请将“This development of the state form is not occurring because the national state is unable to control capital flows, but is occurring precisely because national states continue to facilitate the conditions necessary to capital accumulation under the new regime (Weiss, 1998). In the new regime of flexible (global) accumulation (Harvey, 1982, 1990, 2003), Jessop (2002a, 203) argues that the scope of governance continues expanding into new areas of social life and penetrates ever deeper into the fabric of national social formations, precisely because global “competitiveness is now widely believed to depend far more on formally extra-economic institutional forms, relations, resources, and values than in the past, and this belief is leading in turn to increased pressure to subsume these factors under the logic of capital” (i.e., as social capital, human capital, intellectual capital). This process is visible in the subsumption of family policy, neighborhood development, public education, university research, patents and copyrights, and many other facets of social life once considered “private,” “cultural,” “social,” or “intellectual” into the structure of economic and workforce development policy.28

The expansion and deepening of the scope of governance required to facilitate capital accumulation necessitates a structural denationalization of the state. Jessop (2002a, 206) observes that this process has “major implications for the role of local and regional governments and governance mechanisms insofar as supply-side policies are supposedly more effectively handled at these levels and through public-private partnerships than at the national level through traditional legislative, bureaucratic, and administrative techniques.” However, the rising significance of local and regional forms of subnational governance cannot be confined merely to traditional forms of “the local state” (Gottdeiner, 1987), precisely because economic regions, supply chains, and industrial clusters have emerged as the new centers of global competitiveness (Porter, 1990, Chap. 6–7). These regional clusters not only exceed the geographic reach of existing forms of the local state, but they are frequently international regions defined by cross-border economic linkages (Perkmann and Sum, 2002).

The denationalization of the state is also required at another level by the continuing internationalization of capital accumulation through regional economic blocs (e.g., NAFTA and EU). The deepening of these supra-national regions of capital accumulation requires an increasing role for supra-national institutions, which Jessop (2002a, 204) considers vehicles for organizing “countervailing imperialist strategies in Europe and Asia.” Jessop does “not deny the continued domination of U.S. capital and the American state in an allegedly ‘triadic’ world,” but he suggest that the United States will be increasingly checked by a shifting balance of power within the global triad, particularly since the European situation is now complicated by increasing linkages between European and East Asian capitals. However, Jessop (2002a, 199) insists that the process of supra-national state development should not be equated with the emergence of a “global state” or a “world state,” since there is still no “supranational state with equivalent powers to those of the national state.”29

Finally, a third major trend that Jessop (2002a, 207) identifies in contemporary state formation is the destatization of the political system, which is indicated by “a shift from government to governance on various territorial scales and across various functional domains.” This trend is empirically visible in the creation of partnerships at all levels of governance between government, para-governmental, and nongovernmental organizations in which the state apparatus is often only first among equals. In these arrangements, state elites and state managers are involved primarily in steering and guiding “multiple agencies, institutions, and systems that are both operationally autonomous from one another and structurally coupled through various forms of reciprocal interdependence.”

Claus Offe (1984, 249; 1996, 22–27) describes the same process as “a dissolution of the institutional separateness, or relative autonomy of the state, the withering away of the capitalist state as a coherent and strictly circumscribed apparatus of power.” The process of destatization is one in which “policy-making powers are ‘contracted out’ to consortia of group representatives who engage in a semi-private type of bargaining, the results of which are then ratified as state policies or state planning.” A key feature of destatization in Offe’s view is the parallel trend toward strengthening intermediate organizations in national and international civil societies that are legally “private,” but which are capturing sovereign functions from the state or receiving them as delegated powers of the state. As the state becomes overloaded with demands on its national and local administrative capacities, it continues to delegate and disperse regulatory and distributive powers to quasi-public corporations, trade associations, professional organizations, social service corporations, labor unions, chambers of commerce, scientific associations, and many other private nonprofit organizations. These collective actors are being delegated quasi-sovereign functions and thereby relieve the national state of a number of responsibilities (Drucker, 1993, 1–46; Flinders, 2006; Hall and Biersteker, 2002; Schmitter, 1985).





Conclusion


The restructuring of the nation-state entails its simultaneous internationalization, denationalization, and destatization, as described by Jessop, Offe, and others, but this process should not be equated with a decline, retreat, or end of the state. Nation-states should also not be seen as passively acquiescing to the irreversible logic of a global market or to the superior power of transnational corporations. First, the nation-state has been a profoundly contested terrain for nearly four decades as highly politicized capitalist classes have launched new business offensives in one country after another under the ideological rubric of neo-liberalism, competitiveness, economic modernization, and globalism. The fact that capitalist classes have vigorously and successfully deployed a range of economic, financial, political, and ideological power to recapture these states and to restructure their hegemony should actually be taken as an indicator of the state’s continuing importance to economic globalization.

Second, these same states have acted as the principal agents of globalization by exercising enormous power to realign the state apparatuses with transnational capital, to reconstitute property and contract law, and to otherwise implement and enforce the provisions of international trade and investment agreements even against domestic opposition. The internal realignment of the state apparatuses that accompanies the internationalization of policy regimes has certainly resulted in the ideological subordination or disempowerment of those agencies with links to labor and other noncapitalist groupings. However, the fact that implementing such policies has entailed significant social struggles in one country after another should signal the enduring power of the state for it is labor and other social groups that are in retreat—not the state. In opening domestic economies to global competition and in facilitating the restructuring of those same economies, the nation-states of both developed (e.g., United States, Canada) and developing (e.g., Mexico) countries have demonstrated remarkable strength in relation to those groups seeking to promote social welfare, labor rights, and environmental protections. Meanwhile, nation-states have intervened directly in reconstituting private and corporate property rights, contract law, and labor markets to create the political and material conditions necessary for global capital accumulation. The only states that are visibly in retreat are those that once purported to be “socialist” (e.g., Russia, China) or that sought to promote some limited variant of that ideal (e.g., India, Mexico) and in these cases it is noncapitalist state forms that are being displaced by a new form of the capitalist state and simultaneously integrated into the global system of a new imperialism.





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”翻译为中文