After a relatively fallow period in the 1990s, the general form and functions of states are once again returning to the top of the agenda, both theoretically and practically. This is particularly evident in the wake of the world economic crisis that became increasingly visible from mid-2007 onwards and has since triggered a radical restructuring of the state system and a profound strategic reorientation of state intervention. Indeed, following many predictions about the end of the national state, the close of 2008 and start of 2009 could be seen to herald its resurgence as the saviour in the last resort of an economic and social formation in crisis. Such changes are reawakening interest in the state apparatus, state capacities, state failure, and new forms of governance. Interest in the state and state power had declined following the end of the Cold War, the rise (or, at least, increasing recognition) of globalization processes and their effects, and the growing importance of new social movements. These three trends (and others in the same period) saw attention turn away, respectively, from the contrast between capitalism and socialism and their respective state forms to interest in varieties of capitalism and political regimes, from the national state and/or nation-state to global-local dialectics and multi-level governance, and from class struggle and the class character of the state to the dynamics of discourse and identity politics.
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- 1.
I refer here mainly to theory and practice in the North or West as opposed to social and political formations in the global south or the Eastern bloc. It would require too much space and take us beyond mainstream theories to address analyses of the state outside this context.
- 2.
On the distinction between the national state and nation state, see Jessop (2002).
- 3.
Cf. Willke (1992) on the polycontextural nature of the state and Taylor (1994) on the state as a ‘container’ of different social contents.
- 4.
Collibration involves efforts to adjust the relative importance of different modes of governance (cf. Dunsire 1996).
- 5.
The relativization of scale refers to the loss of primacy of the national scale of economic, political, welfare and civic organization that characterized post-WWII territorial states and the failure to establish another scale as primary — leading to competition among states for dominant and nodal positions in the scalar division of economic and political division of labour.
- 6.
I use this metaphor to refer to advanced capitalist societies in the northern hemisphere plus their equivalents in the southern hemisphere (e.g., Australia, New Zealand). South refers to the Third World or Global South.
- 7.
Some scholars deny that an East Asian economic miracle occurred, arguing that the high growth rates were simply factor-driven (e.g., Krugman 1994).
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Jessop, B. (2010). Redesigning the State, Reorienting State Power, and Rethinking the State. In: Leicht, K.T., Jenkins, J.C. (eds) Handbook of Politics. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-68930-2_3
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