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II Global Forum
Democratic State and Governance in the 21st Century
Ministry of Planning
Brasilia, May 29 to 31, 2000

GLOBALIZATION, EFFICIENCY AND DEMOCRACY

Fábio Wanderley Reis

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The title of our session and of this meeting itself of the Forum
(“Democratic state and governance in the 21st century”) calls attention to two
dimensions to be necessarily taken into account in any attempt at reforming
the state: (1) the dimension of the production of power, which refers to
intensifying the power and effectiveness of the state, or to its governing
capacity – to governance; in this case, reference is made to the state apparatus
itself, to be lubricated and improved or directly replaced by a new, perhaps
agile and “lean” one; and (2) the dimension of the distribution of power,
which refers to the extent to which some people are submitted to the power of
others and involves the problem of democracy versus authoritarianism. It is
perhaps possible to phrase the distinction in terms of the opposition between
the state as a subject (it has its own ends and the problem is to achieve them in
an efficient way) and the state as an arena (where many interests and goals
arising from society must make themselves present and be somehow
accommodated).
As to the aspect of governance and efficiency, the word “governability”
tends to be used quite frequently with regard to it, in a clearly improper way:

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the attribute of being more or less “governable” pertains to that which is


governed, i.e., to society, and not to the state as such. In any case, the
technical discipline of administration is supposed to be able do deal with
questions of efficiency. We have here the old perspective of “organization and
methods”, which is not essentially different from recent approaches variously
labelled “total quality”, “reengineering” or “reinventing government”, as
David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s by now classic volume has it. The
peculiarity of the latter approaches with regard to the former is nothing but the
attempt at correcting a supposed ritualistic diversion of the rationalizing
commitment that they share with traditional O&M.
As to the aspect of distribution of power and democracy versus
authoritarianism, it ammounts to a crucial political problem, to be dealt with
by political analysis proper. The contrast with the previous aspect is shown
most clearly in the fact that, whereas efficiency supposes that the goals are
given and goes on to consider the means, democracy is distinguished by
stressing the problematical character of the goals of state action: which are the
goals, who shall define them, how to reconcile the goals corresponding to the
various social categories and interest foci? In the Marxist perspective, for
instance, this brings up the idea expressed in the old formula of the state as an
“executive committee” of certain private interests. But we might also illustrate
the point with a frequent remark by president Fernando Henrique Cardoso to
the effect that “the Brazilian state was not made for the poor”.
Needless to say, there are complex relationships between questions of
governance and efficiency and those of democracy. The problems on which
governmental ability must exert itself may be said to be of two kinds. In terms
of the distinction introduced many years ago by David Lockwood, there are
problems of “system integration”, where the challenge is to manage the

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automatic mechanisms of social causation arising from the intentional – and


autonomous - actions of many actors (the economy is the most important
example, but ecological problems produced by the dispersed activities of
economic and social actors can also be mentioned); and there are problems of
“social integration”, with regard to which the question is how to accommodate
the relationships among different social classes and categories of interests and
opinions. If intentionality and autonomy are, of course, essential to
democracy, making the administration of problems of system integration
relevant to the latter, the connection of social integration to democracy is
perhaps still clearer, since the accommodation to be pursued supposes that the
state becomes sensitive to the various interests and opinions at play.

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From the point of view of democracy, these suggestions may be put in
terms of applying to the state the theory which came to be known as the
“principal-agent theory”. The state appears then as the agent of a principal
that, ideally, corresponds to “the people”, seen as a homogeneous public liable
to being taken as a single being. In the democratic practice, however, this
idealization translates itself into a game in which multiple foci of interests and
collective bodies, including those which compose the more or less complex
governmental machinery, seek to affirm themselves and get the state to act to
their advantage. We thus have a situation in which the state, a plural body
itself, emerges as the agent of many principals.
This situation makes it more difficult, of course, that the action of the
state be democratic in the sense of being for the people, or of orienting itself in
every case by considerations referred to the general or public interest. Having
to respond to specific demands coming from different sectors, the state will be

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exposed either to the risk of fragmentation and “Balkanization” (in a sort of


caricature of the democratic sensitivity to the various interests) or to the one of
letting itself to be grabbed once and for all by certain interests and falling into
authoritarianism. Even in the case of democratic regimes, however, since the
power of the different interests is actually unequal, the operation of
governments will always tend to involve a certain degree of asymmetry or bias
in favor of powerful interests. In capitalist societies, this leads to a special
sensitivity toward entrepreneurial interests, whose ability to influence the state
is linked to the fact that they control the economic dynamics and so tend to
condition, to a large extent, the very possibility that the basic interests of other
sectors may be met: to this extent, therefore, entrepreneurial interests become
equivalent to the public interest.
The general logic thus observed contains a strong incentive for interests
with less “natural” access to the state, for being to start with less provided
with power resources, to organize themselves so as to compensate this
deficiency and gain political power. The history of the more advanced
capitalist societies along the 19th and 20th centuries may be read as a process in
which the confrontation between the ideal formula of democratic government
for “the people” and the realities of power and of the state as an agent of
multiple and struggling principals turns out to acquire a content of effective
democratization. As a consequence of organizational and institutional efforts
which resulted in social democracy (where Keynesianism, “neo-corporatism”
and the welfare state combined with the mechanisms of electoral and
parliamentarian democracy), conditions were created in which not only
effective systemic administration was possible, but also the social bias of the
state was neutralized or reduced.

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In the processes which currently unfold, with the dynamics of
globalization and the strengthening of market mechanisms, we have, to begin
with, the weakening of national states as “subjects” and as foci of effective
governance both with regard to the administration of the economy (system
integration) and with regard to their capacity for social action and
accommodation of internal conflicts (social integration). But, as it fosters the
intensification of competition and increases the number of those that
intensified competition pushes to marginalization or to precarious forms of
economic and social integration in society, globalization (assisted by the
collapse of socialism that it helps to bring about) produces also the weakening
and disorientation of the organized sectors of society which have contributed
to the achievement of social integration, particularly labor unions and labor-
oriented parties – the social-democratic Left, not to speak of the radical Left.
At the national level, the state is therefore brought again to the situation in
which it relates to a socio-political substratum whose inequalities and
asymmetries are greater, and it is thus narrowed down as an “arena” that
should be capable of harboring multiple and different interests. Despite the
immediately pacifying features stemming from this weakening and taming of
formerly important organized political actors, the upshot (dramatized by social
deterioration, “new poverty”, the drug economy, urban violence...) is not only
to jeopardize the social forms of democracy that had been conquered in past
decades, but also possibly to endanger political democracy itself. Besides
intensifying the “structural dependence of the state on capital”, as a certain
literature of Marxist inspiration calls it, the situation we now face seems to
include the risk that national states come to assume the form of a peculiar
leviathan, impotent in face of the economic dynamics, but affirmative and

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maybe even prone to an invading posture in other respects. In particular, this


is suggested, in the United States of recent years, by the explosion of the
population submitted to correctional custody and the corresponding expansion
of instruments and expenses of the state machine: not only crimininality rates
go up, but there occurs also that which some authors (Jonathan Simon, for
instance) have called “criminalization”, that is, the expansion of the scope of
what is defined as crime and so as something concerning the state, which then
acts by increasing the severity of penalties and hardening in various ways its
repressive action.
However that may be, the processes now going on ammount to eroding
the social basis of the democratic compromise that has characterized political
life in some of the most successful and stable democracies of the last half
century. And the affirmative liberal ethos that has accompanied such
processes turns out to represent a clear backward step philosophically, in
which the crucial idea of citizenship is redefined and made to shrink after
centuries of expansion and enrichment: its component of social rights, which
had come to crown the establishment of civil and political rights, is now
abandoned in favor of the harshness of the market. On the other hand, for all
the talk about “civil society” and the special character many analysts tend to
attribute to it from the motivational point of view, the dispersion it shares with
market mechanisms prevents it from being a real solution to the problems we
currently face. The coordination needed in the administration of both the
economy and society cannot dispense with the state or its equivalent at the
appropriate level. If national states are weakened, so much the worse: the
challenge is to respond to the factors of weakness at whatever level it may turn
out to be necessary.

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This challenge is made clearer by the fact that there are also, of course,
relevant consequences of the globalization process that manifest themselves
directly at the transnational level. The most crucial observation is becoming
trivial with the systemic crises that have hit the world in recent years and go
on with us as a frightening threat: the vigor acquired by market mechanisms at
the transnational level is not matched by any coordinating power that might be
seen as appropriate, by contrast to the correspondence between market and
state that, by and large, we used to have at the national level. There is thus the
lack of an effective agent of many principals, one that might be capable of
reconciling the multiple and often conflicting goals at play and of
transforming them, to some extent, into solidary or convergent ends: at the
transnational level, the well-intended initiatives of certain non-governmental
organizations notwithstanding, the scene is disproportionately marked by the
self-interested market-oriented actions of those who have the power to act at
all in a really relevant way. Actually, globalization can even be defined (as
proposed especially by Wolfgang Reinicke in Global Public Policy) as a
micro-economic process having to do with the spatial reorganization of the
activities of firms or corporations as such. In a world lacking a central or
coordinating power and in which national states are weakened, corporations
thus become potentially the great foci of coordination and deliberate goal-
oriented behavior of broader scope. If the process of globalization narrows the
national arenas and makes national states necessarily more sensitive to certain
interests (entrepreneurial, financial), at the transnational level the asymmetry
between different kinds of interests is even larger and nearly total: workers’s
interests and social concerns in general tend to be completely absent from the
spontaneous micro-economic dynamics that prevail there, and national states

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themselves are forced to play by the same logic and appear, for instance, not
only as obstacles to the free movement of workers, but also as avid
competitors for international capital that help aggravate the destabilizing
consequences of the market game now being played at a virtually planetary
scale.

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Therefore, we have a wholly new face to the problem of “reinventing
government”. Instead of the banal search for efficiency by means of “lean”
national governments, in the perspective of the new century the real challenge
is rather how to create government at the transnational and eventually
worldwide level. We would thus be seeking two articulated goals in
correspondence with the two-faced problem proposed in the title of our
session: the one of producing effective transnational power and assuring the
capacity for governance and efficiency at the scale at which the market tends
increasingly to operate; and the one of changing in an apropriate way the
features now displayed by the distribution-of-power aspects at the
transnational level and thus creating a potentially more democratic
transnational arena.
Perhaps this seems too utopian a vision and a mere good-hearted wish.
But two points can be made in this regard. In the first place, despite the
intensification of inter-country competition that globalization brings about at a
certain level, the search for an effective global organization can also be seen
as akin to the general logic of the long-term process which culminates in
globalization such as witnessed today. I have in mind the cogent and
persuasive analysis made by Giovanni Arrighi in The Long Twentieth Century,
where the expansion of “political geography” (Reinicke) takes place side by

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side with the enlarging economic dynamics and as a condition to it: we go


from the system in which Genova’s economic push has to resort to the
political backing of Spain to compensate for its own political weakness,
through the Dutch and British systems of increasing territorial and political
strength, to the American system of unprecedented territorial and political
dimension and strength. Political will or determination is perhaps the crucial
element to reduce the seeming unrealism of the bet in global organization –
and the success of experiences of regional integration which might haved
looked hopeless decades ago certainly brings some backing to this bet.
But, in the second place, it is also possible, if need be, to give the idea
of setting up some form of effective world organization a rather “realistic” and
hard face. We would then recognize that, for all the micro-economic dynamics
and weakening of national states, there are states and states, states of different
reach and power, and that globalization has also an imperial side to it.
Provided with this recognition, maybe the secular perspective of our Forum
might allow us to indulge in a seeming extravagance. Many years ago, Karl
Deutsch has shown that, at the national level, the process of establishing
political communities of an eventually democratic nature has been classically
based upon the hegemony exerted by a “core area”. How about admitting that
an analogous ingredient is probably required if we are to have some form of
actual organization of global reach? And how about seeking to institutionalize
the relationships of an imperial nature to which we are already currently
exposed, in the expectation that their institutionalization may come to result
not only in better governance, but also in the possibility of some sort of
democracy? If imperial relations are inevitable at the transnational level, let us
try and organize the empire – and perhaps make, in the process, the imperial
seat (or seats) more sensitive to the interests and wishes of all those

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concerned. Instead of the watered-down symbolism of the United Nations and


the rather poor tools of governance we have in such institutions as the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund (or the World Trade Organization,
whose failure with regard to the “Millennium Round” has recently furnished,
in Seattle, a clear illustration of the difficulty of advancing in international
organization if there is no real interest on the part of the “central” countries),
how could we get close to the idea of having us all vote in Washington within
a structure of effective governance – or to the functional equivalent of that? In
any case, the point is to try and achieve some equilibrium between the
negative or unpleasant aspects of the asymmetries among states and the
positive aspect having to do with the realistic basis they may provide for the
expectation of effective world governance.
These suggestions will certainly sound sinful from the point of view of
nationalistic ideals associated with collective identities. But perhaps we might
learn to solve collective identity problems at the cultural level to which they
properly belong, which may be a requirement for a propitious economic
adjustment to the new world of globalization. Two remaining questions might
be pointed out. The first concerns the consequences of eventually successful
efforts at transnational organization from the point of view of social
inequalities and of the hope of a sort of social democracy of global reach.
From this point of view, there seems to be no reason to see in a favorable light
our present condition of fragmented and largely impotent national states. The
second refers to the actual content of “realism” to be found in the expectation
that the imperial elements of the current international panorama might be put
to use in a positive or constructive way. If this expectation seems realistic
enough for admitting a role for the power factor in the process of taking
effective steps toward global organization, it may be seen to lack realism with

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regard to the extent to which this process, even defined as the organization of
an empire, might turn out to correspond to the interests of the seat of the
empire – or of the seats, which suggests the emergence of a multilateralism
that may turn out eventually to mitigate the weight of the imperial component.
Perhaps it will be necessary that the systemic crises by which we have
recently been threatened come actually to reach the countries that make up the
advanced and dominating heart of the system.

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