Redefining Power in the Global Age: Eight Theses
Beck, Ulrich
HOW SHOULD SUCH concepts as power, dominance, and authority be redefined from a cosmopolitan perspective? I have eight theses. 1. The world economy stands in relation to the state as a...
...Not imperialism but non-imperialism, not invasion but the retreat of investors is what constitutes the nucleus of global economic power...
...Without legitimacy, there is no conflict management and no security...
...The mixing of races, ethnic groups, and nationalities— at home and abroad—is becoming their central resource for creativity and at the same time their dominant employment policy...
...He is the author, most recently, of What is Globalization...
...Talking about the possibility of the coming of a pacifist and cosmopolitan capitalism may sound worse than illusionary...
...The ability of governments to exercise control increases with interstate cooperation, with the subsequent rise in living standards that then becomes possible, and with their new global economic strength...
...Their involvement is neither political nor nonpolitical...
...Perhaps the cosmopolitan state could become the leading political answer to the paradox that in the era of globalization and pluralism we find ourselves caught in the maelstrom of conflicts over political identities and ethnic fragmentation...
...It is instrumental in structuring processes of transnationalization just as it is being shaped through them...
...Or is it the opposite, that global capitalism destroys the preconditions and sources of cultural diversity and political freedom...
...the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself...
...Europe also needs to internalize the American dream, with its message that you, too, can become someone else, someone other than who you are now...
...This is the central paradox of the neoliberal model of state and politics...
...This meta-power is neither illegal nor legitimate...
...How are the victims of self-determination given their own chance at it...
...It is important to stress that the meta-power of withdrawing investments does not depend on managerial princes who actively pursue a political agenda...
...and military, legal, and technological cooperation among states automatically lead to a loss of both...
...cultural diversification...
...it is also dangerous for capital itself...
...global environmental and technological risks...
...maximum freedom for capital...
...The power of global capitalism derives from potential nonconquest...
...Cosmopolitanism is about inclusive distinctions and loyalties (being citizens of two worlds—cosmos and polis...
...Or does such an idea merely raise false hopes and false consciousness once again...
...that is, of not investing in this country...
...It is thus possible to have both wings and roots—to develop meaningful affiliations without renouncing one's origins...
...These are the challenges of what I call the "world risk society," and deregulation, liberalization, and privatization provide no remedy...
...But nowadays corporations-as-quasistates also have to make political decisions , and they are at the same time fundamentally dependent on negotiation and trust, and thus thoroughly dependent on legitimation...
...But perhaps the state can also jump and checkmate the knighteconomy in new ways...
...Global corporations are using and developing the productivity of diversity...
...This determination was a product of British history, a feature of British cosmopolitanism, and it 88 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 produced one of the founding acts of the new Europe...
...Of course, oldfashioned territorial struggles continue in many parts of the world and may even gain new im 84 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 portance in the near future—as the plans of the Bush administration to build a new national missile defense system suggest...
...Product development subsidized by the state is the equivalent of weapon innovation...
...In fact, for such hazards the neoliberal regime is counterproductive...
...Global corporations are transnational societies in miniature...
...No one is in charge, no one started it, no one can stop it...
...REDEFINING POWER Could capitalism become a factor in the cosmopolitan revival of democracy...
...The more the globalization discourse dominates all areas of life, the more powerful capital strategies become...
...It is a kind of global sub-politics...
...These are the reform goals of globally active neoliberalism...
...The adjective "national" presumes self-determination...
...The most important historical event of the twentieth century, the defeat of National Socialist terror, would have been inconceivable without the British determination to defend European values in Europe against the Germans in their fascist fervor...
...This is the neoliberal project, which anticipates globally binding decisions...
...their power and their decisions were economically determined and limited, so that the burden of legitimation was removed...
...it can change the national and international rules...
...You are not determined by country of origin, social status, skin color, nation, religion, or gender...
...Still, might it be possible to develop the sub-politics of investment decisions into an instrument of power with two goals: to establish global rules for "wild" capitalism and to force nationstates to open up to cosmopolitanism...
...Legal rules adjusted to the global economy must in turn be sanctioned by the states and defended against social resistance...
...DISSENT / Fail 2001 n 83 REDEFINING POWER The power of not investing capital exists everywhere...
...What does this mean...
...Of course, global capital has to be localized somewhere and so it is imperialistic at the same time...
...In other words, the national fixation with politics is a self-defeating mechanism...
...Sharing sovereignty increases sovereignty rather than reduces it...
...This possibility emerges clearly when we compare the political architecture of cosmopolitan states with national federalism...
...The old territorial and the new deterritorialized power games overlap and contradict each other...
...How can we co-exist, at the same time both equal and different...
...It is a kind of organized irresponsibility...
...The cosmopolitan question is, self-determination—but against whom...
...They do not capture the new actors, strategies, resources, goals, conflicts, paradoxes, and ambivalent outcomes of economic meta-power, both inside and among nations...
...The national narrowness of the state thus becomes a hindrance to transnational inventiveness...
...and a lean, adaptable welfare state that pushes its citizens into work...
...Two unseen consequences of this sub-political meta-power are remarkable...
...The logic of the zero-sum game—as we know it from great power conflict, colonialism, economic and cultural imperialism, and military alliances—loses its explanatory power...
...the dismantling of trade barriers and currency controls...
...Cosmopolitanism is the new master concept for how to include globalization in politics, identity, and society...
...ULRICH BECK is professor of sociology at the University of Munich and the London School of Economics and Political Science...
...power is not tied to any specific location, and consequently, it can be disposed globally...
...Methodological nationalism is based on the equation of these two, which means that economic dependence...
...Of course, not all states are equally inclined or able to participate in the new global power game...
...it is expected to have institutionally internalized the neoliberal regime...
...inequality, poverty, and exclusion within and among countries, and the connection of all this to conflict, security risks, and then the withdrawal of investors...
...On the other hand, deregulating the market and privatizing public assets does not mean a weak state...
...6 6 Given this new politics, how can the idea of the state be opened up to the • challenges of transnationalization, the challenges of the "world risk society...
...Similarly, it is necessary to discover cosmopolitan France, cosmopolitan Germany, cosmopolitan Italy, Poland, Spain, Greece, Russia, and so on...
...Globalization is not a choice...
...Europe as a cosmopolitan state that cooperatively domesticates economic globalization and guarantees the otherness of the others—this is a realistic utopia...
...Modern nationalism was born out of emergent national capitalism...
...And how can correspondingly powerful anti-cosmopolitical coalitions be overcome...
...Each society is reshaping its legal norms and institutions under the regime of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank...
...unemployment, fragile employment, and "jobless growth...
...They look like Swiss cheese: they incorporate uncertainties because of flows of information, capital, people...
...Without taxation, no infrastructure...
...How can we avoid having to choose between two destructive alternatives: living together and giving up our differences or living apart in homogenous communities that communicate only through the market or through violence...
...5 5 In order to break free from the nationality trap both in thought and action, we • will have to distinguish between au REDEFINING POWER tonomy and sovereignty...
...Without taxation, no proper education, no affordable health care, Without taxation, there is no public sphere...
...On the one hand, it is oriented to the ideal image of the minimalist state, whose responsibilities and autonomy are to be tailored to the enforcement of global economic norms...
...The new global meta-power is in its essence pacifist (though maybe not in its consequences...
...This is becoming a selffulfilling prophecy through the structural reform policies initiated by the IMF and World Bank...
...Corporations with the advantages of mobility and a global network are able to weaken individual states by playing them against one another...
...Rather, they happen to do "politics" as a side effect...
...The architecture of a cosmopolitan federal state could point a way out of the politics of false alternatives, in particular in regions of chronic ethnic-national state conflicts—the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians comes to mind—or in the face of annexation (Hong Kong) or the threat of annexation (Taiwan...
...It requires the overcoming of ethnic nationalism, not by condemning it but by affirming it under the constitutional law of peaceful co-existence...
...Only the nonreligious state makes the practice of different religions possible, and only the cosmopolitan state will be able to guarantee the co-existence of national identities...
...The basic principle was summed up in the headline of an east European newspaper on the occasion of the visit of the German chancellor: "We Forgive the Crusaders and Await the Investors...
...This raises the question of whether there is a chance that both groups—the opponents of neoliberalism and the cosmopolitan faction of capital—will find the cosmopolitan state a useful instrument in a second Great Transformation (like that of Karl Polanyi), where the complex processes of globalization undermine the capacity of nation-states to act effectively...
...The same question can also be put another way: who is going to prevent the next holocaust...
...HOW SHOULD SUCH concepts as power, dominance, and authority be redefined from a cosmopolitan perspective...
...The benefits of sharing include security and stability, reduced military spending, and economic and technological cooperation...
...To close the circle: without forums for regulated (that is, recognized and nonviolent) handling of conflicts, both nationally and globally, there will be no economy whatsoever...
...But there is nobody at the other end of the line, no e-mail address...
...Ignoring the fact that the globalization of the market is turning the world into a battlefield for the survival of the fittest is not only unacceptable to the forces that oppose the neoliberal agenda...
...Every counDISSENT / Fall 2001 n 87 REDEFINING POWER try that puts democracy and human rights above autocracy and nationalism is already on the way to the cosmopolitan state, which must not be confused with the idea of a centralized world state...
...This extension of translegal rule works all the better the more the national perspective dominates the thinking and action of people and states...
...Potential state meta-power in turn is created by the break with these two, allowing the deterritorialized and denationalized states to open up new transnational potentials of politics and control...
...2 2 The boundary between politics and economics is being broken up, strategically • negotiated, redrawn, and redefined...
...Still, the state must have a defined territory over which it exercises real power, because it must be in a position to convince its own citizens to accept the transnational rules...
...This insight is central to a cosmopolitan social science: a reduction in national autonomy and a growth in national sovereignty are by no means exclusive...
...To the ears of those speaking in national terms, this sounds like a completely unrealistic utopia, and yet many of its basic characteristics are already partly realized...
...However, if sovereignty is equated with the ability to solve political problems—that is, to create economic growth, prosperity, jobs, social security, and so on—then increasing transnational state cooperation, though it involves the loss of autonomy, constitutes a real gain in sovereignty...
...Still, the only way to make this cosmopolitical vision possible, as Immanuel Kant taught almost two hundred years ago, is to act steadily "as if" it were possible...
...In reality, cosmopolitanism requires a struggle for a political Europe, which is more than a conglomerate of nation-states regularly at each others' throats...
...minimum regulation of the national labor market...
...The pawn—the economy—suddenly becomes the knight (given new possibilities of mobility by information technology) and can thus checkmate the king—the state...
...It is nobody's rule...
...The process of globalization goes hand in hand with a shift from autonomy based on national exclusion to sovereignty based on transnational inclusion...
...This is what Renato Ruggerio, the former general director of the World Trade Organization, was referring to when he said in 1997, "We are writing the constitution of a single global economy...
...This nonviolent, invisible, intentional threat of withdrawal or inaction is neither conditional upon consent nor even capable of achieving it...
...Offense is the best defense, and that means research and development, force-fed with government support and the taxpayers' money...
...But this still does not mean that managers are ruling the world...
...Nationalism is about exclusive distinctions and loyalties...
...You keep looking for someone who is responsible, to whom you can complain...
...What might be called the methodological nationalism of daily life and politics (and scholarship too) strengthens the transnational power of big companies...
...To pick one example: the state monopoly of lawmaking is increasingly eroded by a kind of privatization...
...1. The world economy stands in relation to the state as a kind of meta-power...
...Governments are essentially acting in a transnational space as soon as they negotiate binding international legal agreements, or—as for example in the European Union—join together to create spaces of "shared, interactive, cooperative sovereignty...
...I know, this would put the socialist perspective of the Workers' International upside down...
...The power of the state is thus not undermined or broken by another state's power, by military threat or conquest, but rather deterritorially, exterritoriallyby way of transnational trade and activity in digital space...
...The quasi-statehood of transnational economic meta-power is evident not least in the fact that the new norms are conceived globally, and thus, so to speak, include nation-states as local executive organs...
...But, in fact, the old categories of statecentered power and politics are becoming zombie categories...
...In fact, law is both privatized and transnationalized...
...They make collectively binding decisions, but at the same time they mutate into fictitious decision makers, virtual organizations...
...Even among states there are different kinds of losers and winners...
...The curbing of nationalist theology should lead to a redefinition of the scope and frame of politics just as curbing Christian theology did at the beginning of modern times in Europe...
...The new politics begins with breaking the "national sound barrier...
...Governments have to surrender national independence, tie each others' hands, in essence, in cooperative agreements, in order to deal successfully with central national tasks...
...The deterritorialized power of business need neither be politically obtained nor legitimated...
...This strategy, however, has its price...
...Property rights, patent law, environmental law, and human rights are the key areas in which the boundaries between national and transnational contexts are blurred or altogether lost...
...There is a national interest in denationalization, in sharing sovereignty in order to solve national problems...
...The state, "adjusted to the global market," has to be easily replaceable and completely exDISSENT/Fall 2001 n 8 5 REDEFINING POWER changeable...
...In British Euroskepticism, I believe, it is not the insistence on their own national culture that deserves criticism, but rather their inability to recognize that a cosmopolitan Europe would not cancel it out but would, rather, cherish it...
...Furthermore, they become legitimation-dependent players without being able to draw on democratic sources of legitimation...
...Only the post-nation, plural-nation, nation-indifferent, and nation-tolerant state can possibly overcome these alternatives...
...There is only one thing worse than being overrun by big multinationals: not being overrun by multinationals...
...8 8 The enemies of cosmopolitanism are easy to identify and apparently all-pow• erful, but who would qualify as the agent of cosmopolitan transformation...
...The new state option of a cosmopolitan, interactive, and reflexive state, which seeks to reconstitute its power at the intersection of global, regional, and local systems of governance, is emerging wherever previously there was only the alternative of either national self-determination or submission to the authority of someone else's nation-state...
...Economic power remains "nonpolitical" because adjustment to the international economy—above all to the global finance markets—has become the internal compass of domestic politics...
...At this point it is useful to introduce a distinction between potential power and actual power in order to examine the extent to which state strategies can counter capital strategies...
...And, of course, ideological war has been replaced by the discourse of globalization...
...These new borders do not function like the old ones...
...This deterritorial conception reverses the logic of the traditional understanding of power, violence, and authority...
...The major elements of instability are • the series of financial crises in Asia, South America, and Russia...
...and Brave New World of Work...
...Taxes can be defense strategies protecting national markets against global invaders...
...REDEFINING POWER Transnational cooperative ventures and organizations thus become private quasi states...
...National rivalries prevent national leaders from discovering the mighty potential of cooperation 86 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 among states and from finding institutional forms for it...
...My tentative answer is, possibly the cosmopolitan state, which would have to be founded on the principle of national indifference...
...DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 89...
...the downward trend of corporate taxes and the inability to finance common goods, nationally and globally...
...What is in prospect is a stronger state, for example, in matters of surveillance and repression...
...If, on the other hand, they reduce interstate competition by combining and imposing obligations on themselves in order to strengthen their position against the global economy, they qualify their own national sovereignty...
...Accordingly, a universally valid and applicable policy mix is being propagated: political reforms are to be geared to the standard of economic goals—low inflation...
...The actual power of states is paralyzed by neoliberalism and nationalism...
...It introduces the threat of not doing something...
...But so will globally active businesses for, at the end of the day, they can only be successful in a framework that guarantees themselves and others legal, political, and social security...
...I now think of Europe as a new kind of transnational, cosmopolitan, quasi-state structure, which draws its political strength precisely from the affirmation and taming of the European diversity of nations...
...Whoever focuses, however, on the increasing power of the global economy can deriveexperimentally— a short-term and a long-term prognosis...
...I want, very briefly, to look at one of the less familiar criticisms: that the neoliberal regime is incapable of reproducing itself, an idea put forth by Jan Nederveen Pieterse...
...But this is a kind of imperialism whose subjects, even if they don't like it at all, vitally depend upon it...
...Europe would not be Europe without the British idea of civilization...
...While the power of states (according to the national rationale) grows through territorial conquest, the power of the players in the global economy grows precisely to the extent that they become extraterritorial factors...
...The antidote to stagnation is hybridization...
...balanced budgets...
...From what do capital strategies draw their new meta-power...
...THERE IS nothing more risky than making a prediction about the future...
...It is the precise opposite of the classic theory of power: the threat is no longer of an invasion but of the non-invasion (or withdrawal) of investors...
...With this in mind, it is possible to conceive of hybrid forms of transnational or cosmopolitan architecture for a federation of states and a construction process that could gradually, step by step, suspend the seemingly unbreakable unity of nation and state, without creating a power vacuum...
...4 4 Governments, parties, and states find it difficult to exploit the above paradox in • order to revitalize democratic politics...
...How do cosmopolitical coalitions nationally and internationally—for example, between global civil society (NGOs) and transnational corporations, transnational corporations and post-national states, post-national states and global civil society actors—become possible and powerful...
...If they stick to the sovereignty postulate of nation-state politics, they both intensify the competition for investment among states and increase the risk of monopoly-formation on the world market, which in turn weakens the state players...
...it has to compete with the largest possible number of similar states...
...In order to determine the possibilities of such a cosmopolitical regime, three questions have to be answered systematically: Who are the losers—that is, the probable enemies—of the pluralization of borders inside national societies and between societies and states in the international system...
...Both prescribe and establish a highly differentiated, balanced power structure—in the case of federalism, within a nation-state...
...It is a state that chips away at habeas corpus or trial by jury, increases prison sentences, steps up border patrols, and prepares for terrorism as the weapon of the weak...
...In order to attain the goal of neoliberal restructuring of the world, the power of the state has to be simultaneously minimized and maximized...
...We are not living at the "end of politics," but in a time of translegal meta-politics...
...7 7 Is the idea of the cosmopolitan state transferable to other regions of the world...
...The elements that used to be combined in the national paradigm—independence, self-determination, and the domestic resolution of central problems (welfare, justice, security)— now become separated and opposed...
...Mélange is the norm, at least inside these corporations...
...Neoliberal futures are contested on many grounds...
...And yet, there are two arguments that provide theoretical justification for this idea of cosmopolitan sovereignty: it would open the way for genuine diversity and it would establish fundamental human rights...
...Above all, such a state must make certain that mobility of capital is not matched by any comparable mobility of labor...
...Old enterprises were regulated by the principles of market and hierarchy...
...In the Middle East, this would assume that Israel re-imports its own cosmopolitan tradition, the diasporic consciousness...
...We are talking about very ambivalent processes and open-ended scenarios...
...It envisions a borderless world, not for labor but for capital...
...It requires the renewal of the continental ethos of democracy, of the state of law, and of political freedom for the transnational era...
...In the mid-seventeenth century, a secular state was inconceivable, even synonymous with the end of the world, and today a non-national state is almost equally unthinkable...
...The new global economic power of big business is, in this sense, not founded on violence as the ultimate ratio nale, and this makes it much more mobile...
...Indeed, states must even be able to bestow post-hoc legitimation on decisions that will often have come about in a completely undemocratic manner and that effectively undermine the power of national politics...
...It's like playing chess and changing the rules of the game along the way...
...Without a public sphere, there is no legitimacy...
...As a result, there is a chronic need for trust on the part of global economic players, which makes world markets extremely unstable...
...it breaks with the most basic political idea: the antagonism of friend and foe...
...Political answers to the newly emergent global economic geography can be found by developing what I call the despatialization of state, politics, and identity...
...It is exactly the meta-power of capital that sets companies free to diversify their workforcesoften against national laws and agencies...
...Legal changes are the order of the day in advanced capitalist societies as much as in former socialist ones and in the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America...
...the neoliberal regime embodies a global reform policy...
...In the short term, protectionist forces may triumph, a heterogeneous mix of nationalists, anticapitalists, environmentalists, defenders of national democracy as well as xenophobic groupings and religious fundamentalists...
...Another key paradox is that globalization means reinventing borders, tightening border controls...
...both military power and diplomacy have lost their longstanding importance...
...New actors—corporate law firms, arbitration bodies, lex mercatoria, international institutions, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—are contributing to the diversity of forms of regulation, to the variety of settings for rule creation, and to the proliferation of methods of interpretation and application of norms and standards...
...The national Other must be present, recognized, given a voice in the community, culturally as well as politically...
...This kind of authority is not tied to the execution of orders but to the possibility of going somewhere else—to other countries—to make better investments...
...Could modern cosmopolitanism emerge as a creation of global capitalism...
...Until now, the rules of the game in world politics have been bloody and imperialistic...
...Finally, what has to be recognized of the dark side, the unexpected consequences of the victory of the cosmopolitical transformation (for example, the "military humanism" of the Kosovo war in 1999...
...So what is the meaning of the old adjective "cosmopolitan," which has suddenly begun to glitter again...
...Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man...
...The analogy between the military rationale of power and the economic rationale of power is evident: investment capital is the equivalent of firepower—with the big difference that the threat of not firing enlarges the power...
...An interesting paradox arises, which can be used by NGOs as they confront the high power and low legitimation of transnational corporations with their own low power and high legitimation...
...The economy has broken out of the cage of territorially and nationally organized power conflict and has acquired new power moves in digital space...
...Let me close with an ironic quote from George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world...
...Under the conditions of economic globalization, states find themselves in a nationality trap...
...There are well-grounded arguments for this claim...
...it is translegal, but it changes the rules of the national and international systems...
...Its implementation avoids the institutions of developed democracy such as parliaments and courts...
...in the case of transnationalism, between different states...
...They may yet learn to exploit their legitimation power...
...A cosmopolitan Europe of national difference— what does that mean with regard, for example, to Great Britain...
...The second little-noticed consequence is that "cosmopolitan corporations" and maybe even a "cosmopolitan capitalism" are in the making...
...Then, advocates of workers' rights, environmentalists, and defenders of democracy will support cosmopolitan legal systems...
...Just as the Peace of Westphalia ended the religious civil wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by separating state and religion, so the national world wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries could be answered by a separation of state and nation...
...The idea of the cosmopolitan state may be defined against three positions: the dangerous illusion of national self-reliance, the neoliberal idea of the minimal, deregulated economic state, and the imperialistic model of the global state (in the premodern or postmodern era...
...and finally, tensions between capitalism and political freedom, the market and democracy...
...In the long term, however, an even more paradoxical coalition between the supposed "losers" from globalization (trade unions, environmentalists, democrats) and the "winners" (big business, financial markets, world trade organizations, the World Bank) may indeed lead to a renewal of the political—provided that both sides recognize that their specific interests are best served by cosmopolitan rules...
...But in the central arenas of economic globalization, where transnational corporations and nation-states both compete and collaborate, war has become almost unthinkable...
Vol. 48 • September 2001 • No. 4
