Abstract
Stephen Gill’s approach to contemporary world order in terms of new constitutionalism, disciplinary neoliberalism and market civilisation is rightly a standard point of reference in critical international political economy (IPE). On the evidence of these collections, arising from encounters in 2010 and 2011, involving a couple of dozen collaborators and ranging across global leadership and governance, and contemporary manifestations of new constitutionalism, it retains some vitality, but is showing its age. The first is focused on the prospects for alternative concepts of global leadership and frameworks of rule, and the second sets out similarly to explore global governance as it is, and as it ought to be: both draw on the notion of a gathering global organic crisis, made more intense by a model of development that is ‘wasteful, energy-intensive, consumerist, ecologically myopic and premised on catering mainly to the affluent’ (2012: 7). The third (jointly edited with Claire Cutler) addresses contemporary aspects of the new constitutionalism of disciplinary neoliberalism. The three volumes taken together should afford an opportunity to assess the achievement and potential of the new constitutionalist research programme, but in practice, they provoke more questions than they resolve, in part because the overall structure of each is loose, and the division of material across them somewhat arbitrary, and in part because the editing, particularly in the volumes on global leadership and governance, ranges from relaxed at best to perfunctory at worst.
The volumes on global leadership and governance can be considered together. There is some work of value in each, but neither works as a collection, primarily because of the lack of engagement on the part of the editor with the other contributions. The first starts from the premise that ‘there is an identifiable, neoliberal nexus of ideas, institutions and interests that dominates global political and civil society – one that is associated with the most powerful states and corporations’ (2012: 1): neoliberal governance is presented as allied with authoritarian and dictatorial forces across the global South, and virtually unchallenged in representational politics across the global North, where the left ‘seems to have offered only limited resistance and few credible alternatives to the neoliberal responses to the crisis of accumulation of the past three years’ (2012: 15), and ‘all mainstream parties’ share the view that ‘there is no alternative to disciplinary neoliberal governance of capitalism’ (2012: 27). The 2015 volume describes the ‘unequal international order’ as ‘premised on the primacy of capital, the world market and US geopolitical power’ (p. 1), though the latter is said later to be ‘weakening’ (p. 182). In both volumes, hope for transformative politics is placed upon a ‘post modern Prince’ – a ‘political movement and a social and pedagogical process’ led by ‘millions of organic intellectuals’ (2012: 253; cf. 2015: 194–196), on which more below.
The contributions to the two volumes cover a variety of topics (not all relating clearly to the theme of organic crisis), and the perspectives they offer often contrast sharply with those of the editor on crucial points. To illustrate briefly, in the 2012 volume, Nicola Short sees a possible path to the resubordination of the market to democratic controls through new forms of regulation of the media and of party funding (p. 55); Hilal Elver concludes that the ‘progressive realization of basic human rights such as the right to water needs effective and prudent – indeed, very far-sighted – regulation’, through democratically accountable institutions and policy-making structures and processes attuned to multiple scales (p. 123); Upendra Baxi’s nuanced account of ‘adjudicatory leadership’ draws on Weber to suggest that ‘tasks, or transformations, of leadership as social and economic enterprise begin only with the displacement of social relations embedded in charismatic or patrimonial relationships’ (p. 178); Teivo Teivainen, reflecting on the World Social Forum, maintains that ‘the road from politicizing protests to transformative proposals is filled with dilemmas’, and highlights the need to address ‘explicitly political questions of leadership and future institutional orders’ (pp. 186, 198); and Adam Harmes makes the case for an alliance of progressives and classical economic liberals against neoliberal ‘locking in’ and policy competition (pp. 228–232). In essays in each, Richard Falk dwells on the potential for reform of the United Nations (UN) system, and in the 2015 volume, he argues for ‘persons of benevolent intention throughout the planet’ to unite to achieve ‘a global democracy as an operative political framework that transcends the workings of state-centric world order’ (p. 30); and Janine Brodie identifies hopeful signs of change from within United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which latter at least Gill classes among the institutions behind the global status quo against which the volume is aimed. So these contributors offer contrasting analytical frameworks, and suggest institutional and organisational strategies other than those favoured by Gill. But in the respective conclusions, where he largely reprises his own previous work, they are all simply ignored. As a result, neither volume has the added value that a good collection should provide – and the second, with a scant 200 pages of text (including an essay from Scott Sinclair which I estimate has a 75% verbatim overlap with his contribution to New Constitutionalism and World Order), seriously short-changes the reader.
New Constitutionalism and World Order (jointly edited with Claire Cutler) is in contrast a well-organised volume, in six sections (each with a summary introduction): concepts; genealogy, origins and world order; multilevel governance and neo-liberalization; trade, investment and taxation; social reproduction, welfare and ecology; and globalization from below and prospects for a just new constitutionalism. There is a useful glossary, and editorial standards are high. The new constitutionalist approach is clearly set out in the opening chapter, and developed further in a number of the contributions that follow. While none lack merit, those from Cutler, May, Schneiderman, Sinclair, Bakker and Roberts do most to explore, supplement or extend the new constitutionalist approach. Even so, the absence of a conclusion from either Gill or Cutler means that no overall assessment of the vitality of the analytical framework a quarter of a century on from its inception is offered. And as in the volumes reviewed above, contrasting perceptions are allowed to sit side by side without comment – striking examples here being Gill’s own tilt towards a Gramscian perspective versus Cutler’s explicit commitment to value theory (2014: 45), and Schneiderman’s invocation of ordoliberalism and Foucault, with its clear implications for the character of ‘disciplinary neoliberalism’.
On the evidence here, then, how does the new constitutionalist project stand? Its central concepts are more relevant than ever if we unpack them, and understand the new constitutionalism as a specific complex of laws and mechanisms of regulation and governance aimed at ‘the “locking in” of neoliberal frameworks of accumulation’ (2014: 4), disciplinary neoliberalism as ‘the power and discipline of capital in social relations’ (2014: 29) and market civilisation as ‘premised on the ethical and moral rectitude and rationality of the capitalist world market as its primary governing force’ (p. 30). The integration of social reproduction into the analysis (reflected here in contributions from Bakker to the 2014 and 2015 volumes) is a signal strength, as is the bringing together of international law and global political economy into a single framework, and the focus on surveillance as a state practice captures an important aspect of the politics of implementation and management of the whole complex. However, other aspects of the approach can be questioned, all revolving around the way in which these concepts are deployed, and the extent to which the analysis they underpin has kept pace with change in the world market over the last 25 years.
Gill continues to see the world order as fundamentally US-centric and US-led, and to focus primarily on the Atlantic area. There may be a case for continuing US supremacy, but it goes largely by assertion or default, in that little attention is paid to the character and consequences of the rise of China, and its orientation within global politics, or the wider expansion of the world market in general. The focus is rather on the Americas, with reference preferentially to the United Kingdom when Europe comes into focus – as it has been from the beginning. Little interest is shown in either the actual record of spatial development of the world market over the last 25 years, or the specific forms in which it has been promoted by leading international organisations – notably, the OECD, the IMF and the World Bank – and its underlying logic. So there is virtually no critical analysis of ‘fragmented production’ or global production chains, changing patterns of inward and outward foreign investment, or new patterns of employment, organisation and resistance among the working classes ‘added’ to the global economy since the 1980s – or consideration of their implications. But it is no longer self-evident that the primacy of capital and the world market (undoubtedly the focus of the international organisations) can be unproblematically coupled with US interests or geopolitical power. What is missing, in short, is a nuanced understanding of the material underpinning of the new constitutionalism in the anything but linear or US-centred interplay between class struggle, incessant division of labour and uninterrupted technological revolution on a global scale, processes that have transformed the world market in recent decades. One particular set of questions that arise in this connection is how the ‘Western’ legal, constitutional and regulatory mechanisms that ‘lock in’ advantages to capital will mutate as China becomes a major investor in the United States and elsewhere, and more broadly how applicable the concept of the private transnational corporation will prove to forms of enterprise much more closely tied to the state. Another concerns the rising institutional presence and influence of China, India and others in the Bretton Woods institutions, to judge by the recently relaxed attitude towards capital controls, rising support for (admittedly market-promoting) industrial policy and acquiescence over US objections to China’s management of its currency. Cutler’s observation that it is ‘a curious form of citizenship where foreign corporations have rights and no duties, and host states have duties and no rights’ (2015: 103–104) may be characteristic of a moment in the development of the global political economy, rather than an intimation of its final form.
More serious questions can be asked with regard to the politics of the ‘post modern Prince’. In neglecting the evidence of renovation and reform within the international organisations themselves, and dismissing both representative party politics and the traditional left, Gill risks both underestimating the cunning of the institutions in their defence and promotion of capital, and over-estimating the capacity to resist and the transformative potential of the ‘diverse constellation of peasants, urban workers, feminists, ecologists, socialists, anarchists, indigenous peoples, churches and scientific and other experts’ (2015: 198) that he invokes. On the one hand, the disciplinary strategies of the World Bank and its allies have moved on from surveillance to direct action on the thought and behaviour of the global poor, while labour reform, social protection and conditional cash transfer are geared, across the developed as well as the developing world, to draw and lock men and women into ever more competitive labour markets. On the other hand, the movements always highlighted as avatars of the post-modern Prince – in Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela in particular – are never examined critically or in depth, or in accordance with their current (sharply reduced) circumstances, but simply invoked in a manner that has become ritualistic. On all of these issues, the new constitutionalism-disciplinary neoliberalism-market civilisation model and the proposed alternative to it seem due for an empirical fix, a recalibration and a reboot. The three collections reviewed here identify that as a task emphatically worth undertaking, but leave it still to be done.