism (cf. Harvey 1982) and other concepts relevant to my specific areas of interest. The chapter then presents four partially overlapping phases in the development of the SRA in my own work as new theoretical problems were identified, either in general terms or in relation to my attempts to understand the development of Britain’s post-war political economy from social democracy to Thatcherism and, most recently, New Labour. These problems emerged through variable combinations of criticism, self-reflection, and self-criticism.

Chapter 2 critically reviews some basic approaches to the state and thereby updates and extends analyses and arguments presented much earlier in State Theory (1990b). It is especially concerned to identify emerging issues that the strategic-relational approach is well equipped to address and/or that provide major challenges to be addressed in its subsequent development. In addition, for those unfamiliar with this complex field, this chapter serves as a general introduction to some key themes in post-war state theory and provides useful context for the more detailed, often strongly focused, analyses in later chapters.

Chapters 3 to 6 present re-readings of some major texts and approaches in political economy and state theory from a strategic-relational perspective in order to draw conclusions that are relevant to further development of the strategic-relational approach. These chapters are representative of a wider range of such strategic-relational readings that include other major theorists, such as Louis Althusser (Jessop 2007e), Manuel Castells (Jessop 2002d, 2003b), Anthony Giddens (Jessop 1989b, 2005), Stuart Hall ( Jessop et al., 1988; Jessop 2002c, 2004e), Michael Hardt (Jessop 2003b), David Harvey (Jessop 2004g, 2006b), Ernesto Laclau (Jessop 2007b), NiklasLuhmann (Jessop 1990b, 1992b, 2001b, 2007a), Ralph Miliband (Jessop 2007c), Chantal Mouffe(Jessop 2007b), Tony Negri (Jessop 2003b), Karl Polanyi (Jessop 2001b, 2007d), and Saskia Sassen (Jessop 2003b). Each of these encounters has added something to the development of the strategic-relational approach and, I hope, has revealed something surprising and interesting about the work of those criticized. The four theorists chosen for inclusion in this book are those whose work has had the strongest positive impact on my development of the SRA and where the latter in turn reveals significant new aspects of the text or body of work concerned. Thus I explore Marx’s famous text on The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), the spatialization as well as historicization of political concepts in Gramsci’s political writings and prison notebooks, the emergence of the strategic-relational approach and its increasing significance in the work of Nicos Poulantzas, and the concepts of governmentality and statecraft in the work of Michel Foucault. There is a risk of circularity in this procedure, of course, but I believe that the exercise has produced new results. Readers must judge whether or not this confidence is misplaced.

Chapters 7 to 9 illustrate in turn how the SRA can be applied to three topics that are somewhat removed from the theoretical issues through which it was originally developed and that will therefore provide interesting test cases of the value-added of the approach. Each of them originates in invitations from scholars who had not previously worked with the SRA and who, indeed, were not necessarily favourable to historical materialism. The chapter on gender selectivities, for example, originated in a challenge from feminist theorists in Germany to show that the strategic-relational approach was relevant to their concerns (see Jessop 1997a, 2001c). It has since been expanded in the light of further reading in the rich body of feminist and queer-theoretical scholarship but is not completely updated. The general strategic-relational line of argument should be valid (or not) regardless of the most recent studies. In addition, a textbook currently in preparation will review the most recent contributions to feminist and queer analyses of the state and politics as well as examine key contributions to other approaches to state theory (Jessop forthcoming). The chapter on globalization has its roots in an invitation to develop a strategic-relational critique of theories about the impact of globalization on the future of the national state. Finally, the chapter on the European Union was begun in response to several requests from political scientists interested in controversies about its nature as a type of state or political regime. In each case the challenge to apply the strategic-relational has been very productive for my own understanding of the world and the results also seem to have had some resonance outside the fields in which Marxist state theory is usually closely followed.

Chapter 10 concludes these reflections and explorations on the strategic-relational approach. It presents a strategic-relational research agenda that points beyond the preceding chapters and has been specially prepared for this book. It aims to bring the different lines of argument together. For the different entry points adopted to present and develop the SRA in the different parts of the present work illustrate the problems involved in addressing a complex phenomenon – thus each part reveals something about the approach and its development and, together, they reveal far more without, however, exhausting all of the possibilities. For this reason the concluding chapter is intended not as the final statement about the strategic-relational approach but as a further contribution to a continuing research programme.

Part I

Theorizing the State

1

The Development of the Strategic-Relational Approach