Obstacles to a world state in the shadow of the world market

Introduction

This specific contribution to this special issue on the world state first introduces some basic concepts for analysing the world economy, world state and world society as problematic sites of global governance. It then addresses three interrelated topics: (1) the implications of increasing functional differentiation for global governance; (2) the governance problems generated by the separation of the political from other spheres of world society; and (3) the problem of multi-spatial metagovernance. It is suggested in the article that, while the institution of a world state may be possible in formal, institutional terms, its substantive operation will be strongly shaped by the uneven development of the world market and the survival of a world of states. Furthermore, a world state is unlikely to become the dominant scale within any system of multi-spatial metagovernance, especially in a networked, asymmetrical and still hierarchical world of states. This highlights a performative paradox in political activities to create a world state: an effective world state oriented to good governance is implausible on fundamental theoretical and political grounds, but efforts to develop such a state are nonetheless justified if made in a spirit of romantic public irony. While individual arguments similar to those elaborated below are prefigured or explicitly stated in other work, written from diverse theoretical and political perspectives, this article is distinctive because it seeks to develop a coherent approach based on the improbable combination of Luhmannian systems- theoretical analysis and the Marxian critique of political economy. By bringing these contrasting paradigms into a virtual dialogue, we can better relate the challenge of global governance to the complexities of the global social formation. ¹

Theoretical preliminaries

Much contemporary thought about the feasibility of global governance focuses on the properties of and, in many cases, the interrelations among, one or more of the following: the dynamic of the world economy, the prospects of a world state in a world of states and the emergence of global civil society (see, for example, Scholte, 2005). Concern with these themes and their interrelations reflects the Enlightenment conceptual triplet of market economy, sovereign state and civil society as defining features of modern social formations (for a nuanced account, see Zafirovski, 2011). Accepting for argument’s sake that these concepts capture more or less adequately the structure of modern societies, it should be noted that the respective logics of the three designated spheres conflict in ways that pose serious theoretical and practical problems for a coherent approach to global governance. The market economy is organized primarily in terms of profit-oriented, market-mediated economic activities and takes the world market as its ultimate horizon of calculation. The sovereign state system is based, in this perspective, on the territorialization of political power and thereby segments the globe into distinct, formally equivalent units, each of which is recognized as sovereign within its territory. Bourgeois civil society, insofar as it is not simply conflated with market relations, comprises a wide range of identities, interests and social relations that are not tied to any specific functional system or institutional order but cross-cut them by virtue of their grounding in the experiences and ‘lifeworlds’ of whole persons. These persons co-exist in a spirit of mutual tolerance and draw on these experiences to deliberate to produce negotiated consent on decisions that affect the society in which they live.

The relations among these spheres have been studied in many ways. Rather than reviewing and critiquing these, however, this article combines Luhmannian and Marxist ideas to identify some fundamental challenges to the development of a world state. Karl Marx advocated scientific socialism and, eventually, communism (albeit not in the distorted form that it acquired in the Soviet Union and other state socialist societies) ² based on his critical inquiry into the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist mode of production and his sometimes more, sometimes less confident prognosis of its revolutionary overthrow through class struggle in a context of worsening global economic and political crises. Niklas Luhmann (see, for example, 1989, 1990, 1996, 1998, 2008) is often considered a conservative thinker because of his emphasis on the autonomous operational logics of functional systems, their mutual non-substitutability, and, on this basis, the impossibility that any one system – or any superordinate instance – could control other systems from outside and/or in a top-down manner (on Luhmann as a radical thinker, see Moeller, 2012). This analysis grounds Luhmann’s often-remarked ‘steering pessimism’ and his critique of attempts to interfere in functional systems insofar as intervention ignores their respective operational codes and programmes. Luhmann argued that Marxism was a premodern theoretical paradigm because it analysed complex modern societies in terms of an outdated notion of class stratification and treated society one-sidedly in terms of just one of its features, i.e., exchange relations. Notwithstanding the different contexts in which Marx and Luhmann wrote and their contrasting analytical entry-points and standpoints, there are interesting and productive convergences in the import of their theoretical work for the feasibility of a world state. Whereas Marx emphasized the disjunction between the tendential unification of the world market and the survival for political reasons of a plurality of territorial states, Luhmann’s scepticism is grounded in the alleged irreversibility of functional differentiation. For Marx, the plurality of states representing competing economic and geopolitical interests is a major political obstacle to global governance as opposed to imperial domination – although the contradictions of capital accumulation are the primary obstacle. For Luhmann, it is functional differentiation that rules out a world state that could control world society.

These approaches seem far apart until one recalls a neglected insight from Luhmann. This can be expressed as follows: in a self-organizing ecology of self-organizing systems, one system may become ‘ecologically dominant’. Luhmann appropriated this useful notion from Edgar Morin (1980: 44) but did not employ it explicitly in later work – even though the underlying concept does survive therein. One system would become ecologically dominant when the self-organization and self-reproduction of that system causes more problems for the other systems than they can cause for it (Jessop, 2002); or, again, when it predefines the problems that other systems must address (see Pahl, 2008: 55–63). In these circumstances, the structural coupling and co-evolution of all functional systems is shaped more by the logic of the ecologically dominant system than the latter’s development is shaped by the logics of other systems. In his early work, Luhmann indicated the economy as the most likely such system and reverted to this idea several times in later work (Luhmann, 1974; for further examples, see Pahl, 2008). His later work also identified the tight coupling among the economic, legal and political systems relative to their linkages to other systems (for instance, Luhmann 1989, 1990, 2008). This provides an interesting bridge to Marx, for whom the logic of capital accumulation provided the critical entry-point into the analysis of the anatomy of bourgeois societies – a logic that was not reducible to market exchange but depended on close ties among the social relations of production, juridico-political institutions and state power. In short, the contribution of this article will be to explore the argument that the world market is ‘ecologically dominant’ and that this poses serious obstacles to a world state. But it also considers whether there can be functional equivalents to a world state that could limit the ecological dominance of capital accumulation (including its increasingly damaging environmental footprint) and provide other ways to steer the overall development of world society.

This perspective differs from the more common accounts of a world state that start from problems of warfare, military security and the politico-military balance of power (especially in a nuclear age) and/or the institutional conditions for perpetual peace among nations based on mutual commitment to non-violent conflict resolution (Deudney, 1995; Sørensen, 2003; Wendt, 2003). From such a perspective, the dominant problem to be solved at the global scale is state violence directed against other states and the desired end-state is a global political authority with a legitimate monopoly over the use of organized coercion in the relations among territorial political entities. The starting point in the present article is different and leads us in another direction. The primary concern is with capital accumulation as the dominant force in shaping world society rather than the problematic of security that informs much of the work on a world state and/or on the emergence and consolidation of international society. Buzan and Little (1999) provide a possible link between these concerns when they remark that the international relations system has recently (but belatedly) shifted from a predominant concern with Westphalian inter-state relations oriented to the control of territory, claims to sovereignty and struggles over borders and security to a capitalist international relations system oriented to the global pursuit of wealth based on property rights in what one might call a space of flows. They claim that it is now ‘impossible for liberals, in particular, to discuss the future of the international system without some evaluation of the unfolding international role being played by capitalism’ (Buzan and Little, 1999: 89). While the extent of this bifurcation and their explanation for the transition is questionable, their ‘English School’ view lends some credence to this author’s emphasis on the (il)logic of the world market as a key reference point in analyses of the world state and world society.

Two further preliminary points are necessary. First, if Luhmann’s focus on functional differentiation is followed, with each system having its own code and programme, it can be concluded that there will be competing Vergesellschaftungsprinzipien [principles of societal organization] that reflect the social imaginaries associated with different functional systems. Each of these competing principles would involve efforts to organize the societal system (up to and including world society) according to the code and programme of one system, leading to the roll-back or colonization of other systems (cf. Habermas, 1984; for a critique of Habermas that is closer to the present approach, see Baxter, 2002). Such principles can include marketization, juridification, militarization, scientization and the subordination of social relations to the rule of one religion. Moreover, if we allow for societalization projects that privilege identities and values anchored, not in specific functional systems but in identities rooted in civil society or the lifeworld, it is possible to envisage attempts to impose social order based on patriarchy, ‘race’, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and so on. One way to read Marx’s critique of political economy is that it examines what occurs when capital accumulation becomes a totalizing principle of societal organization, up to and including the world scale. But, second, if Luhmann’s arguments about the non-substitutability of functional systems are also followed, then the colonization of society (and, a fortiori, world society) by one principle would be counter-productive, leading sooner or later to the breakdown of societal integration and social cohesion. This is also implied in Marx’s claim that the integration of the world market generalizes and intensifies capital’s contradictions and in Karl Polanyi’s analysis of how ‘society’ fights back against the extension of market relations into social spheres where market logic is inappropriate. A further connection is Michael Walzer’s defence of plural spheres of justice, in which different moral values and norms hold for different sets of social relations (Walzer, 1984).

Globalization

The processes that have prompted growing interest in the world market, world state and global governance do not unfold exclusively on a world scale (i.e. through processes that embrace the entire planet) and do not amount to a single causal principle, let alone derive from one primary causal force. In this sense, ‘globalization’ is a misleading neologism for the latest reorganization of world society that also understates the continuities with earlier trends towards planetary integration. These processes emerge from many competing strategies and counter-strategies associated with diverse activities, identities and interests. They develop in many sites around the globe, including not only metropolitan regions but also peripheral and semi-peripheral locations, as well as in diverse networks of social relations rather than specific places. They also develop on many scales that co-exist and interpenetrate so that globalization is just one among many effects of changing forms of scalar articulation (see, for example, Scholte, 2005). Its multi-dimensionality complicates any and all efforts to manage or govern globalization (see Karns and Mingst, 2010). This involves more than spatial locations and horizons of action. Globalization also develops in a dense nexus of temporalities and time horizons that are linked to growing space–time distantiation (the stretching of social relations over space and time – see Scholte, 2005) and/or space–time compression (the growing density or intensity of social relations in a given space and/or time interval). The problem of compression or, in its temporal form, acceleration has been emphasized in political and social thought for centuries (for instance, Rosa, 2005). Nonetheless, the most recent wave of globalization (dating loosely from the 1980s, depending on one’s reference point) is distinctive less for the growing planetary integration of events, processes, institutions, systems and the lifeworld than it is for the growing speed of these interconnections and their successive ramifications thanks to new material and social technologies that facilitate more rapid integration and faster spread of its repercussions (for an idiosyncratic account that prioritizes military technology, see Virilio, 1986; more generally, see Rosa, 2005 and Glezos, 2012). This has major implications for the temporal as opposed to territorial sovereignty of the state and, a fortiori, for the design and operations of a world state.

Governance and metagovernance

The preceding remarks reinforce the widespread recognition of the complexity of governance and the difficult challenges facing the governance of complexity – recognition that has underpinned conservative fears about the growth of state power. But ‘steering pessimism’ does not apply solely to the risks of state failure but also holds for other forms of governance. It is useful to distinguish four main forms of coordination of complex reciprocal interdependence: ex post coordination through exchange (e.g. the anarchy of the market), ex ante coordination through imperative coordination (e.g. the hierarchy of the firm, organization or state), reflexive self-organization (e.g. the heterarchy of negotiated consent to resolve complex problems in a corporatist order and/or of horizontal networking to coordinate a complex division of labour), and the solidarity of unconditional commitments (e.g. the solidarity of communities of fate). Transposed to the global scale, these modes of coordination would correspond roughly to the primacy of exchange in the world market, the primacy of imperative coordination in a putative world state, the reflexive self-organization of governance in global civil society, and the subsidiarity and solidarity that would be needed to develop a world society based on principles of redistributive social justice and respect for the environment that transcend the morality of specific functional systems.

In recent decades there has been a dramatic intensification of societal complexity reflected in the following trends:

These trends appear to have promoted a shift in the institutional centre of gravity (or institutional attractor) for policy coordination towards heterarchy or reflexive self-organization (which is sometimes conflated with governance tout court in claims that there has been a shift from government to governance). But disillusion with the utopias of communism, the welfare state and, more recently, the unfettered dominance of market forces should not lead us to put all our trust in the atopic vision of good governance based on horizontal and vertical solidarities and the mobilization of collective intelligence (Willke, 2001). It is not just markets and imperative coordination that are prone to fail; heterarchic governance and solidarity are also failure-prone – albeit for different reasons, in different ways and with different effects. In general, the greater the material, social and spatio-temporal complexity of the problems to be addressed, the greater are the number and range of interests whose heterarchic coordination is necessary to resolve them satisfactorily. In addition, the less direct and visible are reciprocally interdependent interests, the more challenging is efficient, effective and consensual coordination regardless of the method of coordination. These simple and obvious remarks already indicate some basic problems of a world state as a governance regime.

The growing dominance of the logic of capital

Advocates of neo-liberal globalization see it as spreading the mutual benefits of free exchange. In contrast, Marx suggested that world market integration generalizes and intensifies capital’s contradictions. Without using Marxist terminology, a continuing bête noire, Luhmann also glimpsed these problems in his final years – witness his references to the rise of an international financial system as a new and dominant centre in world society and the challenge it poses to national states to adapt to the predefined imperatives of global finance (Luhmann, 1998).

The complex mutual implications of world market dynamics and state power are shaped by at least two sets of features of capitalist social formations: (a) the inherent contradictions in the capital relation, especially between use-value and exchange-value; and (b) the typical separation of the profit-oriented, market-mediated capitalist economy from its crucial extra-economic preconditions. States have key roles in mediating this relation. While the present section deals with the first set, the second set is discussed in the next section on economic challenges to the territorial and temporal sovereignty of states.

There is insufficient space here to discuss all of the contradictions and crisis tendencies inherent in the capital relation, this article therefore focuses on two sets of contradiction. The first set comprises the contradiction between the growing socialization of productive forces through the deepening of the social division of labour on a global scale and the continuing private ownership and control of the forces of production and the appropriation of profit – shaped in part by the close connection between capital accumulation and the economic and economically relevant roles of territorial states. The second set is rooted in the often-remarked contradiction between the use-value and exchange-value aspects of the commodity form and its reflection in other forms of the capital relation (see below). This contradiction is intensified when the commodity form is generalized to social relations for which, as Karl Polanyi among others have suggested, it is inappropriate: nature, money, labour power and, one might add, knowledge (for further discussion, see Jessop, 2002, 2007).

Both sets of contradictions pose problems for global governance. The first set is aggravated by the plurality of states, which are often mobilized to defend the interests of capitals located in their territory and/or to provide attractive conditions for mobile capitals. This is the basis for the development of various forms of ‘competition state’ that seek to enhance the economic and extra-economic conditions of inter-urban, inter-regional or international competitiveness in a potentially endless treadmill of competition premised on ever more growth in a world of finite resources. These contradictions and those arising from the second set are often resolved partially and temporally by displacing them elsewhere and/or deferring them into the future in ways that depend on the absence of global governance that might block such ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ policies. Capital accumulation on a global scale continually creates zones of instability and crisis as both a condition and effect of stability and relatively crisis-free expansion elsewhere. Recent manifestations of this uneven development are the rise of Japan and the East Asian dragon economies and, more recently still, the expansion of the BRIC (Brazil–Russia–India–China) economies, China above all. While these examples have become clichés, this phenomenon occurs at many different sites, on many different scales and is mediated through many networks.

Furthermore, in the past 35-40 years, both sets of contradictions have been aggravated by neo-liberal efforts to extend and deepen the world market. The typical neo-liberal policy set privileges capital as ‘value in motion’ (seeking the highest return on a global scale) rather than as a stock of assets to be valorized in a particular time and place; treats workers as disposable and substitutable factors of production rather than as the possessors of specific skills and tacit knowledge; regards the wage, including the social wage, as a cost of (international) production rather than as the final source of demand; views money as an international currency rather than means of national demand management; commodifies nature rather than guarding it as a collective resource, and sees knowledge as intellectual property rather than intellectual commons. Supported by an emphasis on shareholder value, this approach particularly benefits hypermobile financial capital. Moreover, with the deregulation of international finance and the growth of shadow banking, there is a vast increase in financial leverage to expand private credit far in excess of the underlying growth potential of the ‘real’ (but always monetized) economy. This creates the conditions for asset bubbles and eventual liquidity and solvency crises with contagion effects extending far beyond the financial sector. The same ‘ecological dominance’ of the world market, especially when dominated by international financial capital, enhances the scope for a relatively unfettered (or disembedded) capitalism to shape the operation of other systems (Jessop, 2007).

These contradictions and crisis tendencies have become almost self-evident in the past decade and have been blamed on an excess of deregulation of market forces and on the implicit guarantees that national states and/or international financial institutions would support banks and corporations that are too big and/or too interconnected to be allowed to fail. ³ Given the preceding analysis, it is tempting to suggest that the currently dominant neo-liberal form of globalization restricts state power in its current forms and, a fortiori, would also constrain a world state. Indeed, a world state could not finesse these problems as some national states have hitherto managed to do – because the problems would then be internalized within the world state rather than being displaced elsewhere from one economic space or territory to another. In particular, a world state that was more than a simple inter-governmental forum used by powerful states to dominate the less powerful could not maintain its output legitimacy if it simply shuffled the cost of uneven development among weak regions. The consequences of the inevitable internalization of the costs of uneven development and economic crisis tendencies are sometimes cited as one reason why a combination of an expanding world market and a plurality of states might be considered beneficial for capital accumulation. It provides room for continual uneven development, zero-sum business models and policy approaches and the deferral of environmental, economic and social problems resulting from capital accumulation into the future.

While this argument is certainly plausible, it requires at least one qualification. Specifically, the extension of neo-liberalism and the tendential completion and integration of the world market are not inevitable effects of the invisible hand of the world market or the unanticipated, unwanted side effects of narrow, short-sighted economic policy decisions. While some states (and their individual and corporate citizens) are largely passive victims of neo-liberalism, state managers and their allies in other states promoted neo-liberalism as an accumulation strategy and state project and garnered, at least for a while, significant economic and political benefits. Indeed, the restrictions on state power generated by the generalization of neo-liberalism are, in some cases, self-imposed, the product of specific national and transnational class projects linked to specific economic and political imaginaries rather than resulting from fateful necessities imposed by the logic of the market. We can illustrate some of these issues by considering how neo-liberalism challenges the temporal as well as territorial sovereignty of national states and thereby modifies the balance of economic and political forces.

The challenge to the territorial and temporal sovereignty of states

The problem of time has been much rehearsed in discussions of political power (especially in the constitutionalist republican tradition) in relation to the speed of communication, the speed of economic transactions, the speed of modern weapons systems, the urgency of crisis management and so on. Nonetheless, as Rosa (2005) shows, a key problem in contemporary capitalist economy is the dissociation between hypermobile, superfast financial markets and the ‘real economy’. This is particularly evident in the so-called global financial crisis, the great recession and the role of state crisis-management in transforming private credit–debt problems into issues of public and sovereign debt. Rosa adds that the greatest danger of the ‘acceleration society’ (which Luhmann would regard as one self-description among many of late modern society) is the de-synchronization of politics and economics (Rosa, 2005; see also Luhmann, 1998).

The separation of the economic and the political – and, hence, the possibility of their desynchronization – is another source and site of potential contradictions in modern societies. Capitalist reproduction cannot be secured exclusively through the profit-oriented, market-mediated logic of accumulation but depends, as scholars from left, right and centre acknowledge, on crucial extra-economic mechanisms. States are heavily involved here through their direct role in economic management and through their role in the indirect modulation of other modes of regulation. This said, few, if any, individual states have an effective global reach and can compress their routines to match the time–space of fast hypermobile capital. Even the more powerful states still encounter external pressures from other states, from other power centres, and from the logic of the world market as well as from the repercussions (or blowback) of their own policies and the resistance these generate.

Nonetheless, as the latest wave of world market integration has intensified, post-war national states can no longer presume, as they did at the height of Atlantic Fordism, East Asian export-oriented growth and Latin American import-substitution industrialization, that their chief economic task is to govern their respective national economies. World market integration enhances the economic power of capital insofar as it weakens the capacity of national states to guide capital’s expansion within a framework of national security (as reflected in the ‘national security state’), national welfare (as reflected in social democratic welfare states), or some other national project with a matching, primarily national, spatio-temporal fix. It also increases pressures on national states to adjust to the time horizons and temporalities of transnational mobile capital.

In addition to their claim to territorial sovereignty, states also seek temporal sovereignty. This involves the ability to make decisions according to the routines and rhythms of the political system rather than those of other systems. World market integration also puts pressure on this dimension of sovereignty due to its associated forms of time–space distantiation, compression and differentiation. As economic decision-making and the rhythms of the world market accelerate relative to those of the state and political decision-making, the time to determine and coordinate political responses to economic events shrinks – especially regarding hypermobile, superfast capital. This reinforces conflicts between the time(s) of the state and the time(s) of the market, with some states more actively involved in and/or more vulnerable to time–space distantiation and compression. More generally, the pressure to comprehend more information and address issues in real time tends to collapse the future into the present, pressuring states to adapt by withdrawing from areas where they are too slow to make a difference, speeding up their routines through fast policy and fast tracking or seeking to slow down economic movements.

Strategies adopted to cope with these challenges to temporal sovereignty include:

National states and/or global governance?

Given these remarks, it is implausible that a putative world state could govern a world society, let alone that this could be achieved at the global scale alone. This has prompted proposals for multi-level governance as a ‘third way’ between supranational imperative coordination through a world state and a relatively anarchic, negatively coordinated and fragmented pursuit of common economic, social and political objectives in international society (for instance, see Slaughter, 2004).

Yet recent proposals for global multi-level government or governance could prove misleading on four grounds. First, they draw on past work on multi-level governance that has focused on regional, national and supranational levels of political organization set in a nested territorial hierarchy. Second, they direct attention to relations of vertical interdependence, communication and joint decision-making without emphasizing the tangled and shifting nature of dominant, nodal and marginal levels of government in different areas. Third, work on multi-level governance has tended to focus on specific policy and issue areas rather than wider problems of policy coordination. And, fourth, even when it addresses governance rather than government, it tends to neglect problems of ‘metagovernance’, notably those concerning the continual effort to find the right balance among different modes of governance. Each of these problems has important implications for thinking about a world state and/or global governance and, because they reinforce rather than moderate each other, their conjoint implications are even more challenging.

An alternative theoretical and policy paradigm could be developed by recognizing the complex interrelations between territorial organization, multiple scalar divisions of labour (and other practices), networked forms of social interaction and the importance of place as a meeting point of functional operations and the conduct of personal life. To escape the traps of methodological nationalism and reification of world society, multi-spatial metagovernance can be proposed as an alternative approach to the world state and global governance. It has four potential advantages over multi-level governance. First, it affirms the irreducible plurality of territorial area, social scales, networks and places that must be addressed in attempts at governance. Second, it recognizes the complex, tangled and interwoven nature of the relevant political relations, which include important horizontal and transversal linkages – indicated in notions such as ‘network state’ or ‘network polity’ – as well as the vertical linkages implied in multi-level governance. Third, in contrast to a one-sided emphasis on heterarchic coordination, it highlights the role of metagovernance as the reflexive art of balancing government and other forms of governance to create requisite variety, flexibility and adaptability in coordinated policy-formulation, policy-making and implementation. And, fourth, it insists on the plurality and, indeed, heterogeneity of actors potentially involved in such institutions and practices, which stretch well beyond different tiers of government and well beyond the confines of any given administrative, political or economic space.

At this stage of theoretical elaboration, the concept of multi-spatial metagovernance is admittedly a place-holder that identifies a range of problems to be addressed in research on the inevitably fractal, multi-dimensional nature of governance in an emerging world society. It does not plot the ‘high road’ to an effective world state or global governance but serves to warn against investing too many hopes in the search for a quick, one-dimensional fix to the problems of world governance. In particular, it reflects the rescaling of the complexities of government and governance rather than a simple rescaling of the sovereign state or the emergence of international regimes as just another arena in which national states pursue national interests. In short, multi-spatial metagovernance operates through multiple modes of governance and with multiple stakeholders in the shadow of post-national statehood. Some states are more important in this regard than others and there is no simple scalar division of labour that ensures the primacy of one particular scale. Each scale and node is involved in complex, tangled relations with others located above, below or transversal thereto. Many parallel power networks are involved in the emerging, hypercomplex and chaotic system of global metagovernance.

A further complication is the growing disjunction in an increasingly integrated global economy between the formal structures of political power associated with sovereign territorial states and the substantive circuits of transnational power. If representative democracy is based on territorial representation, it is rendered problematic by the relativization of scale (the loss of primacy of the national scale), by de- and re-territorialization (the territorial re-scaling of government powers and authorities), the resulting increase in variable geometries and tangled hierarchies of political power (the loss of territorial congruence and/or of neatly nested hierarchies of power across a growing range of fields of government action), and the challenge to many of the traditional bases of national citizenship and mutual solidarity in some national states that come from multi-ethnicity, multiculturalism and divided political loyalties. Moreover, given the increasing interdependence among functionally differentiated systems with their own operational codes, logics of appropriateness, temporalities, spatialities, etc., it becomes harder for one system (even the state as the core of the political system) to control the operations of other systems from outside and above.

World society or global civil society?

What should be made of the alleged resurgence, recovery, resistance or revenge of civil society on the market economy and/or national territorial states and of the countless calls from many quarters to promote a ‘global civil society’? Such calls do not entail that ‘civil society’ has become materially and social unified – let alone on a global scale. They do indicate major changes in the ‘self-understanding’ and ‘self-description’ of societies that are reflected in the renewed discussions on ‘civil society’. In particular, growing structural and social complexity together with the time–space distantiation and compression entailed in the development of world markets, global politics and world society have increased the significance of a growing plurality of values, identities and interests as means to cope with the disorienting effects of complexity by providing social anchoring and meaning. This is linked in turn to the apparent ‘de-nationalization’ of civil society and the resulting challenges to many of the traditional bases of national citizenship and mutual solidarity that arise from multi-ethnicity, multiculturalism and divided political loyalties – whether these latter features are inherited from the earlier stages of state formation or result from more recent regional or global shifts in population and/or from other economic, political and socio-cultural transformations. This poses the question of whether a potential global civil society is compatible with the continuation of national identities or demands more cosmopolitan subjects.

Some of the counter-tendencies that prevent a complete de-statization of politics in favour of market forces and/or civil society and that prevent a complete ‘governmentalization’ (state absorption) of the economy and civil society could also enable a partial transcendence of the opposition between state and civil society or, a fortiori, between a plurality of national states and an emergent global civil society. Relevant here are: (1) the decomposition of different forms of national identity associated with nation-states, which creates the space for transnational and/or cosmopolitan identities as well as for localist, ‘tribal’ or other particularisms; and (2) the continuing importance of state power, in the sense of state capacities and strategic resources rather than formal territorial sovereignty, for the realization of major objectives of the social forces active in an emerging global civil society.

In this context, ‘global civil society’ would have a dual significance. First, it would develop as a ‘public sphere’ based on dialogue not only among individuals but also among organizations or associations as representatives of a wide range of personal, inter-personal, organizational, inter-organizational, systemic and inter-systemic interests. The development and expansion of social forums, either independently of or in parallel with inter-governmental or business forums, illustrates this. Such forums could be seen as a new form of associational democracy with its own logic based on dialogue in the context of solidarity. As such they would provide crucial transversal networking mechanisms among social movements on different scales with a view to building new forms of transnational solidarity. Their aim would not be to replace all forms of coordination through the market (though emphasis would go to fair trade rather than free trade) and/or through statal and other hierarchical organizations. Instead they would aim to provide forums for shaping the appropriate balance among different coordination mechanisms and to provide flanking and supporting devices for solidaristic initiatives. Thus the overall challenge is to connect particular local struggles, generalize them and link them to a universal project of socio-ecological transformation opposed to the logic of ever more accumulation.

In addition, for global civil society to acquire influence in global governance, it must develop the resources, capacities and collective will to resist hegemonization, domination or colonization by the institutional logics associated with one particular functional system (e.g. the profit-oriented, market-mediated logic of the capitalist economy, the authority of science, the fetishism of law, the prioritization of military security) or by the power interests of one super-power or bloc of states. Only then could it serve as a space for dialogue between different systemic and organizational logics with a view to developing mutual understandings and sustain negative and positive coordination among different organizations and systems. In this sense, civil societies and any emergent global civil society provide a reservoir of antagonistic ‘instincts’ (rooted in other identities) and social resources for resisting attempts to colonize or dominate a wider social formation. Continuing dialogue might lead to consensus on hegemonic values, axial principles of societalization and procedural roles for system integration and social cohesion without the need for an increasingly impossible top-down government or blind co-evolution of anarchic market forces.

Presented in this way, it might seem that these are purely technical matters that can be left to ‘experts’ or the ‘leading’ states as the final arbiters of good governance. Effective decision-making involves not only institutional design, but also ‘cultural’ governance. Whereas there has been much interest in issues of institutional design appropriate to different objects of governance, less attention has been paid to the reform of the subjects of governance. This poses basic questions not only about institutional compatibility of different modes of governance in a global governance regime, but also about the complementarity among the individual and collective capacities and individual and collective orientations needed to sustain them.

Conclusion

Malpas and Wickham (1996) have criticized mainstream social science for its ‘refusal to recognise the centrality of failure and the inevitability of incompleteness’. Failure is therefore ‘seen as the exception rather than the rule, and as something to be eventually overcome through improvements in knowledge or technique’. Three reactions to the probability of failure are fatalistic resignation, stoicism and cynical opportunism. Cynics are overly influenced by the ‘pessimism of the intellect’ and assume that new policies will work no better than old policies. This leads to a state of ‘being in denial’, so that cynics deny failures or redefine them as successes; it also encourages a manipulative approach, with appearances being stage-managed so that success seems to have occurred. This is the realm of symbolic politics, accelerated policy churning (to give the impression of doing something about intractable problems) and the ‘spin doctor’ – the realm of ‘words that work but policies that fail’.

Yet another response is possible: romantic public irony. The ironist recognizes the likelihood of failure but acts as if success were possible. More specifically, if failure is likely, one can, at least, choose one’s preferred form of failure. This is a romantic form of irony. Moreover, if one chooses one’s mode of failure wisely, one would choose to fail collectively, i.e. through deliberation. This would make the irony public as well as romantic. It would also add a further ironic moment insofar as collective deliberation may well minimize the risks of failure. This involves a commitment to participatory forms of governance in which relevant social forces engage in continuing dialogue and mutual reflection to monitor the progress of their attempts at governance and to develop an appropriate repertoire of modes of coordination so that they can respond to signs of failure. This in turn requires a commitment to reflexive metagovernance practices that are concerned to create the conditions in which the scope for participatory governance is optimized in different policy domains and on different scales and in which the contribution of market forces and top-down command (especially through the state) is subordinated to the logic of participatory governance. This does not exclude resort to the anarchy of exchange or the hierarchy of formal organization as means of simplifying specific coordination problems, but it does require that the scope of the market mechanism and the exercise of formal authority be subject as far as possible to forms of participatory governance that aim to balance efficiency, effectiveness and democratic accountability in and through self-reflexive deliberation in conditions that minimize social exclusion. This places issues of constitutional design at the heart of debates on the future of governance and metagovernance and, in this context, poses a whole series of complex problems about the place of a putative world state within multi-scalar metagovernance.

This author’s preferred solution to these problems is a mixed constitution based on an appropriate mix of representative, associational and direct democracy and the extension of democracy to the maximum feasible extent beyond the political order into the organization of the economic domains. Without this extension of democracy, political democracy would still be constrained heavily by the competitive, profit-oriented, market-mediated logic of the world market and the damaging, growth-oriented, resource-intensive logic of ‘industrialism’ operating from local to planetary scales. The logic of capital accumulation, whether the dominant forces of production are purportedly ‘industrial or ‘post-industrial’, entails a competitive treadmill oriented to ever-increasing production of wealth in the form of a massive accumulation of commodities. This treadmill operates not only among firms but also clusters, regions and national states and is one of the principal limits to the denationalization of statehood and the harmonious internationalization of policy regimes. When an integrated world market and global ecosystem characterized by uneven development and growing ecological vulnerabilities are combined with many competing economic and political entities endowed with unequal strategic capacities and power, it would be virtually impossible to resolve market and state failures, environmental problems, economic inequalities and unequal access to opportunities for human flourishing within the existing economic and political order. For the modes of economic and political calculation associated with profit-oriented, market-mediated accumulation and exclusive juridico-political sovereignties militate against the sacrifice and reciprocity required to overcome the problems generated by economic competition and political rivalries on a global scale. Cooperation within these logics is feasible where a positive-sum game can be played against other competitors