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