Bulletin n. 3/2006
December 2006
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Cerny Philip G.
    Restructuring the state in a globalizing world: capital accumulation, tangled hierarchies and the search for a new spatio-temporal fix
    in Review of International Political Economy , Volume 13, Number 4 / October 2006 ,  2006 ,  679-695
    A main concern of debates on the changing role and form of the state and the relationship of these with the process of globalization has been the role of capitalism. Jessop, a well known exponent of Marxist political theory, tackles the broader range of issues but, like the urban sociologist Brenner, is most interesting when he writes about the institutional restructuring or ‘rescaling’ of the state along lines that go well beyond multi-level governance to unstable ‘tangled hierarchies’ and the still nebulous search for a ‘new spatio-temporal fix’ for social, political and economic organization. Both authors seek to give socio-political variables a higher degree of independence in explaining change and eschew economic determinism, although the central importance they give to ‘accumulation strategies’ and, in Jessop's case, to Marxist theories of value, make this assertion problematic from a non-Marxist perspective. Thus although the authors emphasize the significance of ‘extra-economic’ interactions between complex interests and actors, I argue that they also retain a sense that there is an underlying economic-structural imperative at work ‘in the last analysis’.
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