States_of_Imagination-After Neoliberalism-Janet Newman and John Clarke-Manifesto- (original) (raw)
After a relatively fallow period in the 1990s, the general form and functions of states are once again returning to the top of the agenda, both theoretically and practically. 1 This is particularly evident in the wake of the world economic crisis that became increasingly visible from mid-2007 onwards and has since triggered a radical restructuring of the state system and a profound strategic reorientation of state intervention. Indeed, following many predictions about the end of the national state, the close of 2008 and start of 2009 could be seen to herald its resurgence as the saviour in the last resort of an economic and social formation in crisis. Such changes are reawakening interest in the state apparatus, state capacities, state failure, and new forms of governance. Interest in the state and state power had declined following the end of the Cold War, the rise (or, at least, increasing recognition) of globalization processes and their effects, and the growing importance of new social movements. These three trends (and others in the same period) saw attention turn away, respectively, from the contrast between capitalism and socialism and their respective state forms to interest in varieties of capitalism and political regimes, from the national state and/or nation-state to global-local dialectics and multi-level governance, and from class struggle and the class character of the state to the dynamics of discourse and identity politics. In this context, the 'state', especially in its illegitimately taken-for-granted form of the 'national state' or 'nation-state', was considered by many commentators and researchers as less relevant as an object of enquiry than it was during the heyday of work on the state. 2 It seemed too abstract or artificial a theoretical object to study meaningfully in comparison with the range of contemporary political regimes, the complexities of political life, or the micro-physics of socially dispersed power relations. It was seen as a cultural or discursive construction, for example, as an imagined political community or as a site of governmental rationality rather than as a solid institutional apparatus with defined borders and functions. It was seen as an