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.In distinction, itcan be argued that the growth of the informational economy andmarket liberalisation has had an ambiguous impact on the economies ofthe South.On the one hand, much of the South s conventional economicactivity has become redundant in relation to the nodes and networks ofthe core areas of the global economy.On the other hand, as discussed inChapter 6, the South has reintegrated itself into the liberal world systemthrough the deepening and expansion of a wide range of transbordershadow economies.46Duffield 3a 24/4/07 11:50 Page 47STRATEGIC COMPLEXES AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCEThe concept of globalisation has a more general and less ambiguousutility in relation to political rather than economic factors: the changingdomestic competence of the nation state and the forms of public admin-istration that international market liberalisation compels governmentsto follow.While their abilities to respond differ, in broad terms this is aphenomenon affecting both North and South.The modern nation stateemerged in the mid-seventeenth century in the context of a long periodof transborder religious wars.After three centuries of growth and insti-tutional deepening, it is regarded as having reached its apogee duringthe so-called  golden age of world capitalism from the end of theSecond World War until the early 1970s (Hopkins and Wallerstein1996).While exceptions and differences in depth existed, the tone of thispost-war period was one of nation-state competence and effectiveness.It was a time of comprehensive welfare provision, macroeconomicmanagement, government regulation and unprecedented social engi-neering to combat the public ills of want, ill health and ignorance.In aphrase, it represented the triumph of modernity.Moreover, thisdevelopment was not confined to the market economies of the West.While their legitimacy was weak, the socialist party states of the SecondWorld reached the peak of their economic performance (Arrighi 1991).As for the Third World, state-led models of development, in theory atleast, also reigned supreme.Even the national liberation struggles ofthe period did not seek to abolish the nation state.Their task was todrive out its bourgeois and comprador usurpers and proclaim a people s state.Looking back to the 1960s with a hint of eulogy,Derlugian observesthe state everywhere expanded, expansive, and in its full glory.The long-term process of state formation and state expansion appeared to culminatein an unprecedented triumph.The whole globe was covered in sovereignstates, and these appeared to be working in a quite satisfactory manner.For the first time there were almost no merely  nominal governmentsthat could rule outside the capital cities only thanks to the support oflocal non-state and parastatal authorities (warlords, strongmen, sheikhs,tribal chiefs).(Derlugian 1996: 159)In retrospect, this success appears to have been partial and short-lived;a couple of decades after several centuries of formative growth.Fromthe early 1970s, the competence of the nation state began to erode.Lessthan a decade later it would be widely accepted that it had reached thelimits of its ability to manage social and economic change (ibid.: 170).In both the North and the South, globalisation has become synony-mous with pressures that are changing the architecture of the nation47Duffield 3a 24/4/07 11:50 Page 48GLOBAL GOVERNANCE AND THE NEW WARSstate and forcing a reworking of public policy and cutbacks in domesticwelfare expenditure.While true economic and technological integra-tion may characterise only Northern regions, in most places globalisa-tion has brought growing income disparities and polarised life chances.In this respect, a number of broad North South similarities exist.Theauthority of the nation state lay in its general social competence,including its ability to maintain effectively the provision of publicgoods such as employment, education, health and pension provision,and to uphold international commitments (Cerny 1998).Of specialimportance was the nation state s independent ability to plan and redis-tribute wealth and public goods within its juridical borders.Since the1970s, states have been slowly losing their national competence in thisrespect.States are no longer able to assure national living standards throughthe pursuit of domestic policies alone.Growing public indebtednesshas led to insurmountable pressures to cut public expenditure andreduce state welfare provision.As a cheaper alternative, the privatisa-tion of public goods and services has been promoted as the state hasprogressively withdrawn from anything that could be construed ascommercial activity.Where it has proven unfeasible to privatise apublic service, the trend has been towards marketisation, the intro-duction of private sector accounting and management techniques.Insome cases, public institutions have been corporatised and run as ifthey were capitalist enterprises.At the same time, changes in industrialand commercial policy, plus rapid technological innovations that haveimproved the viability of transnational business, have encouraged aprocess of economic regionalisation and internationalisation (Moralesand Quandt 1992).Increasingly, national economic strategy has shiftedtowards domestic budgetary restraint coupled with global trade liber-alisation [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]