Globalization and the Decline of the State-Centric Paradigm

1. Two Political Sciences

In the scientific study of politics there is still an antiquated disciplinary division between “political science” and “international relations”, or rather the separation of the study of domestic politics from the study of international politics. The point of view that still guides political research is the state-centric one.
This means that, for political science, state borders determine the boundaries of research. It is an approach that tends to concentrate research on single states isolated one from the other. On the contrary, International relations study the relations among states, understood as independent political entities, without dealing with the relations that exist between domestic politics and international politics.
However, the tendency to separate the study of the domestic sphere from the international one is not exclusive to politological disciplines. Other social sciences (history, economics, law, etc.) also divide the analysis of the social reality they study into two separate spheres. The historical sciences separate national history from world history. Economic sciences look at political economy and economic policy on the one hand and international economics and international economic policy on the other. The juridical sciences make a distinction between civil, penal, procedural and constitutional law on the one hand and international law on the other.


2. The Separation between National and International Levels in Economic Science

We should emphasize that this approach also characterizes economic science, the most advanced of the social sciences. Joan Robinson noted that the adoption of the state-centric paradigm unites all the currents of thought in economic science.
Firstly the classics. Robinson writes, “They argued against the narrow nationalism of the Mercantilists in favor of a more far-sighted policy, but were favorable to Free Trade because it was good for Great Britain, not because it was a good thing for everyone”. “Marxism too”, she continues, “even though universalistic in theory, had to be filtered down into national forms once a revolutionary administration had been established. The aspirations of developing countries are more in the sense of independence and national self conscience than in the sense of simply satisfying material needs”. Finally, “The appeal to national solidarity, which underlies the Welfare State, makes the solidarity of the human race even more difficult to achieve. Neoclassical ideology claimed to be founded on universal benevolence, yet fell very naturally into the habit of speaking in terms of national revenue and the welfare of the people. Our nation, our people, were repeated ad nauseam”.
Joan Robinson concludes this review of the major currents of economic thought by noting that “economists do not think that it is the duty of wealthier nations to help raise the utility of the world at large by subsidizing imports from the poorer nations. A genuinely universalistic point of view is very rare. At most we can say that we live better in a prosperous world than in a world in misery. The prosperity of others is not desirable for the love of them, but as a contribution to our comforts; when that prosperity appears as a threat to the latter, it is not desirable in the least. This seems such a natural way of thinking, so appropriate and right, that we do not even notice that it is nevertheless a particular attitude: it is an air we have breathed since birth, and we no longer notice its scent” (Robinson, 1966, pp. 185-187).


3. The Role of Nationalism

Underlying the success of such a common point of view is an ideological fact: nationalism. This ideology promotes the unity and independence of the nation states and justifies their existence in a world of states in conflict with one another. The dogma on which political thought is still based today is that our nation is the center of the political universe and that the rest of the world revolves around it. This point of view offers an image of the political reality that interprets what happens in the rest of the world in the light of what occurs inside our nation. In other words, the national perspective regards the essential contents of policy those that emerge in the domestic politics within each state, does not attribute autonomy to the international dimension of political, economic and social facts, gives priority to political commitment for pursuing liberty, equality and independence within the national area and assigns a subordinate role to the objectives of peace and international order.
We might say this point of view was adequate, roughly speaking, when the nation states were independent, but today it has clearly become anachronistic and unsuitable to know and govern a world whose parts are ever more closely interdependent.


4. The Limits of the State-Centric Paradigm

Using the state-centric paradigm to study politics hinders the progress of knowledge. It is a theoretical error to separate the study of domestic politics from the study of international politics since this approach prevents us from considering the reciprocal relations between these two spheres of politics and thus studying politics as a whole.
On the one hand, the structure of a state and its economic and social problems influences the way the state behaves in relations with other states. On the other hand, the international system influences the structure and domestic politics of the states.
Let us consider revolution as the most important example of a change in the internal structures of the state. The French revolution and the Russian revolution caused a fracture in the state system by introducing a radical protest respectively to the absolutism of the ancien régime or the capitalistic system of liberal democracies and by appealing to a new world order based on the principles for which those revolutions were the vehicle respectively liberty, equality and fraternity or communism. The Napoleonic wars and the spread of communism beyond the borders of the Soviet Union after the Second World War are the consequences of those revolutions.
To illustrate a causal relationship that goes in the opposite direction, we can mention international events such as the First World War, which made the Russian revolution possible by causing the collapse of the Empire of the Czar. Another example would be World War II, which, thanks to the defeat of Japan and the decline of the European colonial empires, created the conditions that allowed Mao to establish the communist party dictatorship in China.
These examples show how any political analysis demands the use of a theoretical model that makes it possible to study the reciprocal relations between domestic politics and international politics, between the single state and the state system. But we must admit, with disappointment, that such a model does not exist.


5. The Systemic Approach to the Study of Politics

From the moment the systemic approach began to be used in the study of politics the limitations of the state-centric paradigm became readily apparent, in particular the error of studying politics by analyzing the individual aspects separately. “Each part...does not stand alone, but is related to all the others” and “the functioning of no part can be fully understood without referring to the way the totality works” (Easton, p. 280) had emphasized David Easton, who deserves recognition for having introduced the concept of political system to political science in the book The Political System (1953) .
It is true that Easton, in contrast with the Weberian approach (Weber, 1966), refuses to consider the state as the central category of political science both because the territorial state was formed in the 17th century, and this choice would preclude the study of pre-state political formations, and because the concept of state defines a political institution, but does not give any idea of the typical characteristic of political behavior and what distinguishes the latter from other social activities such as economic behavior (Easton, pp. 94-102).
Nevertheless, Easton defines his theory as a model for the analysis of “political systems”, in the plural. This means that the concept of political system serves to study the state or other political formations that preceded the state, but not the state system. In other words, the study of international relations appears to be unrelated to his interests.
It was Morton A. Kaplan who in 1957, in the book System and Process in International Politics, used the systemic approach in the study of international relations. Nevertheless, even Kaplan can be criticized for having limited the application of the concept of system to a single aspect of politics – that of international relations– and not to its totality. The same criticism can be aimed at Kenneth N. Waltz, who applied the systemic approach in the most consistent way in the Theory of International Politics (1979), but did not take into account variables relative to the domestic sphere of politics, which also influence international politics.


6. Towards a Unified Theory of Politics

The concept of political system applies to the sub-state level (e.g. the party system), the state level and the state system. Therefore, if we want to study politics in its globality, as is necessary, we need to study the world states system. Compared with the global political system, single states are like sub-systems that are relatively autonomous and interdependent on each other. The systemic analysis makes it possible to recognize the reciprocal influence of the parts on the whole and of the whole on the individual parts. This means that the single states influence the world states system and that the latter in turn retroacts on the single states. If we want to reach a unified theory of politics that goes beyond the interdisciplinary barriers that artificially separate the study of domestic politics from the study of international politics, the systemic approach seems to have the appropriate requisites.
These thoughts on the systemic approach to the study of politics highlight the advantages of this model of analysis. By focusing its attention on the processes by which a political system responds to tensions from the environment conditioning its activity, it allows us to study not only the processes that tend to preserve the system, but also those that bring about change.


7. The Contribution of Ranke’s Historiography

It is important to remember that the Rankian historical school, which made an important contribution to defining the theory of raison d’état, started the use of the concept of the state system in the methodological perspective suggested here.
Ludwig Dehio, the last representative of this historical school, who wrote the history of the European state system after its conclusion, wrote of Ranke: “The greatest historian in Germany abandoned the ‘patriotic thought’ of a history of his homeland because it can only be understood as a product of general history. But in exchange he became the expert on the general history of the west, particularly the history of the system of western states” (Dehio, p. 28). The superiority of the state system perspective was affirmed by Rankian historiography much earlier than by political science, which focused its attention on the study of the single isolated state.
The most significant contribution of the research of these historians
consists in having shown the influence the state system exerts on the structure of the individual states. On this point Ranke wrote: “The degree of independence gives a state its place in the world; and it imposes the need to mould its internal relations in view of the objective of its own affirmation. This is its fundamental law” (Ranke, p. 132). This means that the very structure of the states, and thus their constitution, are influenced by the place the states occupy in the state system and more precisely by the power relations that are established among the states. For example, the outcome of the Second World War, which caused Europe to be divided between the two superpowers and demoted the national states to the status of satellites of the United States and of the Soviet Union, affected the domestic politics of all the European states. In particular, the constitutions of the European countries were modeled on the basis of the imperative to create institutions that were homogeneous compared with those of the ruling powers.
The emphasis that Rankian historiography placed on how the state system affects single states has meant that at times there has been a disregard for analyses that highlight the opposite causal relation, i.e. how the dynamics of the domestic politics of the states affect international relations. While Hintze (p. 147) – another exponent of this historical approach – accused historical materialism of one-sidedness because it explains politics and the forms of state merely on the basis of the evolution of the mode of production, the followers of the Rankian historical school can be criticized for not having highlighted the role that the evolution of the modes of production played in shaping the forms of state.


8. The Crisis of the State-Centric Paradigm in Political Studies

Despite the diversity of the approaches, most scholars of political science and international relations still share a common assumption: that the division of the world into sovereign states is a permanent trait of politics, and not historically transitory.
On this subject Waltz wrote: “The weave of international politics remains very constant, with recurrent models and events that repeat endlessly... The persevering anarchic characteristic of international politics explains the surprising uniformity of the quality of international life through the millenniums” (p. 143).
This point of view is not shared by Raymond Aron, whose work Peace and War Among Nations is a reference for the studies of international politics. He wrote that “there will be an essential difference between domestic policy and foreign policy ... until mankind has achieved its unification in a universal state” (p. 25). This statement is important because it implies that the division of mankind into sovereign states is conceived of as a historically transitory situation and that it will be able to cease when a universal state is established. It is the objective that Kant had pointed out over 200 years ago in the essay on perpetual peace (pp. 283-336) as the aim of man’s path through history.
But while the objective of the world federation was an idea of reason that Kant placed in an indefinite future, gaining popularity with scholars today is the hypothesis that world unification is an event on the march, driven by the scientific revolution of material production and by globalization. The changes that have occurred to the sovereign state and the international state system are by now recognized as the central political facts of our times. The consequence of this awareness is that the state-centric paradigm must not only be viewed as the theory of politics of a given historical epoch – that of the sovereign states –, but that it has also ceased being a guide for political research in our time.
The construction of a general theory of politics that unifies political science and international relations is a long term task that can be performed by an entire generation of scholars. Multitudes of scholars are working to reconstruct a theory of politics that adheres more to the evolution of contemporary history. They are grouped together according to the nature of the research project they promote (global governance, world order models, world-system studies, cosmopolitan democracy, peace research, theories of dependence, theories of global civil society etc.), but a universally shared model does not exist for the moment.
I would like to mention one of these scholars, George Modelski, who indicated world politics as the object of study in his important book the Principles of World Politics. It concerns an approach that criticizes the separation between political science and international relations and in particular the supposed autonomy of political science compared with international relations. Modelski denounces the “ethnocentric” nature (p. 2) of the typical approach of political science, which studies “the state and (more recently) the political system ... as if they were isolated, independent and self-sufficient entities ... and regards political change as if it were self-generated – i.e. as a phenomenon endogenous to the national community – while the influences coming from outside the community appear extraneous, illegitimate, if not downright subversive” (pp. 1-2). On the other hand, continues Modelski, “we can say that international relations worked as an ‘ideology’ of the system of nation states rather than as an explicative theory structured in the ‘form of social sciences’” (p.9).
The renewal of politological disciplines demands that we overcome the state-centric point of view, which vitiates the studies of political science and international relations, and adopt a perspective that Modelski has called “geocentric” (pp. 14-16). It is an approach for studying politics as a phenomenon of international dimensions in accordance with the changes that have taken place in world politics in the age of globalization. The adoption of this point of view allowed Modelski to perceive the advent of the era of globalization before others. As seen in the third chapter of Principles, he is the first political scientist to have used this word.
The state-centric approach was justified when the states were independent entities and with their power governed the fundamental aspects of economic and social relations that used to be carried out within state borders. But today this situation has faded away forever.
The study of politics in its unity, according to the recommendations of Modelski, represents an important proposal of method and an ambitious research project, which is only developed in small part in Principles. It will be the task of a new generation of scholars to expand on these suggestions for renewing the studies of political science. In the face of the crisis of social sciences and the obvious inadequacy of its analytical tools we must not abandon hope that the sciences can help us understand the world we live in and identify ways to improve it. In order to continue on this course, however, we first need to clear the path of the residues of outdated and useless theories.


9. Globalization and the Decline of the State-Centric Paradigm

The European system of sovereign states did not always exist and it is not destined to last forever. It was codified with the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and supplanted in 1945, after the end of the Second World War, by the world system composed of two superpowers of macro-regional dimensions, the United States and the Soviet Union. After the end of the Cold War and the bipolar world system (1989), signs of the decline of the superpowers caused by globalization began to be evident. The state-centric paradigm rests on two axioms: the supremacy of the state over civil society and the predominance of the states in the sphere of international politics. These axioms no longer correspond to the reality of our times. Globalization has questioned these two postulates of the state-centric paradigm, which put the state at the center of political thought and action. In fact the most significant consequence at the political level of globalization is the erosion of state sovereignty. We can come tonthe conclusion, which I will try to give a theoretical foundation in this book, that the era of the sovereign states is passing
On the one hand, with the formation of the global civil society, globalization puts in a critical position the principle of state supremacy over civil society, whose dynamic escapes state control. On the other hand, international relations are conditioned in an increasingly glaring way by non-state actors (multinational corporations and banks, non-governmental organizations, criminal and terrorist groups etc.), which threaten the control that the states used to exert exclusively aver international relations and compete with the states for the decision-making power on the great issues of international politics.
If we ask ourselves how the crisis of the sovereign state will be resolved and how politics will be able to govern the globalization process, an important indication may come from an analysis of European unification. The institutions of the European Union are an expression of a general tendency towards constitutionalizing international relations. Institutions like the European Parliament, endowed with powers of legislative co-decision and control towards the European Commission, or the euro, the single European currency, show that the Union has gone beyond the traditional forms of cooperation of international organizations. The constitutional construction site of the European Union is the laboratory of a new form of statehood. It should be pointed out that this process creates a new level of government in Europe, which does not substitute but rather joins those existing nationally, regionally and locally. However, it has the power to interfere in the domestic affairs of the states as regards its areas of competence, such as monetary and trade policy or the competition policy, which is base on assigning an antitrust authority to the European Commission.
If we want to govern globalization, it is obvious that like powers must be instituted at the international level. Under the banners of free international trade (World Trade Organization) or the protection of human rights (International Criminal Court), international organizations govern what were once considered the domestic affairs of the states. But the unresolved problem is that they do so without democratic legitimation. In our age “everything has been globalized except consensus. Only democracy has remained relegated to the national state” (Monbiot, p. 7).




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