8 The “Strategic-relational Approach”

An innovative approach to the state and state-building has been developed by Jessop and others in an attempt to overcome various forms of one- sidedness in the Marxist and state-centered traditions. His “strategic- relational approach” offers a general account of the dialectic of structureand agency and, in the case of the state, elaborates Poulantzas's claim that the state is a social relation (see above). Jessop argues that the exercise and effectiveness of state power is a contingent product of a changing balance of political forces located within and beyond the state and that this balance is conditioned by the specific institutional structures and procedures of the state apparatus as embedded in the wider political system and environing societal relations. […]The SRAalso introduces a distinctive evolutionary perspective into the analysis of
the state and state power in order to discover how the generic evolutionary mechanisms of selection, variation, and retention may operate in specific conditions to produce relatively coherent and durable structures and strategies.

Over time there is a tendency for reflexively reorganized structures and recursively selected strategies and tactics to co-evolve to produce a relatively stable order, but this may still collapse owing to the inherent structural contradictions, strategic dilemmas, and discursive biases characteristic of complex social formations. Moreover, because structures are strategically selective rather than absolutely constraining, there is always scope for actions to overflow or circumvent structural constraints. Likewise, because subjects are never unitary, never fully aware of the conditions of strategic action, never fully equipped to realize their preferred strategies, and may always meet opposition from actors pursuing other strategiesor tactics; failure is an ever-present possibility. This approach is intended as a heuristic and many analyses of the state can be easily reinterpreted in strategic-relational terms even if they do not explicitly adopt these or equivalent terms. But the development of a strategic-relational research programme will also require many detailed comparative historical analyses to work out the specific selectivities that operate in types of state, state forms, political regimes, and particular conjunctures (for an illustration, see Jessop 2002).

9 New Directions of Research

Notwithstanding declining interest in the more esoteric and abstract modes of state theorizing, substantive research on states and state power exploded from the 1990s onwards. Among the main themes are: the historical variability of statehood (or stateness); the relative strength or weaknessof states; the future of the national state in an era of globalization and regionalization; the changing forms and functions of the state; issues of scale, space, territoriality, and the state; and the rise of governance and its articulation with government.

First, interest in stateness arises from growing disquiet about the abstract nature of much state theory (especially its assumption of a ubiquitous, unified, sovereign state) and increasing interest in the historical variability of actual states. Thus some theorists focus on the state as a conceptual variable and examine the varied presence of the idea of the state. Others examine the state's differential presence as a distinctive political form.
[…]

Second, there is growing interest in factors that make for state strength. Internally, this refers to a state's capacities to command events and exercise authority over social forces in the wider society; externally,
it refers to the state's power in the interstate system. […]

Third, recent work on globalization casts fresh doubt on the future of national territorial states in general and nation states in particular. This issue is also raised by scholars interested in the proliferation of scales on which significant state activities occur, from the local, through the urban and regional, to cross-border and continental cooperation and a range
of supranational entities. […]

Fourth, following a temporary decline in Marxist theoretical work, interest has grown in the specific forms and functions of the capitalist type of state. This can be studied in terms of the state's role in: (a) securing conditions for private profit—the field of economic policy; (b) reproducing wage-labor on a daily, lifetime, and intergenerational basis—the field of social policy broadly considered; (c) managing the scalar division of labor; and (d) compensating for market failure. […]

Fifth, there is interest in the changing scales of politics. While some theorists are inclined to see the crisis of the national state as displacing the primary scale of political organization and action to the global, regional,
or local scale, others suggest that there has been a relativization of scale. For, whereas the national state provided the primary scale of political organization in the Fordist period of postwar European and North American boom, the current after-Fordist period is marked by the dispersion of political and policy issues across different scales of organization, with none of them clearly primary. This in turn poses problems about securing the coherence of action across different scales.

Finally, “governance” comprises forms of coordination that rely neither
on imperative coordination by government nor on the anarchy of the market. Instead they involve self-organization. Governance operates on different scales of organization (ranging from the expansion of international and supranational regimes through national and regional public–private partnerships to more localized networks of power and decision-making). […]

Interest in governance is sometimes linked to the question of “failed” and “rogue” states. All states fail in certain respects and normal politics is an important mechanism for learning from, and adapting to, failure. In contrast, “failed states” lack the capacity to reinvent or reorient their activities inthe face of recurrent state failure in order to maintain “normal political service” in domestic policies. The discourse of “failed states” is often used to stigmatize some regimes as part of interstate as well as domestic politics. Similarly, “rogue states” is used to denigrate states whose actions areconsidered by hegemonic or dominant states in the interstate system to threaten the prevailing international order. According to some radical critics, however, the USA itself has been the worst rogue state for many years (e.g. Chomsky 2001).

10 An Emerging Agenda?

There is a remarkable theoretical convergence concerning the contingency of the state apparatus and state power. First, most approaches have dethroned the state from its superordinate position in society and analyze it as one institutional order among others. Marxists deny it is the ideal collective capitalist; neostatists no longer treat it as a sovereign legal subject; Foucauldians have deconstructed it; feminists have stopped interpreting it as the patriarch general; and discourse analysts see it as constituted through contingent discursive or communicative practices. In short, the state is seen as an emergent, partial, and unstable system that is interdependent with other systems in a complex social order. This vast expansion in the contingency of the state and its operations requires more concrete, historically specific, institutionally sensitive, and action-oriented studies. This is reflected in substantive research into stateness and the relative strength (and weakness) of particular political regimes.

Second, its structural powers and capacities can only be understood by putting the state into a broader “strategic-relational” context. By virtue
of its structural selectivity and specific strategic capacities, its powers are always conditional or relational. Their realization depends on structural ties between the state and its encompassing political system, the strategic links among state managers and other political forces, and the complex web of interdependencies and social networks linking the state and political system to its broader environment.

Finally, it is increasingly recognized that an adequate theory of the state can only be produced as part of a wider theory of society. But this is precisely where we find many of the unresolved problems of state theory. For the state is the site of a paradox. On the one hand, it is just one institutional ensemble among others within a social formation; on the other, it is peculiarly charged with overall responsibility for maintaining the cohesion of the formationof which it is a part. As both part and whole of society, it is continually asked by diverse social forces to resolve society's problems and is equally continually doomed to generate “state failure” since many problems lie well beyond its control and may even be aggravated by attempted intervention. Many differences among state theories are rooted in contrary approaches to various structural and strategic moments of this paradox. Trying to comprehend the overall logic (or, perhaps, “illogic”) of this paradox could provide a productive entry point for resolving some of these differences and providing a more comprehensive analysis of the strategic-relational character of the state in a polycentric social formation.

1Ad hominem (лат.) – касающийся чувств, апеллирующий к чувствам.

2Ad hoc (лат.) - (специально) для этого случая.