Comp Pol | Course Paper

Social Theory and Globalization: The Rise of a Transnational State

Author(s): William I. Robinson

Source:

Theory and Society,

Vol. 30, No. 2 (Apr., 2001), pp. 157-200

Published by: Springer

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/657872

Accessed: 09-04-2020 14:38 UTC

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Theory and

Society

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Social theory and globalization:

The rise of a transnational state

WILLIAM I. ROBINSON

University of California, Santa Barbara

Globalization is a relatively new concept in the social sciences. What

this concept exactly means, the nature, extent, and importance of the

changes bound up with the process, is hotly debated.1 But few would

doubt that it is acquiring a critical importance for the academic as well

as the political agenda of the twenty-first century, or that it poses a

distinctive challenge to theoretical work in the social sciences. The

historic limitations of social theory, insofar as it has been informed by

the study of “national” societies and the nation-state, are brought into

focus by the universalizing tendencies and transnational structural

transformations bound up with globalization. To what extent is the

nation-state a historically specific form of world social organization

now in the process of becoming transcended by capitalist globaliza-

tion? This is the question that underlies the present essay, although the

matter I intend to address is more circumscribed.

The debate on globalization has increasingly centered on the relation

of the nation-state to economic globalization. But the issue of global-

ization and the state has been misframed. Either the nation-state (and

the inter-state system) is seen as retaining its primacy as the axis of

international relations and world development – the “strong state”

thesis – in a dualist construct that posits separate logics for a globalizing

economic and a nation-state based political system, or the state is seen,

as in the “weak state” or diverse “end of the nation-state” theses, as no

longer important. Rejecting these frames, I intend here to clarify the

relationship between globalization and the nation-state by critiquing

and moving beyond this global-national dualism by developing the

concept of a transnational state. I argue that the state and the nation-

state are not coterminous. The conflation of the two in the globaliza-

tion literature has impeded analysis of the increasing separation of

state practices from those of the nation-state.

Theory and Society 30: 157-200, 2001.

? 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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158

Specifically, I call for a return to a historical materialist conception of

the state, and on this basis explore three interrelated propositions: 1)

economic globalization has its counterpart in transnational class for-

mation and in the emergence of a transnational state (henceforth,

TNS) that has been brought into existence to function as the collective

authority for a global ruling class; 2) the nation-state is neither retain-

ing its primacy nor disappearing but becoming transformed and ab-

sorbed into this larger structure of a TNS; 3) this emergent TNS

institutionalizes a new class relation between global capital and global

labor.

This article is divided into six parts. The first discusses globalization as

a new stage in the development of world capitalism. The second calls

for a break with the Weberian conception of the state that underlies

much discussion of globalization. This section also develops the con-

cept of a TNS. The third situates the rise of a TNS in the context of a

new class relation between global capital and global labor. The fourth

reviews empirical evidence for the rise of a TNS between the 1960s and

the 1990s. The fifth examines the transformation of national states as

part of the globalization process. Parts four and five also specify the

relationship between the national state and the TNS. Finally, the sixth

reflects by way of conclusion on the ability of a TNS to provide regu-

latory and other functions for the system of global capitalism, and as

well refers to the implications of a TNS for state theory and other

issues for future research. I should note, as a caveat, that space con-

straints preclude a full discussion of the theoretical and analytical

issues at hand. There are natural limits to exploratory research of this

type, which tends to raise a set of new questions for each one it

answers. The propositions put forward are intended to provoke discus-

sion, advance the debate on globalization, and suggest the way forward

for ongoing research. They are as a matter of course tentative in nature.

Globalization: From a world economy to a global economy

The predominant version of globalization associates it with the pro-

found restructuring of world capitalism that began in the 1970s. In my

view, however, globalization is not a new process, but the near culmina-

tion of the centuries-long process of the spread of capitalist production

relations around the world and its displacement of all pre-capitalist

relations (“modernization”). It marks the triumph of the capitalist

mode of production, what Istvan Meszaros calls “the end of capital’s

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3rd categoration—TNS

159

historical ascendancy.”2 The capitalist system since its inception has

been expanding in two directions, extensively and intensively. The final

phase in capitalism’s extensive enlargement started with the wave of

colonization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and

concluded in the 1990s with the reincorporation of the former Soviet

bloc and Third World revolutionary countries. Under globalization,

the system is undergoing a dramatic intensive expansion. Capitalist

production relations are replacing what remains of all pre-capitalist

relations around the globe. The era of the primitive accumulation of

capital is coming to an end. All remaining “Chinese walls” the world

over are being battered down. In this process, those cultural and

political institutions that fettered capitalism are swept aside, paving

the way for the total commodification or “marketization” of social life

worldwide.

Economic globalization has been well researched.3 Capital has achieved

a newfound global mobility and its reorganizing production worldwide

in accordance with the whole gamut of political and factor cost con-

siderations. This involves the worldwide decentralization of produc-

tion together with the centralization of command and control of the

global economy in transnational capital. In this process, national pro-

ductive apparatuses become fragmented and integrated externally into

new globalized circuits of accumulation. Here we can distinguish be-

tween a world economy and a global economy. In earlier epochs, each

country developed national circuits of accumulation that were linked

to each other through commodity exchange and capital flows in an

integrated international market. This was a world economy. Different

modes of production were “articulated” within a broader social forma-

tion, or a world system while nation-states mediated the boundaries

between a world of different articulated modes of production.4 In the

emerging global economy, the globalization of the production process

breaks down and functionally integrates these national circuits into

global circuits of accumulation. Globalization, therefore, is unifying

the world into a single mode of production and a single global system

and bringing about the organic integration of different countries and

regions into a global economy. The increasing dissolution of space

barriers and the subordination of the logic of geography to that of

production, what some have called “time-space compression,” is with-

out historic precedence.5 It compels us to reconsider the geography

and the politics of the nation-state. My argument is not that space

becomes irrelevant under globalization. Instead, the social configura-

tion of space can no longer be conceived in nation-state terms but

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160

rather in processes of uneven development denoted primarily by social

group rather than territorial differentiation. The nature of global capi-

talism is such that it will always create uneven spaces, if only because

of the mapping of functions onto space within the system.6

The political reorganization of world capitalism has lagged behind its

economic reorganization, with the result that there is a disjuncture

between economic globalization and the political institutionalization

of new social relations unfolding under globalization. Nevertheless, as

the material basis of human society changes so, too, does its institu-

tional organization. This new transnational phase of capitalism is not

a radical rupture but an outgrowth of capitalism’s development, char-

acterized by a period of major restructuring of the system, including its

institutional form. A study of globalization is fundamentally historical

analysis, in that events or social conditions can be conceived in terms

of previous social processes and conditions that give rise to them. Each

epoch in capital’s historical ascendancy has seen a successive expan-

sion of the system over the preceding epoch and has also seen the

establishment of sets of institutions that made this expansion possible

and organized long-term cycles of capitalist development. From the

seventeenth-century treaties of Westphalia into the 1960s, capitalism

unfolded through a system of nation-states that generated concomi-

tant national structures, institutions, and agents. Globalization has

increasingly eroded these national boundaries, and made it structur-

ally impossible for individual nations to sustain independent, or even

autonomous, economies, polities, and social structures. A single head-

quarters for world capitalism had become untenable as the process of

transnational market, financial, and productive integration proceeded

in recent decades.

A key feature of the current epoch is the supersession of the nation-

state as the organizing principle of capitalism, and with it, of the inter-

state system as the institutional framework of capitalist development.

Capitalism is a constantly revolutionizing force, which perpetually

reshapes the world in new and often quite unexpected configurations.7

In the emerging global capitalist configuration, transnational or global

space is coming to supplant national spaces. There is no longer any-

thing external to the system, not in the sense that it is now a “closed”

system, but in that there are no longer any countries or regions that

remain outside of world capitalism or still to be incorporated through

original accumulation and in that there is no longer autonomous

accumulation outside of the sphere of global capital. The internal

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161

social nexus is a global one. Here we can note the sociological principle

that organic social relations are always institutionalized, which makes

them “fixed” and makes their reproduction possible.8 As the organic

and internal linkage between peoples become truly global, the whole

set of nation-state institutions is becoming superseded by transnational

institutions.

Globalization has posed serious difficulties for theories of all sorts.

The embedded nation-state centrism of many extant paradigms, in my

view, impedes our understanding of the dynamics of change under

globalization.9 My propositions regarding the integration of the entire

superstructure of world society is a conception of the current epoch

that differs from that of world system analysis, which posits a world

system of separate political and cultural superstructures linked by a

geographic division of labor, and from many Marxist analyses, which

see the nation state as immanent to capitalist development.10 The

notion that the continued internationalization of capital and the

growth of an international civil society have involved as well the inter-

nationalization of the state has been recognized by a number of tradi-

tions in the social sciences.” And the interdisciplinary literature on

globalization is full of discussion on the decreasing power and signifi-

cance of the nation-state and the increasing significance of supra or

transnational institutions. However, what these diverse accounts share

is a nation-state centrism that entraps them in a global-national dual-

ism. They assume phenomena associated with a TNS to be interna-

tional extensions of the nation-state system. The conception is one of

international institutions created by nation-states individually or col-

lectively as mechanisms to regulate the flow of goods and capital

across their borders and to mediate inter-state relations. Here I wish

to go beyond such nation-state centrism and to distinguish between

international and transnational (or global). The former is a conception

of world dynamics founded on an existing system of nation-states,

while the later identifies processes and social relations that transcend

that system.

Conceptualizing a transnational state apparatus:

From Weber to Marx

The question of the state is at the heart of the globalization debate. But

this debate has been misinformed by the persistent conflation of the

nation-state and the state. The two are not coterminous.12 Here we

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162

need to distinguish analytically among a number of related terms:

nation, country, nation-state, state, national-state, and transnational

state. Nation-states are geographical and juridical units and sometimes

cultural units, and the term is interchangeable as used here with coun-

try or nation. States are power relations embodied in particular sets of

political institutions. The conflation of these two related but analyti-

cally-distinct concepts is grounded in a Weberian conception of the

state that informs much analysis of this subject. For Weber, the state is

a set of cadre and institutions that exercise authority, a “legitimate

monopoly of coercion,” over a given territory. In the Weberian con-

struct, the economic and political (in Weberian terms, “markets and

states”) are externally related, separate and even oppositional, spheres,

each with its own independent logic. Nation-states interact externally

with markets.13 Consequently, globalization is seen to involve the eco-

nomic sphere, while the political sphere may remain constant, an

immutable nation-state system. State managers confront the impli-

cations of economic globalization and footloose transnational capital

as an external logic. This has become the dominant framework for

analysis of globalization and the state, especially prevalent in realist

approaches to international relations, ever since Raymond Vernon

published his seminal Sovereignty at Bay in 1971.14 In the globalization