Taking Back Control?

Taking back control? States and state systems after globalization

The era of hyperglobalization once hailed as the 'end of history' was characterised by boundless capitalist expansion. The neoliberal revolution gave rise to a politics of scale aimed at the centralization and unification of states and state systems: the replacement of national with global governance or, in Europe, of the nation-state with a supranational superstate, the European Union.

The 'New World Order' proclaimed by the United States in the wake of the Soviet collapse 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, hyperglobalization gave rise to various kinds of political countermovements that rebelled against and ultimately stopped the upward transfer of state authority in its tracks.

This book analyses the ongoing tug-of-war between the forces of globalism and democracy, of centralization and decentralization, and unification and differentiation of states and state systems, and how they are tied to the advance of global capitalism and the prospects for its social and democratic regulation.

Exploring the possibility for states and the societies they govern to take back control over their collective fate, the book is an attempt at a renewed theory of the state in political economy. Inspired by the work of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes, it discusses the potential outlines of a state system allowing for democratic governance within and peaceful cooperation between sovereign nation-states.Introduction: Political Economy beyond Globalism: States, War, and Capitalist Democracy

Part I: The Demise of Centralism
1. Global Politics and Regional Planning
The Neoliberal Interlude
A Critical Moment

2. The Demise of the New World Order
Globalisation and Hyperglobalisation
A New European Order: The European Union
Forever Unfinished

3. Stuck: Between Globalism and Democracy
What Next? A Tug of War
Left Globalism
Culture versus Unculture
Democracy as a De-proletarianised Value System

4. Breaking the Deadlock: Democracy and the
Politics of Scale
Economic Crisis and State Systems
Megalomania?
Decomposing Complexity

Part II: After Three Decades
5. A Dual Crisis I: Capitalism
Stagnation
The Neoliberal Crisis Sequence
The Central Bank State as the Last Stage of Neoliberalism
Keynes from the Ashes?
Debt without Remorse?
The Emergency State
Clueless
The Great Uncertainty
Capitalism and Nothing Else

6. A Dual Crisis II: Democracy
States between Democracy and Globalism
Globalism against Democracy
Democracy against Globalism
Post-globalist Democracy?

Part III: States and State Systems
7. Integration and Differentiation
Gibbon: Unity or Diversity?
The Contemporary State System: A Survey
Metamorphoses of the Nation-State
Statehood and the Constitutive Particularism of
Human Socialisation
Excursus I: Scotland and Catalonia
Excursus II: Germany in Comparison
‘Taking Back Control’
Confederation or Empire?
The Dimensions of States and State Systems, and their Political Economy

8. The European Union: From Neoliberal to Geopolitical Integration
Europe as Battleground and Place of Desire
Before Ukraine: Critical Fault-Lines, Impending Failure
More Unity through Less Unity?
Integration by Militarisation?
After Ukraine
Liabilities Old and New
Beyond Superstate and Empire
Learning from Europe

Part IV: Beyond Globalist Centralisation
9. Mega-statism and Its Limitations
The Contradictions and Limits of Neoliberal Globalisation:
Eight Theses
Globalisation and Hyperglobalisation
Global Market Economy, National Democracy
Unity from Above: Global Governance
Global Governance as Technocratic Utopia
Another Plan A
Global Governance as Liberal Empire
COVID: The (Long-Hidden) Costs of Globalisation
COVID and the Fiscal Crisis of the State: A Conjecture

10. Small-Statism and Its Possibilities
Simon: Decomposing Complexity
Keynes: National Self-Sufficiency
Deglobalisation and Alternative Development
Global Polycentrism
Disentanglement: COVID and the Supply Chains
The Keynes-Polanyi State: National, Sovereign, Democratic
Better Smaller
‘Economic Patriotism’: Globalism and Back
Big Crisis, Small States
The Question of Money
Democratic Particularism and Global Collective Goods
Cooperative, Not Imperial: A Prospect of a New International Order

Epilogue
Index"The most interesting person around today on the subject of the relationship between democracy and capitalism."
—Christopher Bickerton, University of Cambridge

"The most interesting person on the most urgent subject of our times."
—Aditya Chakrabortty, Guardian

"In this wild ride of a must-read book, Wolfgang Streeck clarifies the depth of current crises in both capitalism and democracy, offers a detailed condemnation of the disastrous post-1989 unipolar neoliberal politics of enforced hyper-globalization, and suggests his own rules and structure for a more diverse, democratic, and peaceful state system we might begin to build, but that a long-tired politics and now mindless militarism still keep from public view."
—Joel Rogers, co-author of American Society: How it Really Works

"Taking Back Control? provides both a brilliant diagnosis of what has gone wrong with globalization and a persuasive prescription for renewing democratic governance. Wolfgang Streeck synthesizes arguments from politics, economics, and sociology in a book that deserves a place besides those of his 20th century intellectual forebears—Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes."
—Fred Block, author of Capitalism: The Future of an Illusion

"To me, one crucial question emerges from this masterclass in contemporary political economy: does the current breakdown of a neoliberalism underpinned by US hegemony portend a regression to fascism and war as in the 1930s, or is there a more hopeful prospect? Drawing on Dani Rodrik's critique of hyper-globalisation and the democratic alternative offered by the 'Keynes-Polanyi state', Wolfgang Streeck argues compellingly for a de-globalised world polity founded on a humane economic nationalism. 'The nation state', he claims, 'is the only institution capable of asserting the primacy of society over capitalism'. Agree or disagree, Streeck offers a radical and necessary challenge to conventional wisdom."
—Robert Skidelsky, author of The Machine Age

"Taking Back Control? combines a brilliant diagnosis of the political crisis of neoliberal globalization with a tough-minded case for “small-statism” as our best chance for a democratic-socialist resolution. Left internationalists may not like that conclusion but cannot ignore it. Streeck’s challenging new book raises the scale-of-democracy debate to a new level."
—Nancy Fraser, author of Cannibal CapitalismWolfgang Streeck is Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. He is a member of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His books include Buying Time, How Will Capitalism End? and Critical Encounters.