The Stateless State

Introduction

The study of politics has long concentrated on the state as a sovereign authority; as ‘a set of institutions with a dedicated personnel’, which wields ‘a monopoly of authoritative rule making within a bounded territory’ (Hay, Lister and Marsh, 2006: 8). This notion of the state arose gradually and contingently during the Renaissance and Reformation, culminating in the great texts of Bodin and Hobbes (see Skinner, 1978). However, once the idea of the state as sovereign authority had arisen, it proved to be remarkably powerful and resilient. It inspired political actors to remake the world in its image, most famously in the Treaty of Westphalia, which enshrined it as a principle of international relations. Moreover, as it became more and more entrenched in political life, so many students of politics began to take it for granted, treating it as a natural development and object for study.

In this chapter, we do not provide either a historical review of the origins and development of the state (see Hall and Ikenberry, 1989; Skinner, 1978; Tilly, 1975) or a survey of the extensive and varied literature on social science theories of the state (see Dunleavy and O'Leary, 1987; Hay, 1996; Hay, Lister and Marsh, 2006; Jessop, 2000, 2007a). Rather, we focus on recent developments in analysing the state: namely, the various claims there has been a change in the pattern and exercise of state authority from government to governance; from a hierarchic or bureaucratic state to governance in and by networks. We identify three waves in the literature discussing the changing state, from network governance to metagovernance and on to decentred governance and its postfoundational move to the stateless state.

The literature on network governance studies the institutional legacy of neoliberal reforms of the state. Network governance is associated with the changing nature of the state following the public sector reforms of the 1980s. The reforms are said to have precipitated a shift from a hierarchic bureaucracy toward a greater use of markets, quasi-markets and networks, especially in the delivery of public services. The effects of the reforms were intensified by global changes, including an increase in transnational economic activity and the rise of regional institutions such as the European Union (EU). The resulting complexity and fragmentation are such that the state increasingly depends on other organizations to secure its intentions and deliver its policies. [Page 204]Network governance evokes a world in which state power is dispersed among a vast array of spatially and functionally distinct networks composed of all kinds of public, voluntary and private organizations with which the centre now interacts. The network governance literature offers a compelling picture of the state; indeed Marsh (2008b: 738) is concerned it ‘may be becoming the new orthodoxy’ (see also Kerr and Kettell, 2006, 13). We will decentre this first-wave approach to network governance, examining the work of the Anglo-governance school.

The second-wave of network governance accepted the shift from bureaucracy to markets to networks but disputed it led to any significant dispersal of state authority. It focused on metagovernance or ‘the governance of government and governance’ (Jessop 2000: 23, Jessop, 2007b). Metagovernance is an umbrella concept that describes the role of the state and its characteristic policy instruments in network governance. Given that governing is distributed among various private, voluntary and public actors, and that power and authority are more decentralized and fragmented among a plurality of networks, the role of the state has shifted from the direct governance of society to the ‘metagovernance’ of the several modes of intervention and from command and control through bureaucracy to the indirect steering of relatively autonomous stakeholders. We also decentre ‘bringing the state back in (yet again)’ (Jessop 2007a: 54).

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