Part I
1
Ellen Meiksins Wood
Capitalist economies are all ‘capitalist’, despite their many national diversities, because they share certain common principles or ‘laws of motion’, a certain common ‘logic of process’. In one way or another, they are all subject to the capitalist imperatives of competition, capital accumulation and profit-maximization. All national capitalist economies also exist only in relation to others, and capitalism has from the beginning been tendentially ‘global’. Capitalist principles and processes are now more universal than ever before, and capitalist economies are, as we are constantly reminded, more interconnected and global than ever.
Yet there is no ‘global economy’ abstracted from the particular local, national, and regional economies that constitute it, or from the relations among them, whether among major capitalist powers or between imperialist powers and subaltern states. The general laws of capitalism and global economic forces manifest themselves in specific national and regional forms, and the global dynamics of capitalism continue to be driven by forces within, and relations among, national economies and nation-states. The emergence of capitalism was closely tied to the evolution of the modern nation-state, and that close link has shaped the development and expansion of capitalism ever since. The global economy as we know it today is still constituted by national entities.
My intention here is to explore the contradiction between the global sweep of capitalism and the persistence of national entities by tracing, in very broad strokes, some of the connections between capitalism and the nation-state from the beginning until now. The object of this exercise is not specifically to explicate the contribution that historical materialism can make to an understanding of ‘globalization’, but it should become clear why I believe that the interconnections between the modern state system and the development of global capitalism can be more fruitfully explored from the perspective of historical materialism than from more conventional theoretical vantage points.
For instance, the relations and the contradictions between the global and the national can be clarified by understanding the separation of ‘economic’ and ‘political’ spheres and the relations between them. But that separation is specific to capitalism. The ‘economy’, conceived as a distinct and separate sphere, is a notion that has meaning only under capitalism, where two fundamental and related conditions are met: first, all economic actors are market dependent – that is, dependent on the market for the conditions of their self-reproduction, and hence subject to the specifically ‘economic’ imperatives of competition and accumulation; and second, appropriation takes place not by direct coercive means, through the exercise of political or military power in the hands of the appropriators themselves (as, for example, in feudalism), but by purely economic means, the ‘free’ exchange between capital and labour in which direct producers are compelled by their propertylessness to exchange their labour-power for a wage. The economy as a separate ‘sphere’, in other words, exists only when the market regulates social reproduction and when exploitation is disaggregated into two separate ‘moments’, apportioned between two distinct agencies: the moment of appropriation by capital itself and the moment of enforcement by a separate state power.
The ‘historical’ in historical materialism allows us to explore the conditions and implications of this historically specific separation. Its ‘materialism’ focuses our attention not on some transhistorical economic sphere, but on historically specific material conditions of social reproduction, which not only affect all social spheres but constitute them as distinct spheres in the first place. From that perspective, we can explore a development like globalization not as some ahistorical natural process but as a truly historical one.
Joined at birth?
It is not at all uncommon to insist on the connections between the emergence of capitalism and the rise of the nation-state, or even to define capitalism as a system of nation-states. Typically, the connections are seen through the prism of one or another theory of ‘modernity’ or ‘rationalization’, according to which certain ‘modern’ or ‘rational’ economic, political, and cultural forms have developed more or less in tandem, combining a process of urbanization and commercialization with the formation of a ‘rational’ state. One particularly ingenious account suggests that the emergence of the absolutist state in early modern Europe freed the ‘bourgeois’ commercial economy from the dead hand of feudalism and landlordly power, separating political and economic spheres by concentrating sovereignty in a centralized state. Another influential explanation suggests that the European nation-state, in sharp contrast, say, to Asian empires, laid the foundations for capitalism because the organization of Europe into multiple polities, instead of in one over-arching empire, permitted the development of a trade-based division of labour, without the burden of massive appropriation by an imperial state which syphoned off surpluses that could otherwise have been invested.1
Let me propose a somewhat different account of the relation between the rise of capitalism and the nation-state. This account will be based on certain presuppositions which can only be stated here baldly, without elaboration, but which have been discussed at greater length elsewhere.2 The main presuppositions are these: that capitalism was not simply the natural outcome of certain transhistorical processes like ‘rationalization’, technological progress, urbanization, or the expansion of trade; that its emergence required more than the removal of obstacles to increased trade and growing markets or to the exercise of ‘bourgeois’ rationality; that while certain European, or Western European, conditions, not least the insertion of Europe in a larger and non-European network of international trade, were necessary to its emergence, those same conditions produced diverse effects in various European, and even Western European, cases; and that the necessary conditions for the ‘spontaneous’ or indigenous and self-sustaining development of a capitalist system, with mutually reinforcing agricultural and industrial sectors, existed only in England.3
How, then, do these presuppositions apply to the relation between the rise of capitalism and the nation-state? We can certainly accept that capitalism developed in the distinctive context of the early modern European state, which was not itself created by capitalism – or, more precisely, that capitalism developed in tandem with the process of state formation. But, while there were certain common preconditions, not all European, or even Western European, nation-states developed in the same way. The French absolutist state, for instance, had an economic logic quite distinct from capitalist forms of exploitation or capitalist laws of motion. Notwithstanding France’s ‘bourgeois’ revolution, we cannot take for granted its ‘spontaneous’ evolution into capitalism, in the absence of external pressures from an already existing English capitalism.4
The development of capitalism and the nation-state were intertwined in England in a very particular way. But to insist on the particularity of this English relationship is not at all to deny the close connection between capitalism and the nation-state in general. On the contrary, the particular nature of the English relationship only serves to emphasize that close connection. England was not, of course, alone in producing a sovereign territorial state, but it was, in the first instance, alone in producing a capitalist system. At the same time, the process that gave rise to English capitalism was accompanied by the development of a more clearly defined territorial sovereignty than existed elsewhere in Europe. The social transformations that brought about capitalism were the same ones that brought the nation-state to maturity.
As Marx pointed out long ago, precapitalist modes of production were characterized by a unity of economic and political power, specifically in the sense that exploitation was carried out by ‘extra-economic’ means – that is, by means of political, judicial, and/or military power, or what has been called ‘politically constituted property’.5 This unity – which cannot be effectively accommodated by a conceptual framework that takes as given the separation of the economic and the political, or their existence as distinct spheres – existed in a very wide variety of forms. For instance, many ancient empires employed state power to collect tribute from subject peoples, including their own peasants, and imperial office was the principal means of acquiring great wealth.
What was notable about precapitalist forms in Europe was the emergence of a fragmented state power, the ‘parcellized sovereignty’ of Western feudalism, which created a distinctive kind of extra-economic power, the power of feudal lordship. The fragmented military, political, and judicial powers of the state became the means by which individual lords extracted surpluses from peasants. At the same time, political parcellization was matched by economic fragmentation. Internal trade, for example, even when it extended beyond very local peasant markets, was less like modern capitalist forms of trade in an integrated competitive market than like traditional forms of international commerce, a series of separate local markets joined together by a carrying trade conducted by merchants ‘buying cheap’ in one market and ‘selling dear’ in another, or an ‘infinite succession of arbitrage operations between separate, distinct, and discrete markets’.6
The feudal ruling class was eventually compelled to consolidate its fragmented political power in the face of peasant resistance and the plainly untenable disorder of aristocratic conflict. Parcellized sovereignty gave way to more centralized monarchies in some parts of Europe. But if feudalism was a precondition of capitalism, and if capitalism, with its separation of political and economic spheres, emerged in conjunction with a process of feudal centralization, the process of state formation took different forms in different places, and capitalism was only one of several outcomes of the transition from feudalism.
One effect was absolutism, which, instead of producing a capitalist economy, reproduced the unity of political and economic power at the level of the central state, while never completely overcoming the parcellization of feudalism. The most notable example is the absolutist state in France, regarded by many as the prototype of the emerging ‘modern’ nation-state. Formed in a process of state centralization that elevated one among many feudal powers to a position of monarchical dominance, French absolutism remained in many ways rooted in its feudal past.7
On the one hand, the bureaucracy that is supposed to be the mark of the French state’s modernity represented a structure of offices used by office-holders as a kind of private property, a means of appropriating peasant-produced surpluses, what has been called a kind of centralized feudal rent, in the form of taxation. This was a mode of appropriation very different, in its means and in its rules for reproduction, from capitalist exploitation – depending, for example, on direct coercion to squeeze more surpluses out of the direct producers, instead of on intensifying exploitation by enhancing labour productivity.
On the other hand, the absolutist state never completely displaced other forms of politically constituted property. It always lived side-by-side, and in tension, with other, more fragmented forms, the remnants of feudal parcellized sovereignty. Aristocrats, the church, and municipalities clung to their old autonomous powers, military, political, or judicial. Even when these powers were fatally weakened by state centralization and hence no longer represented a fragment of parcellized sovereignty, they often continued to serve as a fiercely protected (occasionally revived or even invented) source of income for their possessors. At the same time, the central state, competing for the same peasant-produced surpluses, typically co-opted many potential competitors by giving them state office, exchanging one kind of politically constituted property for another. But the remnants of aristocratic privilege and municipal jurisdiction, together with the tensions among various forms of politically constituted property, remained to the end just as much a part of French absolutism as was the centralizing monarchy.
Elsewhere in Europe, the fragmentation of property and polity were even more marked, and everywhere, these fragmented forms of politically constituted property, like the centralized version, represented a mode of appropriation antithetical to capitalism. They were inimical to capitalism in yet another sense too: they fragmented not only the state but the economy. Instead of a national market, there were separate local and municipal markets (not to mention internal trade barriers) characterized not by capitalist competition but by the old forms of trade, not the appropriation of surplus value created in production but commercial profit-taking in the sphere of circulation. To put it another way, the parcellization of sovereignty and the parcellization of markets were two sides of the same coin, rooted in the same property relations.
The fragmentation of both economy and polity was overcome first and most completely in England. From the outset – certainly from the Norman Conquest – the English state (the emphasis here is on England, not on other parts of what would become the ‘United Kingdom’) was more unified than others in Europe, without the same parcellized sovereignty. For instance, when France still had its regional ‘estates’, England had a unitary national parliament, and when France (even up until the Revolution) had some 360 local law codes, England had a more nationally unified legal system, especially its ‘common law’ adjudicated by royal courts, which had become the preferred and dominant legal system very early in the development of the English state. But this unity was not simply a matter of political or legal unification. Its corollary was a degree of economic unification unlike any other in history, already in the seventeenth century constituting something like a national economy, an integrated and increasingly competitive national market centred on London.
Both political and economic unity can be traced to the same source. The centralization of the state in England was not based on a feudal unity of economic and political power. The state did not represent a private resource for office-holders in the way or on the scale that it did in France, nor did the state on the whole have to compete with other forms of politically constituted property. Instead, state formation took the form of a cooperative project, a kind of division of labour between political and economic power, between the monarchical state and the aristocratic ruling class, between a central political power that enjoyed a virtual monopoly of coercive force much earlier than others in Europe (the English aristocracy, for instance, was effectively demilitarized very early) and an economic power based on private property in land far more concentrated than elsewhere in Europe (in France, for instance, by far the most land continued to be held by peasants).
Here, then, was the separation between the moment of coercion and the moment of appropriation, allocated between two distinct but complementary spheres, that uniquely characterizes capitalist exploitation. English landlords increasingly depended on purely ‘economic’ forms of exploitation, while the state maintained order and enforced the whole system of property. Instead of enhancing their own coercive powers to squeeze more out of peasants, landlords relied on the coercive power of the state to sustain the whole system of property, while they exercised their purely economic power, their concentrated landholdings, to intensify the exploitation of labour by increasing its productivity, in conditions where appropriators and producers were becoming increasingly market dependent.
The weakness of politically constituted property in England, in other words, meant both the rise of capitalism and the evolution of a truly sovereign and unified national state. It also meant a more sharply defined territorial polity. In feudalism, the territorial boundaries of political sovereignty tended to be fluid, expanding or contracting with the reach of the lord’s, or the monarch’s, personal rule, his proprietary domain and family alliances. The centralizing monarchies of Europe certainly created territorial states in which the central more or less sovereign power exerted its predominant coercive force over a more or less well-defined territory. But the fluid boundaries of feudalism were never firmly fixed until personal rule was replaced by an impersonal state, and that could never be fully accomplished until the separation of the political and economic, the moments of appropriation and coercion, private property and public power. Just as the separation of the political and the economic in capitalism ended the contestation of sovereignty among competing sites of politically constituted property, so did it detach the territorial borders of the state from the fluctuating fortunes of personal property and dynastic connections.
There were, to sum up, two sides to the historical relation between capitalism and the nation-state. On the one hand, that state was not itself produced by capitalism. The ‘modern’ state, together with ‘modern’ conceptions of territoriality and sovereignty, emerged out of social relations that had nothing to do with capitalism, in the tensions between ‘parcellized sovereignties’ and centralizing monarchies.8 On the other hand, the rise of capitalism, which took place in the context of a rising nation-state, brought that state to fruition – or, to put it more precisely, the particular form of English state formation belonged to the same process that brought about capitalism. The transformation of politically constituted property into capitalist property was at the same time, and inseparably, a transformation of the state.
A state with an unambiguous sovereign power over a clearly defined territory did not come completely into its own until capitalist property had displaced precapitalist modes of appropriation – that is, until capitalist property displaced both parcellized sovereignty and the fragmented economy entailed by politically constituted property. The territorial nation-state was part of a more general European process of state formation, but a clearly defined territorial state with a truly sovereign power matured only when political sovereignty became both separate from and coextensive with a national economy.
Capitalism and inter-national relations
For those who regard capitalism as the consequence of commercial expansion when it reached a critical mass, there is something paradoxical about the development of English capitalism. England was certainly part of a vast trading network. But other European nation-states in the early modern period were also deeply involved in the system of international trade, as were non-European civilizations in Asia and the Islamic world, some of which long had trading networks more highly developed and extensive than the European. What distinguished England – and what was specifically capitalist about it – was not, in the first instance, predominance as a trading nation or any peculiarity in its way of conducting foreign trade. England’s peculiarity was not its role in an outwardly expanding commercial system but, on the contrary, its inward development, the growth of a unique domestic economy.
What marked off England’s commercial system from others was a single large and integrated national market, increasingly uniting the country into one economic unit (which eventually embraced the British Isles as a whole), with a specialized division of labour among interdependent regions and a growing, and mutually reinforcing, interaction between agricultural and industrial sectors. This market was also distinctive in the nature and extent of its trade in cheap everyday goods – the means of survival and self-reproduction – for a growing mass market.9 While England competed with others in an expanding system of international trade, a new kind of commercial system was emerging at home, which would soon give it an advantage on the international plane too. Unlike traditional commercial systems, this one did not depend mainly on profits derived from ‘buying cheap and selling dear’, the carrying trade or arbitrage. This system was unique in its dependence on intensive as distinct from extensive expansion, on the extraction of surplus value created in production as distinct from profit in the sphere of circulation, on economic growth based on increasing productivity and competition within a single market – in other words, on capitalism.
Capitalism, then, while it certainly developed within – and could not have developed without – an international system of trade, was a domestic product. But it was not in the nature of capitalism to remain at home for long. Its need for endless accumulation, on which its very survival depended, produced new and distinctive imperatives of expansion. These imperatives operated at various levels. The most obvious was, of course, the imperialist drive. There was, to be sure, nothing new about colonialism, and Britain’s major European rivals were just as much involved in the subjugation of colonial territories, in the oppression of colonial peoples, and in the slave trade. But here again, capitalism had a transformative effect. The new requirements of capitalism created new imperialist needs, and it was British capitalism that produced an imperialism answering to the specific requirements of capitalist accumulation, its particular need for resources, labour, markets, and increasing productivity. Above all, capitalism created new imperialist possibilities by generating economic imperatives that could reach far beyond direct political dominion.
Capitalism also expanded out from Britain in another and more complicated sense. The unique productivity engendered by capitalism, especially in its industrial form, gave Britain new advantages not only in its old commercial rivalries with other European states but also in their military conflicts. So, from the late eighteenth century and especially in the nineteenth, Britain’s major European rivals were under pressure to develop their economies in ways that could meet this new challenge. The state itself became a major player. This was true most notably in Germany, with its state-led industrialization, which in the first instance was undoubtedly driven more by older geopolitical and military considerations than by capitalist motivations.
In these cases, the drive for capitalist development did not come from internal property relations like those that had impelled the development of capitalism in England from within. Where, as in France and Germany, there was an adequate concentration of productive forces, capitalism could develop in response to external pressures emanating from an already existing capitalist system elsewhere. States still following a precapitalist logic could become effective agents of capitalist development. The point here, however, is not simply that in these later developing capitalisms, as in many others after them, the state played a primary role. What is even more striking is the ways in which the traditional, precapitalist state system, together with the old commercial network, became a transmission belt for capitalist imperatives.
The European state system, then, was a conduit for the first outward movement of capitalism. From then on, capitalism spread outward from Europe both by means of imperialism and increasingly also by means of economic imperatives. The role of the state in imperial ventures is obvious, but even in the operation of purely economic laws of motion, the state continued to be an unavoidable medium.
Capitalism had emerged first in one country. After that, it could never emerge again in the same way. Every extension of its laws of motion changed the conditions of development thereafter, and every local context shaped the processes of change. But having once begun in a single nation-state, and having been followed by other nationally organized processes of economic development, capitalism has spread not by erasing national boundaries but by reproducing its national organization, creating an increasing number of national economies and nation-states. The inevitably uneven development of separate, if interrelated, national entities, especially when subject to imperatives of competition, has virtually guaranteed the persistence of national forms.
Nation-states and classes in today's universal capitalism
Today capitalism is all but universal. Capitalist laws of motion, the logic of capitalism, have penetrated ever deeper into the societies of advanced capitalism and spatially throughout the world. Every human practice, every social relationship, and the natural environment are subject to the requirements of profit-maximization, capital accumulation, the constant self-expansion of capital. At one extreme, in advanced capitalist countries, this means the penetration of capitalist principles into those social, institutional, and cultural spaces that even a few decades ago they had not yet reached. At the other extreme, it means the marginalization and increasing impoverishment of whole regions outside the advanced capitalist world. In a sense the class polarizations of capitalism are being reproduced in the North-South divide, together with the impoverishment of so-called ‘underclasses’ within advanced capitalist countries.
But to say that capitalism is universal is not to say that all, or even most, capital is transnational. The measure of universalization is not whether, or to what degree, capital has escaped the confines of the nation-state. We still have national economies, national states, nationally based capital, even nationally based transnationals. It hardly needs to be added that international agencies of capital, like the IMF, the World Bank, or the WTO, are above all agents of specific national capitals, which derive whatever powers of enforcement they have from nation-states – both the imperial states that command them and the subordinate states that carry out their orders.
There are many things to be said about capitalism today, and about its current relations with the nation-state, that lie beyond the scope of this chapter. Needless to say, a thorough examination of their complex interactions would, among other things, require a much closer inspection than is possible here of the many changes that have brought us from the early phases of capitalism to today’s economic and political order. But the point here is that, throughout all the various phases or ‘regimes’ of capitalism, there has been one over-arching pattern: not the decline but, on the contrary, the persistence and even the proliferation of the nation-state. It is not just that nation-states have stubbornly held on through the universalization of capitalism. If anything, the universalization of capitalism has also meant, or at least been accompanied by, the universalization of the nation-state. Global capitalism is more than ever a global system of national states, and the universalization of capitalism is presided over by nation-states, especially one hegemonic superpower.
This is a point worth emphasizing. The conventional view of globalization seems to be based on the assumption that the natural tendency of capitalist development, and specifically its internationalization, is to submerge the nation-state, even if the process is admittedly still far from over. The internationalization of capital, according to that view, is apparently in an inverse relation to the development of the nation-state: the more internationalization, the less nation-state. But the historical record suggests something different. The internationalization of capital has been accompanied by the universalization of capital’s original political form. When capitalism was born, the world was very far from being a world of nation-states. Today, it is just that. And while new transnational institutions have certainly emerged, they have not so much displaced the nation-state as given it new roles – in fact, in some cases, new instruments and powers.
Globalization itself is a phenomenon of national economies and national states. It is impossible to make sense of it without taking account of both uneven development and competition among national economies and without acknowledging the constant tension (the consistently contradictory relations between the USA and Japan spring to mind) between international cooperation and struggles for dominance among national capitalisms. Much of what goes under the name of globalization consists of national states carrying out policies to promote the international ‘competitiveness’ of their own national economies, to maintain or restore profitability to domestic capital, to promote the free movement of capital while controlling the movements of labour, typically by confining it within national boundaries, or at least strictly controlling its movements to coincide with the needs of capital, and always by subjecting it to disciplines enforced by nation-states. Even policies to create and sustain global markets, not to mention policies deliberately designed to forfeit national sovereignty, are conceived, implemented, and enforced by national governments. And nowhere is the nexus of global capital and nation-state more obvious than in the degree to which transnational organizations of capital like the IMF not only serve as the instruments of dominant states but also depend on subordinate states as the conduit of globalization.
If there has been a real movement towards transnational integration, it has tended to take the form less of globalization than regionalization. But even at the level of regional integration, the centrifugal forces of the nation-state are still at work. The global economy is constituted by regional blocs of unevenly developed and hierarchically organized national economies and nation-states. Even – or particularly – in the most ambitious, if not the only, project of transnational unification, the European Union, the tensions between cooperation and competition, or between integration and national sovereignty, are vividly on display. Real political integration, if it were possible at all, would, of course, simply create a larger state, whose purpose would be to compete with other national economies and states – and particularly the US superstate. But as it is, European integration has tended to mean growing competition among its national constituents, which is, if anything, intensified by monetary union. Nor has European integration transcended the contradictory logic of uneven development or the national exclusiveness that follows from it. In fact, the Union has brought into sharper relief the hierarchy of national economies. Major European leaders are generally quite open about the primacy of nation-states, and even those most committed to political integration persist in thinking about Europe as divided between an ‘avant garde’ or ‘centre of gravity’ and a periphery of marginal economies.
When we speak of global economic crises or downturns, too, nation-states and national economies invariably come to the fore. To be sure, crisis is never simply an Asian or Latin American crisis, nor is it a consequence of specific national strategies or policy failures, or the effect of ‘crony capitalism’ or any other specific and defective form of capitalism. Capitalist crisis is a consequence of systemic processes inherent in capitalism as such. At the same time, global crises are always shaped by the specific national forms of the global economy’s constituent parts, each with its own history and its own internal logic, and by the relations among diverse and unevenly developed national entities.
It has been argued (by, among others, contributors to this volume) that, despite the persistence of national economies and nation-states, there now exists a ‘global’ capitalist class. Yet throughout the world of ‘global capitalism’, the principal economic actors and classes are still organized above all on a national basis. Each nation’s working class has its own class formations, practices, and traditions; and while no one would deny that capital is far more mobile and less place-rooted than labour, we are still a very long way from a truly global capitalist class. No one is likely to have much trouble distinguishing US from Japanese capital, or either one from Russian or Brazilian, not only as regards their obvious cultural differences but also the divergent and competing interests among them. National classes are likely to persist precisely because global integration itself, whatever else it may mean, has meant intensified competition among national capitals.
To say, as Marx already suggested a century and a half ago, that capital acknowledges no national boundaries is certainly to say that capital is mobile and that capitalists place profit above national loyalties, so that they will move, whenever they can, wherever the imperatives of profit-maximization take them. But it certainly does not mean that they have no roots in, or no need for, the state or for their own nation-state in particular. Capital accumulation has always involved certain requirements of social order and stability which capital itself cannot provide, and market imperatives themselves require coercive enforcement (not least, to discipline the working class). These requirements up to now have been, and in the foreseeable future still promise to be, fulfilled above all by nation-states.
There are, needless to say, differences between capitalists whose main economic arena is their own domestic economy and those who operate on the global stage, deriving their massive profits from transnational movements of capital. To the extent that capitalists of the latter type have interests in common with others across national boundaries, as against the interests of their own compatriot capitalist classes, and to the extent that these transnational capitalists have certain international agencies at their command, they could (with great caution) be said to constitute a global capitalist class. But even they must rely on the coercive powers of national states. Even they – in some ways, especially they – rely on the preservation of territorially defined labour regimes and controls on the mobility of labour, which are always policed by national states and which depend on maintaining and strictly enforcing the principle of nationality.
It is no doubt true that national governments are now more than ever obliged to act in the interests of ‘global’ no less than local capital, including the interests of ‘transnational’ capital with its home base elsewhere. But this is significant not only because those capitalist interests are global but also because they need the nation-state to sustain them.
Of course the global economy is highly integrated, and of course massive and rapid movements of capital across national boundaries, especially in the form of financial speculation, are a dominant feature of the world economy. But not only is every transnational process shaped by specifically local conditions, the state is also its indispensable instrument. If ‘globalization’ means the decline of national capitalist classes and the nation-state, the transfer of sovereignty from the state to the organs of some kind of unified transnational capital, it certainly has not happened yet and seems unlikely ever to happen.
The new imperialism
To say all this is certainly not to deny that the relations between capital and nation-state take many different forms. The relations among advanced capitalist economies and among their national states are obviously very different from the relations between them and weaker national entities, and the room for national manoeuvre varies accordingly. Nevertheless, it is significant that all these relations are, in one way or another, inter-national.
Capitalism has, to be sure, made possible an imperial hegemony that need not rely on military conquest or political rule but dominates by means of economic imperatives and the ‘laws’ of the market. It is in this respect more than any other that globalization has moved beyond earlier forms of imperialism. Not only have the economic imperatives of capitalism extended into every corner of the world but new means have been found to implant them without the direct application of military force or political subordination: from ‘structural adjustment’ to disciplines imposed by capital lenders and speculators.
But the economic hegemony of capital requires the coercive support of the state in this domain as in every other, and the paradoxical effect of global capital’s far-reaching empire is that it has become more rather than less dependent on nation-states, as increasingly global economic imperatives require local mediations. In a sense, the new forms of imperial domination by means of debt and financial manipulation, or even foreign direct investment, are what they are precisely because they provide a means of penetrating national boundaries, barriers that hardly existed for older forms of colonial domination by direct military means. That this new imperialism is no longer a matter of direct colonial domination and operates through the medium of national entities has implications, among other things, for oppositional struggles.
The other side of the new imperialism is a new kind of militarism. This one does not generally have territorial ambitions, and generally leaves nation-states in place. Its objective is not hegemony over specific colonies with identifiable geographic boundaries but boundless hegemony over the global economy. Instead of absorbing or annexing territory, this imperialist militarism typically uses massive displays of violence to assert the dominance of global capital – which really means exercising the military power of specific nation-states to assert the dominance of capital based in a few nation-states, or one in particular, the USA. These displays may have no clear objective, apart from demonstrating the capacity of US military force to move throughout the world at will, its freedom to navigate the global economy without hindrance, and enforcing the economic imperatives that make it possible for US hegemony to reach far beyond its direct political dominion.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding the ‘Pax Americana’ or in some ways precisely because of it, in the everyday life of global capitalism the major capitalist powers in general depend more than ever on local states throughout the world to operate globalization and enforce the demands of ‘global’ capital. If the economy is increasingly global, there is no commensurate political or military power to match, and nor is there ever likely to be. More likely is a growing disparity between the scope of the global market and the local, national instruments and coercive powers needed to sustain it. US military force – with or without the cover of international cooperation – is probably as close as the world will ever come to a global state power.
But the fact that the police force of last resort for global capital is still a national military force only serves to emphasize the persistent, if contradictory, relation between globalization and the nation-state. It is also clear that this global military power, for all its technological sophistication, is a very blunt instrument – as indeed it must be to sustain its long-distance and spatially unbounded dominance. It cannot provide the minute and local regulation required by capital in its daily transactions. High-tech bombs, however ‘smart’, are not the most effective instruments of economic order and stability. Capital has yet to find a more efficient way to meet those needs than a global system of multiple national states, each with its own legal and coercive apparatus.
What form of state ‘corresponds' to global capitalism?
It is hard to foresee the day when capital will stop being organized on national principles. Existing nation-states may change their form. Some may fragment to form smaller national entities, while others may join larger regional associations. But the forces tending to prolong the historic connection between capitalism and the nation-state are very powerful, indeed rooted in the very nature of capitalism. Even the separation of the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’, the moment of appropriation and the moment of coercion, which makes capital dependent on an external agency of enforcement, tends to the preservation of the state as we know it, with its monopoly of coercive force within clearly defined, and more or less manageable, territorial boundaries. That tendency is reinforced by the uneven development of capitalism, which has preserved and proliferated the nation-state by differentiating national economies, a divisive effect perennially aggravated by the imperatives of global competition – imperatives not alleviated but intensified by globalization.
None of this implies that developments conventionally associated with the current ‘globalized’ world order are insignificant or negated by the persistence of national entities. Markets are certainly integrated, finance capital certainly sweeps the world in the flash of an electronic eye, the USA, together with other major capitalist powers, has certainly imposed globalization on the world economy, and global capital has certainly forged transnational agencies to advance its global class interests. The point here is simply that there is another no less essential feature of this economic order: a constant tension between the integration of the global economy and the centrifugal impulses of its constituent parts.
At the heart of this contradiction between the global and the national is the non-correspondence between capitalism’s economic and political forms. It seems, on the face of it, self-evident that a global state (whatever that might mean) would better serve the interests of a globalizing capital, and it is no doubt tempting to think that the globalizing pressures of the economy will inevitably tend to globalize its political supports. The question, then, is whether the stubborn persistence of the nation-state, and the apparent lack of correspondence between economic ‘base’ and political ‘superstructure’, is simply a historical contingency or more deeply rooted in the nature of capitalism.10
My argument here is that, while capitalism’s historic connection with the territorial state has continued to shape its patterns of reproduction, the persistence of that political form is not simply the result of tenacious historical legacies. The contradiction between capitalism’s globalizing tendencies and its national form is not simply a transient confrontation between forces of the future and remnants of the past. It is not just a matter of capitalism’s persistent inability to overcome a historic contradiction and grow into its ‘proper’ political form. The point is not simply that capitalism has so far failed to produce a global political ‘superstructure’ to match its global economic ‘base’. The critical point is that there is an irreducible contradiction between two opposing tendencies, both of which are rooted in the nature of capitalism.
While capitalism did not create the nation-state, and nor did it invent state sovereignty or territoriality, its systemic logic has reproduced and reinforced the territorial state no less than the universalizing, globalizing force of the economy. It is, in other words, in the very nature of capitalism to intensify the contradiction between its expansionist imperatives and the territorial divisions of its original political (and economic) form.
Let us look more closely at the separation between the economic and the political in capitalism. Unlike other systems of exploitation, in which appropriating classes or states extract surplus labour from producers by direct coercion, capitalist exploitation is characterized by a division of labour between the economic moment of appropriation and the extra-economic or political moment of coercion. Underlying this separation is the market dependence of all economic actors, appropriators and producers, which creates economic imperatives distinct and apart from direct political coercion. This separation – which constitutes two distinct logics of process, each with its own dynamics, its own temporalities and its own spatial range – is both a source of strength and a source of contradiction.
On the one hand, the distinctive division of labour between the economic and political moments of capitalism, and between economic imperatives and political coercion, makes possible capitalism’s unique capacity for universalization and spatial expansion. The economic powers of the feudal lord, for instance, could never extend beyond the reach of his personal ties and extra-economic powers, his military force, political rule or juridical authority. Nor, for that matter, could the economic powers of the absolutist state or any precapitalist empire exceed its extra-economic range. Capital, by contrast, is not only uniquely driven to extend its economic reach but also uniquely able to do so. The self-expansion of capital is not limited to what the capitalist can squeeze out of the direct producers by direct coercion, nor is capital accumulation confined within the spatial range of personal domination. By means of specifically economic (market) imperatives, capital is uniquely able to escape the limits of direct coercion and move far beyond the borders of political authority.
On the other hand, while the scope of capitalist economic imperatives can far outreach direct political rule and legal authority, the same disjunction that makes this possible is the root of an irreducible contradiction. The economic imperatives of capitalism are always in need of support by extra-economic powers of regulation and coercion, to create and sustain the conditions of accumulation and maintain the system of capitalist property. The transfer of certain ‘political’ powers to capital can never eliminate the need to retain others in a formally separate political sphere, preserving the division between the moment of economic appropriation and the moment of political coercion. Nor can purely economic imperatives ever completely supplant direct political coercion, or, indeed, survive at all without political support. This means that capitalism remains dependent on extra-economic conditions, political and legal supports, whose spatial range can never match its economic reach.
In fact, capitalism in some ways more than any other social form needs politically organized and legally defined stability, regularity and predictability in its social arrangements. Yet these are conditions of capital’s existence and self-reproduction that it cannot provide for itself and that its own inherently anarchic laws of motion constantly subvert. To stabilize its constitutive social relations – between capital and labour or capital and other capitals – capitalism is especially reliant on legally defined and politically authorized regularities. The coercions that sustain these regularities must exist apart from capital’s own powers of appropriation if it is to preserve its capacity for self-expansion. Furthermore, a system of market dependence, in which access to the means of subsistence is subject to the vagaries of the market (especially for the propertyless majority whose access even to the means of labour depends on selling their labour power), a system in which the economy has been ‘disembedded’ from other social relations, will also have a distinctive need for politically organized social provision.
It is also worth considering that the state in capitalist society, perhaps even more than in other societies, cannot rely on direct coercion alone and must also organize consent by other means. This means, among other things, that the differentiation of national entities is reinforced by differences in the cultures of legitimation that have accompanied the varied and uneven processes of economic development. At the same time, it is not the least of the many contradictions in the relation between global capital and the nation-state that, in their quest for social and political stability in the process of globalization, imperial states have not only consolidated the national statehood of subordinate states but sometimes encouraged ‘public sector reform’ on the model of Western liberal democracy. While it would be a mistake to exaggerate either the strength of this liberalizing impulse or its beneficial consequences, such reforms sometimes have the effect of opening new spaces for the politics of opposition, both against local regimes and against globalization – as has happened recently in parts of Asia and Latin America.
It is easy to argue that, as capital becomes increasingly global, its needs would be better served by a global state than by national states. But this remains at best a highly abstract theoretical possibility, and one that is constantly undermined by capitalism’s own logic of process. The kind of legal and political order required to enable capital accumulation, and to preserve social stability in conditions of market dependence, is for all practical purposes inconceivable without clear territorial demarcations and sharply defined jurisdictions. New technologies of force have certainly extended the range of coercion, but the reach of direct legal/political dominion and civil order remains far more limited than the scope of economic imperatives, and it is hard to imagine how it could ever be otherwise.
A territorially fragmented political order may be less effective in managing transactions among globalizing capitals than in regulating relations between capital and labour. But within the range of practical possibilities, there can be little doubt that the territorial state is capital’s best available option. Capitalism cannot tolerate the kind of fluidity that characterized political authority in precapitalist societies. It can tolerate it perhaps even less in the current conditions of globalization, when the deregulation of markets is aggravating the system’s inherently anarchic and destabilizing effects. If, therefore, capital cannot have a global legal and coercive order coextensive with its economic reach (and even leaving out of account uneven development, which creates its own pressures against a unified global state), it must be able to move securely from one clearly defined political/legal order to another.
The social differentiation of national economies
The association between capitalism and the territorial state is not, however, simply a matter of mundane practicalities. It is not just the practical limits of political order that force capital to rely on the territorial state to carry out its regulative and coercive functions. Capitalism as a system of social relations also tends towards the territorial fragmentation of space and political authority. There is here yet another contradiction, which can, again, be brought into focus by contrasting capitalism with precapitalist forms and particularly Western feudalism.
The feudal system was, on the one hand, highly fragmented. Its ‘parcellized’ sovereignty represented a network of very local and personal social relations, which were at once political and economic. On the other hand, it was in the very nature of these relations that there were no rigid territorial boundaries between one feudal nexus and another. A feudal kingdom, constituted by a series of vertical relations of fealty, bondage and personal coercive power, and horizontal relations of family and dynastic alliance, was likely to have fairly porous borders, which could be breached or moved by extending, or contracting, the network of personal bonds and domination. Just as the feudal trading network was not an integrated global system but a series of arbitrage operations between one locale and another, feudalism as a social system was an aggregation of personal and local networks with permeable or moveable boundaries.
Capitalism presents a striking contrast. Its economic imperatives could indeed be said to have created a global order more integrated than ever before, maybe even a form of integration that for the first time constitutes anything even remotely resembling a global society. But the resemblance still remains remote. The development of that rudimentary global society is, and is likely to remain, far behind the contrary effect of capitalist integration: the formation of many unevenly developed economies with self-enclosed social systems of their own.
There is nothing else in the history of humanity to compare with the kind of social system created by capitalism: a complex network of tight interdependence among large numbers of people, and social classes, not joined by personal ties or direct political domination but inescapably connected by their market dependence and the market’s imperative network of social relations and processes. This impersonal social system is uniquely capable of extending far beyond the reach of personal ties and direct domination, but it also has uniquely stringent conditions of existence.
A capitalist economy exists to the extent that it constitutes an integrated market within which market-dependent economic actors are compelled to compete. That market is integrated to the extent that economic actors are subject to certain common conditions, interdependencies and economic imperatives. The global economy is bound together by enough commonalities, interdependencies and common imperatives, to constitute a system of global competition. But global competition is still very far from the integrated market of a national economy in which capital and labour are subject to a truly common standard, not just a common standard of monetary exchange but social conditions sufficiently uniform to produce, among other things, a compelling social average of productivity and unit labour costs. If we think of all the conditions that determine the costs of labour and what Marxists call the ‘socially necessary labour time’ that constitutes the measure of value, we will have some idea of the social conditions of a unified capitalist economy.
Of course no national economy has ever neatly and completely coincided with such a uniformity of social conditions, but a well-developed capitalism certainly tends towards such a coincidence. At the same time, on the global plane, capitalist imperatives tend to produce a differentiated world of uneven social development. As capitalism brings less ‘developed’ societies into the orbit of its economic ‘laws’, it compels them to transform their social property relations to make them responsive to market imperatives. That social transformation will not and cannot create another capitalist society in the image of the dominant economies. It may not even constitute a self-contained and viable capitalist economy at all. But it will create a new self-enclosed social regime of market dependence.
Peasants, for instance, may be transformed from subsistence farmers into cash-crop producers, with all the social changes that entails. This transformation will certainly subject them to the imperatives of the global economy, but it will also enclose them in a new social system at home, which increasingly dissolves old social ties and replaces them with new economic dependencies, domestic hierarchies and class relations sustained and enforced by domestic state powers.
So the very forces that may tend towards the creation of a global society have solidified the boundaries between its constituent parts. Capitalist imperatives have produced a multiplicity of national units, each comprising a self-enclosed and territorially bounded social system. Developed economies maintain the conditions of capital accumulation by keeping intact their social regimes and civil order, while profiting from less-developed social conditions elsewhere. Subordinate economies are likely to reinforce those effects, in response not only to direct pressures from the dominant powers but also to impersonal economic imperatives – for instance, enhancing ‘competitiveness’ in the global market by exploiting their own low-cost social regimes.
The imperialism of social differentiation
Rich capitalist economies have, of course, regularly benefited from infusions of cheap migrant labour, legal and illegal, but these have always been strictly controlled, so as not to endanger the advantages of social differentiation among national economies. The benefits of immigration, including any effects it may have on lowering labour costs at home, depend on the preservation of low-wage economies abroad; and, in any case, those benefits have never outweighed the advantages of long-distance exploitation of low-wage economies elsewhere. Nor has capitalism ever been able to resolve the irreducible contradiction between its need for increasing consumer demand and its tendency to reproduce poverty. Each of these two opposing options, and both together, are consistent with, indeed compelled by, the logic of capitalism, whose market imperatives offer no less contradictory alternatives.
The major capitalist economies are, to be sure, finding new ways of exploiting the labour regimes of less-developed economies at a distance, but even these new methods both benefit from and reinforce the social differentiation of national economies. Even today’s new patterns of migration, including the ‘new’ economy’s dependence on the migration of skilled workers, confirms the continuing importance of national differentiation: the most dramatic example is the highly trained IT workers from India imported especially into the USA, which illustrates how capital can profit from appropriating skills produced in other national regimes (and typically non-unionized in their new home, though this may be changing) instead of paying for their more costly creation at home. Globalization may have replaced traditional means of remote-control exploitation, but the end remains the same. In any case, the difference is certainly not that older forms were mediated by the nation-state while the new one is not. On the contrary, now more than ever, imperialism is a matter of inter-national transactions.
Globalization as operated by the major capitalist states and their transnational agencies certainly seeks to foreclose the possibility of independent national development strategies in the world’s poorest countries, by subjecting them to global market forces and ‘structural adjustment’. There is no shortage of efforts to block avenues to development of the kind that created the last generation of economic ‘miracles’ in poor developing countries – development achieved by means of active state intervention within protected national economies. But the effect of this is not to dilute social differences and national states in the solvent of global economic forces. On the contrary, the effect is to aggravate the inequalities among national economies and to consolidate the enclosure of differentiated social regimes, presided over by national states.
For reasons inherent in the nature of capitalism, then, the global economy is, and is likely to remain, a differentiated aggregate of social systems, with very different social environments and very different labour regimes – and capital is likely to continue exploiting those social differences. While many poor economies are compelled to reproduce their own poverty, advanced capitalist societies will continue to sustain their own hegemony by combining, on the one hand, enclosed social orders at home, relaxing the boundaries only under the strictest conditions or, as in the European Union, extending them (up to a point) to embrace more or less comparable social regimes; and, on the other hand, an economic imperialism capable of penetrating other, very different but also nationally enclosed social orders. This tendency to reproduce the social differentiation of the world’s national economies is no less powerful, to say the least, than the much vaunted capacity of a rising capitalist tide to lift all boats.
An equalization of social conditions throughout the globe would no doubt weaken this particular impulse to territorial division. But, whatever both advocates and critics of globalization may say about the homogenization of world culture by the spread of global capitalism, the dynamics of capitalist exploitation and competition, not to mention the ecological unsustainability of generalizing the system’s destructive wastefulness, make a global uniformity of social conditions inconceivable. As long as capitalist exploitation, competition and uneven development continue to reproduce and reinforce the social differentiation of the world’s national economies – and it is surely in their fundamental nature to do so – capitalism will continue to reproduce and reinforce the nation-state, or something very like it, in order to contain specific social systems, as for many other reasons.11
At any rate, however effective capital may be in escaping fixed territorial boundaries, it is very difficult to imagine how its extra-economic supports could ever do likewise. There are, and are always likely to remain, strict practical limits on the reach of direct coercion, and even stricter limits on the scope of a legally authorized coercive regime capable of governing the anarchy of capital from day to day. Capital is always likely to be torn between its need for global power and its demand for a spatially limited political and legal order, with local coercive mechanisms (and locally organized social provision) to manage its everyday life.
Conclusion
While it is true that capitalism did not invent the sovereign territorial state, the connection between the two is more than a historical contingency. Capitalism emerged in conjunction with the process of state formation, and just as it perfected the territorial sovereign nation-state by displacing politically constituted property, so it has continued to reproduce and reinforce the division of the world into a multiplicity of nation-states.
In the earliest days of capitalism, when England’s domestic economy more or less coincided with its national political regime, there was no obvious disjunction between the economic reach of capital and the political/jurisdictional reach of the nation-state.12 But the growing disparity between the global economy and the territorial nation-state in no way signals the end of capitalism’s need, however contradictory, for a spatially fragmented political and legal order. On the contrary, that contradiction results from the persistence of that need; and for the foreseeable future, it is most likely to be met by something like the nation-state. The strongest challenges to existing nation-states, to their boundaries or indeed to their very existence, are more likely to come from oppositional forces of various kinds than from the agents of capital or the impersonal forces of the market.
Competition and uneven development, which belong to the essence of capitalism and have perpetuated national economies, would be enough to prolong the life of the nation-state. The intensification of competition and uneven development by globalization would be enough to intensify the contradiction between economic integration and national fragmentation. But even apart from all that, it is in the essential nature of capitalism that appropriation will always be separate from, and yet require enforcement by, legal, political and military instruments external to the ‘economy’, as well as support from extra-economic social institutions. It is also in the essential nature of capitalism that capital will, and must, always seek to extend its economic reach. So capitalism is always likely to be pulled in opposing directions by two contradictory yet equally essential needs: the economic impulses of capital will always strive to break through all territorial boundaries, while the extra-economic conditions of capital’s self-reproduction will remain territorially rooted and spatially bounded.
The economic reach of capital will always, and increasingly, exceed the grasp of the extra-economic means required to reproduce and enforce it. However global the economy becomes, it will continue to rely on spatially limited constituent units with a political, and even an economic, logic of their own. The contradictions between these contrary impulses belong to the essence of globalization as much as do transnational corporations, high-speed electronic movements of capital, or integrated global markets.
As for the political implications of these contradictions, the fact that capitalism is a global system organized nationally means two things: on the one hand, its systemic weaknesses and contradictions, its endemic crises, are not national in origin. They are global, and they are inherent in the system, rooted in capitalism’s basic operating principles. This means that no specific national policy caused them, nor can any specific national strategy resolve or prevent them. On the other hand, because global capitalism is nationally organized and irreducibly dependent on something like the nation-state, national economies and national states can still be a major terrain of opposition. It goes without saying that struggles against global capitalism demand new forms of international solidarity. But it does need to be said, and constantly repeated, that the first battlegrounds are local, and the nation-state remains the central arena.
Whatever can be said about constraints on the power of the territorial state against global corporations, it remains their most vital support. No corporation can navigate, let alone dominate, the world without the collaboration of one or more states. The most effective political means of intervening in the global economy remains control of the national states that constitute, enforce, and implement it. And the nature of that intervention is still determined above all by the particular class forces embodied in the state. No existing transnational agency, nor, indeed, any conceivable form of ‘global governance’, will be answerable to popular and democratic forces as long as capital commands the nation-states that constitute the global system.
Precisely because global capital so badly needs the state, and because the state as the point of concentration of capitalist power is also the point at which global capital is most vulnerable, capital has a strong ideological stake in the myth that globalization means the disempowerment, if not the disappearance, of the nation-state. Challenging the hegemony of capital requires challenging that myth. If there is a growing distance between the global scope of the capitalist market and the local powers on which it depends, this cannot simply mean that capital is escaping political control. It means instead, or also, that there is a growing space for opposition.
Notes
· * Parts of this chapter originally appeared in Wood (1999). I am grateful to David McNally for his comments on the original article and to Frances Abele for hers on the current one.
1. Many of those arguments are, of course, rooted in the work of Max Weber, although the underlying assumptions – concerning processes of modernization, urbanization, commercialization, and so on – go back further, especially to classical political economy and Enlightenment conceptions of progress. I discuss this idea of modernity, as it relates to conceptions of capitalism and the state, at greater length in Wood (1991). The theory of absolutism as a turning point in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, which liberated the bourgeois economy from feudal constraints, is developed by Perry Anderson (1974). For an explanation that stresses the importance of Europe’s multiple polities in the development of capitalism, see Immanuel Wallerstein (1974, 1983).
2. Most recently, in Wood (2002a).
3. The conditions for such a capitalist system – a system of production, appropriation, and social reproduction driven in its totality by capitalist imperatives – seem not to have been present even in those parts of the Low Countries for which the strongest argument can be made for an early development of capitalism. For an argument on the early development of capitalism in some parts of the Low Countries, see Robert Brenner (2001: 169–238). I have raised some questions about Brenner’s argument on the Low Countries in Wood (2002b).
4. For a discussion of ‘bourgeois revolution’ as non-capitalist, see Comninel (1987), especially the conclusion. See also Wood (1991, 2002a) for general discussions of the difference between ‘bourgeois’ and ‘capitalist’, and between absolutism and capitalism.
5. I owe this phrase to Robert Brenner, who has been using it in his work for many years.
6. This is how Eric Kerridge (1988: 6) describes traditional forms of international trade.
7. On the process of feudal centralization, contrasting France and England, see Robert Brenner (1985, especially pp. 254–64).
8. I discuss the idea of ‘sovereignty’ and its emergence in a non-capitalist society in Wood (1991, esp. Chapter 3). In his doctoral dissertation, Hannes Lacher (forthcoming) discusses the non-capitalist origin of the ‘modern’ territorial state. See also his chapter in this volume.
9. England, in its domestic market, created a commercial system based in distinctive ways on commerce in the means of survival and self-reproduction – food and cheap commodities of everyday life. How this commercial system differed from the traditional European commercial system, with its dependence on the luxury trade and its contradictory interaction with commerce in the means of survival, particularly the grain trade, requires a more elaborate discussion than is necessary or possible here. (For more on this, see Wood (2002a).)
10. This question has been put in an especially challenging and illuminating way by Lacher (2000, and in this volume) arguing that the ‘exclusive territoriality’ of the contemporary state, which defies the globalizing tendencies of capital, is the product of that precapitalist historical legacy. At the same time, he shows how capitalism has ‘internalized’ the territorial state, which has become integral to capitalist processes of reproduction. My argument here, while it starts from many of the same premises, suggests that the reproduction and reinforcement of this historical legacy is more deeply rooted in the nature of capitalism.
11. The World Bank annual World Development Report (2000/2001), entitled ‘Attacking Poverty’, illustrates some of the contradictions. Even fanatical advocates of globalization have to acknowledge that, whatever claims they may make about the general rise of living standards, we have in recent years seen more, rather than less, social polarization between rich and poor among – as well as within – the world’s national economies. The World Bank can always be relied on to give voice to global capital’s contradictions on the subject of development and poverty. As usual, in the latest Report concerns about poverty express themselves in empty pieties and the insistence that ‘growth’ is ultimately the only solution – which means, of course, that the ‘free’ market, imposed according to the will of ‘global’ capital, must be allowed to have its way. The only real novelty in the Report is the introduction of the notion of ‘empowerment’. The governments of poorer countries must, the Report argues, be more accountable to their poor populations and more sensitive to their needs, with policies designed to enhance social welfare. Apart from the vacuity of these pious sentiments, and the shifting of blame from globalization policies to the failures of local states, the most striking thing about this notion is that it neatly sums up the basic principles of globalization: let global market forces do their worst, while the responsibility for picking up the pieces must fall to nation-states – the very states compelled by global capital to implement and enforce its economic imperatives.
12. Of course, both England’s national dominion and its domestic economy began to extend their reach very early in the development of the English nation-state. The multinational character of the British Isles was already a major factor in the formation of the Tudor English state, and England also sought ways of extending the reach of its economic imperatives beyond the capacities of its political and military dominion, already (it can be argued) in its early forms of colonialism. But that is another story, part of which is discussed in Wood 2002a.
Bibliography
· Anderson, P. (1974) Lineages of the Absolutist State, London: Verso.
· Brenner, R. (1985) ‘The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism’, in T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (eds), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
· Comninel, G.C. (1987) Rethinking the French Revolution, London: Verso.
· Kerridge, E. (1988) Trade and Banking in Early Modern England, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
· Lacher, H. (forthcoming) The International Relations of Modernity: Capitalism, Territoriality and Globalization, London: Routledge.
· Wallerstein, I. (1974) The Modern World System, New York: Academic Press.
· Wallerstein, I. (1983) Historical Capitalism, London: Verso.
· Wood, E.M. (1991) The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, London: Verso.
· Wood, E.M. (1999) ‘Unhappy Families: Global Capitalism in a World of Nation States’, Monthly Review, July/August.
· Wood, E.M. (2002a) The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, London: Verso.
· World Bank (2000/2001) World Development Report, Oxford: Oxford University Press.