Taking Back Control?: States and State Systems After Globalism

Taking Back Control? examines the ongoing tug of war between the forces of globalism and those of democracy, between centralisation and decentralisation, and between the unifica­tion and the differentiation of states and state systems. On this territory are fought the defining geopolitical struggles of our era, which will determine the advance of global capitalism and shape the prospects for its social and democratic regulation.

The neoliberal revolution of the 1990s gave rise to a politics of scale aimed at the centralisation and unification of states and state systems. This was the "New World Order" proclaimed by the United States in the wake of the Soviet collapse. But it proved to be ungovernable by democratic means. Instead, it was ruled through a combina­tion of technocracy and mercatocracy, failing spectacularly to provide for political stability, social legitimacy, and international peace. Marked by a series of economic and institutional crises, hyperglobalisation called forward various kinds of political countermovements that rebelled against and ultimately stopped the upward trans­fer of state authority in its tracks.

Exploring the possibility for states and the societies they govern to take back control over their collective fate, Wolfgang Streeck formulates a renewed theory of the state in political economy. Drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes, he discusses the potential outlines of a state system that allows for democratic governance within and peaceful cooperation between sovereign nation­states.