Taking Back Control?: States and State Systems After Globalism

by Wolfgang Streeck

“This maverick thinker is the Karl Marx of our time…In recent decades, Mr. Streeck has described the complaints of populist movements with unequaled power. That is because he has a convincing theory of what has gone wrong in the complex gearworks of American-driven globalization, and he has been able to lay it out with clarity.”
—Christopher Caldwell, New York Times

Taking Back Control? examines the ongoing tug of war between the forces of globalism and those of democracy, between centralisation and decentralisation, and between the unifica­tion and the differentiation of states and state systems. On this territory are fought the defining geopolitical struggles of our era, which will determine the advance of global capitalism and shape the prospects for its social and democratic regulation.

The neoliberal revolution of the 1990s gave rise to a politics of scale aimed at the centralisation and unification of states and state systems. This was the “New World Order” proclaimed by the United States in the wake of the Soviet collapse. But it 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, hyperglobalisation called forward various kinds of political countermovements that rebelled against and ultimately stopped the upward trans­fer of state authority in its tracks.

Exploring the possibility for states and the societies they govern to take back control over their collective fate, Wolfgang Streeck formulates a renewed theory of the state in political economy. Drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes, he discusses the potential outlines of a state system that allows for democratic governance within and peaceful cooperation between sovereign nation­states.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Economics, History, Theory

416 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 19, 2024

Reviews

[Jim Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone remember ‘The New World Order’? I recall that phrase cropping up everywhere in the early 1990s. It came out of George Bush senior’s administration around the time of the collapse of the Soviet empire and the lead-up to the first Gulf War. This was also the time of Francis Fukuyama’s epochal ‘The End of History and the Last Man’, which posited that history, understood as the evolution of ideological systems, had reached its culmination in Western liberal democracy combined with market economics.

That era marked the high-point of what German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, in this masterful volume, describes as hyper-globalisation, an era of boundless capitalist expansion and the global dominance of neoliberalism as an ideology. The argument was that the nation state would give way to global ‘governance’ and a ‘liberal rules-based international order’. In reality, writes Streeck, this was an expression of US hegemony in a what had suddenly become a unipolar world. Scale was everything. Technocracy, the rule by elites, replaced democracy and societies were to be embedded in global economic ‘realities’ rather than economies being embedded in societies and subject to local laws..

The problem was that this ‘new world order’, imposed from above, proved to be ungovernable and undemocratic. The ideology reached its end-point with the global financial crisis of 2008. Technocracy and ‘meritocracy’ as a justification for inequality robbed countries of their political stability and social legitimacy. People were disenfranchised by excessively mobile capital, which robbed governments of their discretion to rule in the interests of their populations.

Since that implosion in 2008, Streeck writes, the world has been in a stalemate. The dominant operating system collapsed. Globalisation and neoliberalism have failed, but there is nothing to replace them. The Brexit referendum and the rise of Trump and authoritarian ‘strong men’ are inevitable symptoms of the system’s breakdown. As for the 2020 pandemic, this just reinforced the illusion about the efficiency of globalisation and the danger of relying on ‘just-in-time’ supply chains .

“The politics of the New World Order undermined the historical compromise between capitalism and democracy by setting in motion a deep transformation of democratic institutions and practices,” Streeck writes. “This excluded growing sections of the population of capitalist democracies from the democratic class struggle by removing the capitalist economy from the reach of democratic politics.”

“But the attempt to merge the world into an all-encompassing, unified political economy governed by universal norms and values rather than by local politics stirred up powerful popular resistance that proved invincible, in spite of the application in various parts of the globe of inordinate military force.”

As suggested by the title of the book, ‘Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism’, Streeck argues not for a more socialist form of globalism but for deglobalised systems of production, marked by shorter supply chains and smaller, more governable states. The rejection of globalisation does not mean the end of internationalism but is a recognition of the realities of global diversity and the need for cooperation amid difference, not forcing US exceptionalism on the rest of us.

Throughout the book, Streeck draws on the influential ideas of two of the greatest 20th century thinkers on political economy - the Englishman John Maynard Keynes and the Austro-Hungarian intellectual Karl Polanyi, whose classic book ‘The Great Transformation’ was published the same year as his ideological opposite Friedrich Hayek’s ‘The Road to Serfdom’. It was Polanyi who foresaw the likely failures of wide-eyed universalism after WWII and instead pleaded for small scale regionalism, marked by peaceful coexistence of diverse regimes.

As we clearly move from a unipolar to a multipolar world (despite the sabre rattling against China by a failed US state under Trump), it is this vision of cooperation within revived nation states shorn of imperialist intentions that I find more persuasive.

It should be clear to anyone at this point that neoliberalism and the era of unfettered capitalism has come an end. Countries like Australia must reclaim their own sovereignty and stop looking to a global hegemon for security against imagined enemies. Capitalism cannot exist for long without democracy.

[BadBad · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am quite perplexed by this book. It is impressive how much I agree with the thought process of this beautiful volume, but at the same time, I arrive at a completely different conclusion. The reason for my skepticism relies upon the way the author treats his subjects. While I agree with the reasons why a neoliberal hyper-globalism cannot exist or, better put, cannot sustain itself in our world as it is (and for the better), and while I find fascinating this anti-correlation between globalism and democracy, because yes, you did convince me that it is impossible to have globalism within the mesh of democracy; at the same time, I found all the premises and the beautiful digressions just a tool to justify his extremist views regarding not only neoliberalism but the European Union too. The problem for me is that the narrative is hardly appropriate to suggest any wrongdoing of the institution per se; at best, it can only express the manipulative form of the writer’s narration.

1. There is not a single positive thing expressed by this work regarding the EU. This already finds me in quite a state of disbelief because, as someone may say, even the worst criminal has done something good. For Wolfgang, this doesn't look like the case.

2. While the author has no problem in pointing out all the reasons why the Union will fall and has to fall, he indulges himself too much in his own take of an European cooperative, confederated nation-state relationship without even pointing out the hurdles that sustaining a system like this post-neoliberalism and globalism will have to endure. The only challenges he poses are about the difficulty of the mission to achieve this framework, not a critique of his own take.

3. While I do understand that an author is not obliged by anyone to have an antithesis to his own work, I do appreciate some intellectual honesty to at least show the reader that he is aware of the limits or objections to his view.

4. While I do understand his point regarding the reasons why the EU was a mistake and why it won't work, it perplexes me that the logical conclusion for him is not to take this valid criticism and reshape or improve the existing model, but instead to completely overhaul the structure, getting rid of it (with the obvious implications it will cause) and then reconstructing it completely from zero. This doesn't look right to me. Because while the writer has no problem in showing how neoliberalism is not the only path but that we can in fact do an inverse process to a nation-state system, he also points out each step the Union is taking to be more technocratic and less democratic (like it's the only direction possible), without even questioning the possibility of an inversion of the process within the Brussels institutions, one where the EU has the opportunity to become more democratic. But for the author, it looks like that is not possible. Only destruction is the viable solution.

5. It also puzzles me the way the author chooses to describe the EU based on the narrative that he is trying to give. Sometimes the organization is just a "Germanic Empire" through which Berlin expresses its power, sometimes it's a multifaceted entity used by national politics to impose what's best for them, and some other times the EU is just a technocratic machine for neoliberal independence from democratic power. While I can imagine how an artificial narration over this would look coherent, I do have to say that, at least from my point of view, there is no cohesion in his vision of what the EU truly is, if not just a noun upon which to unleash his hate toward the institution.

6. While he admits some problems to the U.S. federal system, which can (I guess now) be considered democratic, for the author, a federalized EU won't be as democratic (or even worse), he claims it won't even happen because the U.S. (in comparison) is united at least by language after a unification made in blood. Not only would I even dare to say that before recent legal debates, there was no official language of the U.S., at least de jure and that pretty much any nation-state was "forged" by blood, but his reasons why the EU can or cannot be federalized are arbitrary. There is no reason why a nation has to identify simply by its language nor that an unification through blood is the only way to create a national identity. In fact, it won't be wrong to consider a possible nation based solely by its history or culture (which for sure in Europe are closer to each other than any other country outside the continent). Beside that, even if there is not yet a European sentiment, this doesn't mean that it cannot exist. If the European polycentric communitarian system should work on the basis of mutual cooperation, it will also need a common point of view or even common objectives, something hard to achieve without some shared sentiment. Also the writer indirectly express how it is not possible, based on the fact that yet, no European sentiment has been achieved, to have a federal Europe. But is not necessary to have a national sentiment before the state is even born. It's infamous the Italian saying: "We made Italy, now we have to make Italians." If perhaps we agree on a nation-state system, we should also agree on the arbitrary state of national identity and its construction.

7. Going back to the problems of a system like the one the author proposes, while he explains why our society today is doomed. He doesn't spend a single moment to express how, in fact, a multicentric European system could deal with the superpowers of the post-neoliberal age. The author doesn't even argue what kind of political power a middle state can have over the imperialistic interests of any other superpower. He does try to explain how his system would face global problems like climate change. But, even if he points out correlation between globalism and the increase of CO2, it's also important to understand that as much globalism needs an international order to express its neoliberalism, the same can be said for the opposite. How can we deal with global problems when a country that doesn't cooperate? How can we do it in a coherent way without any centrality or conformation to some universal standard if multilateral agreement can't have some power or authority over a sovereign nation? Wolfgang's system doesn't answer that, but instead it deviates from it. In fact all his analysis over what a polycentric system can do for global problems, can be expressed (and I also believe, achieved) in the same way to our society today without a need for small-statism, but at best with less globalism. The problem for me is that while he proved (at least to me) that globalization ≠ democratization and that globalization = global problems, this doesn't mean that we can't achieve less globalization with a redesign of the existing system. With this, I'm not saying that a federalized EU would be the solution, but that if we have to seriously take into consideration the author's suggestion for an alternative approach, then it should only be right to talk about those kind of problems.

Why then give 3 stars if I do have so many complaints about this book?

The reason lies in the quality of the dissertation being made. While all my objections still hold true, his analysis of the neoliberal system post-Cold War, its intrinsic problems, and the richness of his analysis of an alternative solution of the EU, as well as the plentiful critiques of it, are still very valid. It would be a disservice not reading one of the most critical texts on globalization and the EU institution without taking it seriously, apart from the problems I've mentioned.

[Rexton Tegwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent book. The author gets credit for recognizing that his ideal of deglobalization, with the return of sovereignty to small nation-states, is unlikely.

My primary criticism is his overconfidence in democratic control of national politics through popular participation in voting. Democracy is surely great theoretically when the government matches the will of democratic majorities. However, this is not how liberal democracy has ever worked historically. Governments are not legally required to honor the promises they make to constituents when campaigning. They can simply decline to do what they promised without consequence, beyond not being re-elected. This is normally not an issue, as they can achieve their personal and hidden objectives before they can be removed from power. No liberal democracies have effective systems to quickly remove unfaithful representatives who are not following through on what they campaigned on.

Also, the author recognizes the flaws of neoliberal globalization and how it constrains what political officials can do, since the wealthy threaten politicians with capital flight if they ever do anything the wealthy don't like. But he does not recognize that classically liberal governments are controlled by the wealthiest, not the popular will of most citizens. Neoliberalism demonstrates this. As soon as the wealthy disagree with the democratic will, they can use their vast fortunes to coerce governments into doing what they want rather than what voters have demanded. This issue does not go away in a deglobalized world with capital controls that reduce capital flight.

So long as classically liberal private property rights are unquestionably protected, a so-called democratic nation can always be vetoed by the wealthy. You cannot eliminate political corruption so long as elites can accrue massive sums of money that give them outsized political influence that their poorer national citizenry cannot replicate. The wealthy have always resented the lower orders of the societies they exist within and will never adopt interests that benefit the entire nation rather than their narrow interests, because they lust for power more than anything else in the world. Economic equality means they are not special; they are not superior. It means that their opinions are just as narrow and biased as the next person's. This is an intolerable status for wealthy people.

Liberal democracies evolved out of classically liberal nation-states. Classically liberal nation-states were formed to take economic power away from monarchs and rent-seeking aristocrats and put it into the hands of wealthy merchants, effectively making them the new aristocrats. Liberal democracies initially only allowed those who had a stake in exploiting the nation for disproportionate wealth accumulation to vote. Democracy evolved as a way of distributing power among the wealthy, not the poor. So it will never be used as a method for distributing power among the poor, because that was not its historical purpose.

Liberal democracies are always more classically liberal than they are nations committed to popular sovereignty over all else. They are flexible enough to accommodate slavery, colonial exploitation, genocide, and conquest. They can't be turned into institutions meant to defend the interests of the poor so long as wealth accumulation is allowed through inalienable property rights.

The author pretends as if liberal democracies were born out of thin air at the beginning of the 20th century, when most were on the path to allowing mass suffrage. This makes his argument a bit stronger. I'm sure he knows this isn't true but chose not to point it out because it shoots a major hole in his already far-fetched idea: that lower- and middle-class people can seize control of society and deglobalize domestic politics to their own benefit without the wealthy immediately stopping such a development from gaining any traction. Since they have more authority when capital and labor can flow "freely" (not in reality, as this so-called free movement extracts tremendous costs from poorer- and middle-class people) across borders, they will block any political development that weakens their position, because wealth is the thing that provides them with a sense of superiority that makes their existence meaningful. If these elites didn't have net worths tens of thousands of times higher than those of their fellow citizens, they would feel like common mortal animals who work for nothing but the collective benefit of a society they don't really identify with.

Again, I give the author credit for being pessimistic, as his ideal world of small nation-state sovereignty requires a fantastic application of democracy. That incorrectly presumes that the most powerful people in society are the ones with the greatest numbers. The last 5,000 years of human history show us this is a fantasy. The most powerful people in a society are those with the most wealth, along with those who control well-trained practitioners of violence who can enforce the will of the wealthy on the majority of society.

Until a political solution is found for vast wealth inequality, which requires a tremendous reduction in the protection of private property rights for individuals, society will continue to be dominated by those who can accumulate the most wealth while reducing the odds of large numbers of other people becoming as wealthy as they are. This ensures that the wealthy have a permanent lock on disproportionate power over most people. Compound interest makes those who gained the most from massive economic booms impossible to surpass in political power much of the time. Creative destruction destroys wealth for regular people. Creative destruction rarely destroys vast fortunes that have been compounded over generations due to the dictatorship of unquestionable private property rights.

The author's ideal would be a nice world, for sure. But it is just as impossible as expecting world peace to occur and endure for centuries.

[Nico Beukema · Rating 4 out of 5]

Opnieuw een urgent boek, dat flink aanzet tot nadenken en dat ook somber stemt. Wolfgang Streeck is socioloog en beschrijft in dit boek de meest wenselijke wereldorde die na de afgang van het neoliberalisme nodig is. Zijn focus ligt daarbij op Europa. Niet als grootmacht, maar juist als mogelijkheid het anders te doen. Streeck is geen fan van de Europese Unie, die hij vooral ziet als neoliberaal vehikel en als na-apen van de VS (jaren '90 stijl). Het streven naar meer internationalisme en grotere staatsvormen zijn volgens hem slecht voor de democratie en voor de samenleving. Streeck pleit voor terugkeer naar kleinere staten die in goede afstemming en harmonie samenleven en -werken. Met als voorbeeld de allereerste Europese samenwerking direct na de Tweede Wereldoorlog en ook de huidige samenwerking van Scandinavische landen in de Nordic Council. Europa zien als één groot Rijk is een doodlopende weg met een grote muur aan het eind. Streeck wil terug naar Keynes en Polanyi en de afspraken van Bretton Woods, maar dan passend in de huidige samenleving. Minder grote staten, minder megabedrijven, weg met hyperglobalisatie, meer samenwerking van autonome staten.
Pittig boek, complexe materie, veel economie voor een socioloog. Toch heel interessant om kennis te nemen van dit pleidooi en om hierover na te denken. Zouden ze ook in Den Haag en Brussel moeten doen.
Helaas concludeert Streeck dat de oorlog in Oekraïne het realisme van zijn pleidooi geen goed doet. Ook vreest bij een tweede verkiezing van Trump, hoewel hij ook niets op heeft met de koers van de Democraten onder Biden. Het boek is vlak voor de herverkiezing van Trump geschreven. Hoe snel een boek als dit ingehaald wordt door de tijd. Ik zou graag nog een hoofdstuk toegevoegd zien over 2024 en 2025.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magisterial diagnosis of how and why the US-centric “liberal international order” failed ordinary people over the past four decades. Streek’s prescription—a devolution to small-state polycentrism, wherein capital can be reliably subordinated to national democracy—seems by turns inspired and naive. He counterintuitively claims this would help solve the climate crisis because moral sentiment is more easily transmitted in a small homogenous polity with high social trust. And by contrast can find no basis in a supranational technocracy with no grounding in a coherent human society.

His imagination soars when it comes to the possibility of moral movements supplanting the ‘rational irrationalism’ of emotionless neoliberalism. But his imagination fails markedly in conceiving of a genuinely democratic, genuinely multicultural democracy. The assumption seems generally to be that a less diverse society is easier to govern democratically. I think the evidence is actually quite mixed on that question, and anyway have ethical worries about whether he’s making a positive or normative statement there.

But overall it’s a useful leftist provocation against knee-jerk internationalism, and clears away the cobwebs of various tired shibboleths (on the left and the right). I still can’t say I’m bought into his proposed solutions though.

[Rhys · Rating 5 out of 5]

Streeck offers, perhaps, one of the clearest critiques of the neoliberal-imperialist present. As for 'taking back control', well ... perhaps a new cultural revolution?

"Cultural revolutions of this kind have been known to take place; they are sparked by social movements that, in moments of collective effervescence – an exuberant feeling of community – spread or revive moral attitudes that, once internalised and identified with, can be betrayed only on pain of self-contempt, for reasons of rational self-interest. Social movements provide societies with ideas about themselves and identities; they run their course at the level of society, not the state, but if they become strong enough, they set objectives for and limits to state action; they produce an emotional normativity, a contagious passion transferable to others, one that is better than anything else at fomenting and stimulating the engagement of the many for a common goal" (p.358).

[Joseph Foley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling argument against furthering upward integration and centralisation; the administration of such governance would ultimately be highly technocratic, only serving to remove popular forces further away from democratic institutions than they already are.
Additionally reiterates the usual arguments against economic globalisation in a succint and well-researched manner.

[Norbert S · Rating 2 out of 5]

For political nerds, boring for casual readers

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

The entire argument of the book rests on the notion that the sovereignty of states must be military and absolute, and never even considers the possibility that sovereignty might be segmentary, with different functional decision-topics allocated to differently scaled governance units.

The vision of a global order in which the primary or dominant unit of governance are small-ish “Keynes-Polanyi states” is quite attractive on its face. Streeck is no doubt right that such states are likely to be more democratic and more functionally effective not only because they are veterinary paribus more homogenous but also because smaller units face fewer coordination problems.