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Abstract

Modern International Relations theory has consistently underestimated the depth of the problem of anarchy in world politics. Contemporary theories of globalisation bring this into bold relief. From this perspective, the complexity of transboundary networks and hierarchies, economic sectors, ethnic and religious ties, civil and cross-border wars, and internally disaggregated and transnationally connected state actors, leads to a complex and multidimensional restructuring of the global, the local and the uneven connections in between. We ought to abandon the idea of ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ once and for all. This does not remove the problem of anarchy but rather deepens it, involving multidimensional tensions and contradictions variously described as ‘functional differentiation’, ‘multiscalarity’, ‘fragmegration’, disparate ‘landscapes’, the ‘new security dilemma’ and ‘neomedievalism’. Approaching anarchy from the perspective of plural competing claims to authority and power forces us to think again about the nature of global order and the virtues of anarchy therein. Will the long-term outcome be the emergence of a more decentralised, pluralistic world order or a quagmire of endemic conflict and anomie?

Keywords

Anarchy critical international political economy globalisation neopluralism network theory the state

Introduction

The modern nation-state is supposed to bring together four fundamental features that lie at the heart of political philosophy, more generally: political cohesion, including underlying bonds of social identity and loyalty; structural differentiation, where the state is seen as an institutional structure distinct from others in society and economy; institutional ‘relative autonomy’ and the legitimate authority of the state itself (Weber, 1958) and, especially, multifunctionality. These combine in a single, ideal-type institutional structure characterised as ‘sovereign’ (Krasner, 1999). States, especially modern nation-states, have been described as ‘arenas of collective action’ domestically and effective unit actors able to make ‘credible commitments’ internationally (Spruyt, 1994). This perception has led, in particular, to what has been called the ‘levels of analysis distinction’ (Hollis and Smith, 1990), with the state as the axis combining levels in a ‘two level game’ (Putnam, 1988), an image of world politics in which anarchy exists at the third, highest level of politics, which lacks that which the state has: government.

This ‘interstate’ system has been seen as fundamentally anarchic in the specific sense of lacking a coherent governmental structure above and beyond the states that compose it. As a result, international politics is torn between, on the one hand, disorder, stalemate, the dominance or hegemony of particular states and their alliances, and on the other hand, various forms of fragile often transient cooperation. This conceptualisation leads to a fundamental ‘security dilemma’ in which the attempt of particular nation-states to strengthen their own security can lead to a vicious circle in which other states respond in kind, leading to the breakdown of cooperative arrangements and reducing security all round, leading to increasingly suboptimal outcomes, especially war and even the breakdown of the ‘inter-national’ system (Herz, 1950; cf. Cerny, 2000).

In this article, we challenge this view of anarchy by drawing on a range of theories emanating from the study of globalisation that question the nature of the state, not in order to dismiss anarchy but rather to reframe its contours and to explore the implications of seeing anarchy as central to all social processes. Globalisation theories focus not merely on non-state actors per se but rather on the restructuring of international relations – better identified as ‘world politics’ – around more complex, multilayered and overlapping structures; institutions and processes that challenge and increasingly undermine the capacity of states and the interstate system to control, manage or shape what goes on in the world. These processes often lead to the disaggregation of the state itself (Slaughter, 2004), while not leading to effective forms of global government (Hameiri and Jones, 2015; Kütting and Cerny, 2015).

We develop an account of anarchy that links three important contributions to the anarchy debate: the relativisation of order in Ashley’s (1988) deconstructive critique, the functional pluralism of Milner’s (1991) account of politics, and Rosenberg’s (2013, 2016) account of the generative force of capital in the global process of uneven and combined development, and intersocietal multiplicity. We move towards a neopluralism of intersecting and crosscutting forces (Cerny, 2010; cf. Prichard, 2013) that are functionally differentiated, but lacking in directionality, and existing in a fundamentally anarchic social structure, one which has been ushered in by global capital and is rapidly undercutting the nation-state and increasing anomie and ‘derangement’ of actors whose benchmarks are increasingly undermined and confused (Durkheim, 2006 [1897]; see also Karatziogianni and Robinson, 2017). Where we go further is in arguing that processes of globalisation, in essence, represent the ongoing crystallisation and consolidation of a multilayered, multinodal anarchy, in which actors act to generate patterns of order not simply within the institutions of the state but more often outside those institutions on a number of diverse and variegated levels and networks both old and new, drawing states into wide ranging and shape-shifting processes of ‘complex interdependence’ (Cerny, 2014b; Keohane and Nye, 2000 [1977]). We argue that anarchy becomes the ontological condition for all politics, an ‘order without an orderer’ in Waltz’s (1979) words (1979: 89). The undercutting and criss-crossing of the state by complex, overlapping structures and processes, many of which are historically unprecedented, suggest we think again about the depth of this anarchy and the conceptual, constitutional, political and social questions it implies.

Conceptualising diversity versus convergence in the new anarchy

Globalisation is all too often perceived to be a structurally homogenising process, merely leading to ‘diversity within convergence’ and requiring new forms of intergovernmental cooperation or ‘global governance’. Dimensions of homogenisation are said to include economic globalisation, the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism, socio-cultural convergence, technological innovation and change, liberal internationalism and global governance, and the emergence of a particular kind of so-called ‘flat world’, as advanced by New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman (2005; for a trenchant critique, see Aronica and Ramdoo, 2006). Normative calls for a world state follow this logic. A world state is widely seen to be the only means by which order and justice can be maintained at a global level (Albert et al., 2012). The political integration of large parts of the world economy, the integration of distribution and logistics, a supposed convergence in identity and the externalising of social and environmental costs by multinational corporations, all demand some sort of central or at least ideologically coordinated response mechanism, as argued in the extensive literature on ‘global governance’ (cf. Joseph, 2012).

However, supposed global-level developments are challenged by tensions and contradictions across multiple dimensions in the global political economy. Theorists have identified these processes using the evocative concepts of ‘functional differentiation’, ‘multiscalarity’, ‘deterritorialisation’, disparate ‘landscapes’, ‘neomedievalism’ and ‘fragmegration’, increasing uncertainty in the international system and the likelihood of multiple equilibria or alternative possible outcomes. Each questions the plausibility of a single centre of power feasibly coordinating all others. The result is an undermining of the landmarks of modernisation without a clear direction forward.

The concept of functional differentiation, taken from sociological theory, posits that the differentiation of social structures, previously a cause of embedded conflict and instability, becoming increasingly interdependent as they merge into an overarching vertical structure. These differentiated structures become more co-dependent and complementary – more ‘functional’ – in a modernising world (Durkheim, 1984). As modernisation and other forms of development take place, the more integrated they become and the more likely social orders are to combine complex social bonds, political institutions and processes, and economic structures like markets and firms, in single-overarching units. In this context, political units are characterised more and more by differentiation according to the ‘functions’ that particular substructures and crosscutting infrastructures and processes play in society, the economy and, indeed, political life (Albert et al., 2013).

But at the same time, pulling against these trends, social bonds are increasingly fractionated and multicultural, often localised, regionalised and, indeed, dispersed through material and immaterial transborder linkages, such as information and communications technology, social media, migration and diasporas, and religious and ethnic, rather than ‘national’, identities. Awareness of what is happening across the world is, thus, leading to an uneven mixture of convergence and diversity, the breakdown (and reinvention) of old and the formation of new bonds and identities.

Perhaps, the best known form of functional differentiation is economic, including multinational firms, financial markets and institutions, as well as an increasing transnational division of labour among linked production processes or ‘supply chains’. The integration and differentiation of these structures make them prone to systemic, rather than localised shocks, as witnessed in the recent financial crisis. Nevertheless, in the context of a world that is increasingly characterised by complex interdependence, states, domestic political systems and public policymaking are vulnerable to crosscutting and intersecting independent variables they cannot control, ranging from terrorism to financial crises to the rapid growth of economic and social inequality. A recent cartoon in the New Yorker magazine depicts a lone protester holding up a sign saying, ‘We are being controlled by the random outcomes of a complex system’ (30 March 2015). In the structural environment of a Third Industrial Revolution, and the complex forces undermining neoliberal globalisation and the state, whether ideological, social or material, the tendency is towards asserting an authoritarian form of neoliberalism (Bruff, 2014), echoing processes afoot in the 1930s.

‘Multiscalarity’ focuses on the scale of social, political and economic structures and processes, and posits that in a globalising world, an uneven variety of both old and new scales of interaction are crystallising and consolidating (see the debates on this issue in Brenner et al., 2003). Different publics experience the scale of politics in different ways, often transnationally, or translocally, sometimes both, as in the case of the Occupy Movement, footloose high finance and ‘high politics’. Political agency is no longer defined by interest groups seeking out the levers of state power, because these levers are seen to be largely impotent or politically suspect (Holloway, 2002).

Related to this turn from the state is ‘deterritorialisation’. From this perspective, structural homogeneity between state and society in specific geographical/territorial locations, crucial to the unitary coherence of the nation-state, is being undermined by cross-border linkages (Scholte, 2000). In particular, the kind of strong, secure borders that are supposed to characterise the sovereign nation-state is increasingly recognised as being impossibly porous, challenged around the world, and in many cases becoming, or have always been, more analogous to fluid, pre-modern ‘frontiers’ (see also Haldén, 2017). This recognition has shaped the battleground of the campaign for British ‘exit’ from the European Union (EU), the proliferation and threat of further border walls, all offering a utopian conception of the state as a hermetically sealed container of unified community, often harked back to in debates about the state’s ‘hollowing out’ (see Jessop, 2013 for a critical discussion). Shoring up the state, in this context, is inevitably received as illiberal.

The concept of disparate ‘landscapes’ also captures the fundamental paradox in globalisation theory. On one hand, we have Friedman’s idea that the world is increasingly ‘flat’ and that globalisation is a homogenising force across borders. This is, of course, partly true at particular levels and with regard to particular functional categories such as financial markets and institutions. On the other hand, it is increasingly argued that globalisation is characterised by a growing divergence and uneven interaction between ‘flat’ and ‘rugged’ landscapes, where politics and society are increasingly dissolved and scattered, more and more difficult to control and manage, with developmental processes in one area having unintended consequences in others (Root, 2013). There is also a spectrum of mixed landscapes between the two. General Colin Powell said of American interventionism in the 1990s ‘We do deserts. We don’t do mountains’, while missing out the intervening complexities. Indeed, it has become increasingly clear to military strategists that the old models of engagement have ceased to be of relevance, with urban and guerrilla warfare leading to a reinvention of the use of force. The socio-economic roots of social conflict notwithstanding, religious and ethnic fractionalisation, terrorism and the like, exacerbate conflicts between ‘centralising elites’ and reinvented ‘tribes’ (Ahmed, 2013), moving to ‘a war among the peoples’ (Smith, 2005), not between them.

The concept of ‘neomedievalism’ has been employed in International Relations theory since the 1970s at least but has remained in the background, even at the highpoint of the Cold War (Bull, 1977, see also Friedrichs, 2001 and Haldén, 2017). Today, however, it seems more and more apposite to talk of the complex interaction not only of ‘competing institutions with overlapping jurisdictions’ (Cerny, 1998; Minc, 1993) but also of localities, regions and different social and economic groups, transnational authority and loyalty structures too. The increasing privatisation of the use of force (Abrahamsen and Williams, 2010), the localisation and globalisation of rule and the reach of the use of force, raises questions about whether this complexity will lead to endemic conflict, on one hand, or a ‘durable disorder’ in which key actors are increasingly engaged in various forms of ‘brokerage’ in order to smooth over the underlying dysfunctionality of the system, on the other. Peter H. Wilson (2016), in his pioneering study of the Holy Roman Empire, concludes by comparing the Empire with its multiple levels of authority and conflict with today’s EU. But what is true of the EU is even truer of the world political ‘system’ as a whole. The globalisation of the neoliberal world order has fundamentally transformed the structures of sovereignty, where the monopoly of force and the claims of legitimate sovereign authority are increasingly hollow (Barkawi and Laffey, 2002; Hardt and Negri, 2000, 2009). Today, ‘rhizomatic’ or subterranean interlinkages of informal, non-governmental social agents, structures and processes, including the pluralisation of social movement activism, push the generative processes of global order, processes that are radically distinct from forms of industrial revolutionary political subjectivity current only 50 years ago (Chesters and Welsh, 2005; Karatziogianni and Robinson, 2017). If a mass class consciousness is to arise, it is unlikely to be in the areas of de-industrialisation and service sector economies (Ness, 2015).

Questions of the virtues of statehood are especially pronounced in areas where no such thing exists. Recent scholarship has suggested that up to 80% of the world’s population lives in areas of limited or failed statehood. Thomas Risse (2011) and colleagues (Beisheim and Liesse, 2014; Börzel and Risse, 2010 see also Ostrom, 1990) argue that in these areas, the state’s monopoly of force simply does not reach, either because sub- or non-state actors undermine any state monopoly on violence or because no such monopoly of force existed to begin with. For Risse (2011), ‘areas of limited statehood are an almost ubiquitous phenomenon in the contemporary international system and also in historical comparison’ (2011: 6), forcing non-state actors to provide public goods, security and welfare. Whether in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in Somalia, the mega cities that shape the planet, or its rural hinterlands, the absence of a Weberian state is a perennial feature of life at the margins. This fact of modern life for most of the world’s population characterises what Colin Ward once labelled ‘anarchy in action’ (Scott, 2009; Ward, 1973), that is, the pursuance of the good without a state. Attempts to universalise the liberal western model of the good through extractive neo-colonial processes, on one hand, and the extension of liberal imperium on the other, in a word, globalisation, is precisely the problem.

One way to conceptualise these processes is to think of them in terms of what James N. Rosenau (1990) called ‘fragmegration’, what we call ‘the dialectic of globalisation and fragmentation’. This is not merely a state of affairs. It is an ongoing process. States are no longer (if they ever were) at the wheel of control. They are whipsawed between quasi-globalised financial elites at one end of the spectrum and reinvented tribal groups like Islamic State at the other. The EU, for example, is in continual structural quasi-crisis, trying to deal centrally with plural tensions between the local and the transnational. In the United States and in the rest of the developed and developing worlds, economic growth may well be slowing down as the Third Industrial Revolution runs out of steam (Gordon, 2016), while inequality increases (Milanovic, 2016; Piketty, 2015), presenting another stark structural contradiction that states have facilitated. Most worrying is the evidence that this is a global phenomenon, with Chinese growth slowing too, while ‘developing’ regions are no longer catching up and indeed are in growing crisis (Taylor, 2016).

Finally, austerity and the erosion of the rights of labour are undermining the mid-twentieth century social contract on which the welfare state and liberal democracy have been based. Political leaders in unstable states are either engaged in attempting to restore authoritarian repression, as in Russia, China, Egypt, Turkey, even in the United States, or are ensnared in the breakdown of the political system, as in Brazil, Venezuela and a range of African countries. The number of what are called ‘failed states’ is increasing but the plurality of ways in which they are doing so is cause for alarm. The ‘fragmentation of global governance architectures’ is not leading to coherent structuration at an ‘international’ level (Biermann et al., 2009; Cerny, 2016a; McKeon, 2017).

In sum, the role of the state in the west has changed fundamentally in recent years. Political actors have pluralised and no longer see the state as the main vehicle through which to realise their interests. The state has also divested or outsourced its social, economic and political responsibilities, while ‘concealing’ (Lindsey, 2014) the deep state and its core functions. Military and security expenditures rise, even when their use is outsourced.

Whither the state?

According to the standard modernisation thesis of state and global order, authoritative institutions bring together the diverse scales of political, social and, to a large extent, economic life into a single structural complex for organisational management and control. These are also central to the development of core social bonds and identities, and economic development, especially in the context of the Second Industrial Revolution. The state, whether or not it was effectively centralising in command terms, has nevertheless been seen as centripetal in the evolution of sociopolitical life, especially in the ideas and perceptions that shape that life (see also Badie and Birnbaum, 1983).

This conceptualisation of the state has, of course, dominated not only state-building processes themselves but also the perception among mass publics that states, despite their disadvantages, are normatively the best way to organise political life, especially in the context of the historical longevity of national identities and the development of national pride (Anderson, 1991). Furthermore, state-building has long been associated at least since the Enlightenment with notions of progress and the evolution of modern human society, both natural and conventional, whether liberal, capitalist or socialist.

Today, the state has not, of course, become irrelevant or insignificant, but disenchantment with the providential rhetoric of the enlightenment is the norm. Rationalities of marginal utility have transformed statehood into a marketising, commodifying process, not simply a regulatory state but an ordoliberal/neoliberal state promoting a new model of ‘entrepreneurial man’. The neoliberal state in particular, dominant in political culture in leading capitalist states since the 1970s, sees people themselves as in essence quasi-Hayekian, personalised enterprises in permanent competition with each other (Cerny, 2016b; Dardot and Laval, 2013 [2009]), rather than the social animals of most other versions of political thought. Second, the state has become a promoter of financialisation rather than welfare or social democracy, prompting the financialisation of society itself, replacing decommodifying welfare and public services and undermining the potential for what has been called the ‘entrepreneurial state’ concerned with providing public goods (Block and Keller, 2011; Herman, 2012; Mazucatto, 2013; Mazzucato and Penna, 2015; Tiberghien, 2007). Social democracy has been replaced by the supposed ‘democratisation of finance’ and ‘financial inclusion’ (see Litan and Rauch, 1998; Shiller, 2003), supporting (while re-regulating) the financial system through ostensible deregulation and crisis, indebting the poorer classes rather than redistributing (Cerny, 2014a). Third, the state, by shifting economic policymaking to ‘independent’ central banks, has become, through such policies as quantitative easing, a ‘monetary Keynesian’ rather than a ‘fiscal Keynesian’ institution.

Fourth, the state itself in its traditional international ‘realist’ guise, that is shaping and managing the overall system through diplomacy and, crucially, war – for example, through balances and imbalances of power – has become increasingly vulnerable and impotent in the face of both local and transnational forces and movements. Intervention has become ineffective and counterproductive in the face of what has been called a growing but diverse set of conflicts between reinvented tribes and centralising elites (Ahmed, 2013). Fifth, and finally, the state itself has become a globalising agent – a ‘competition state’, promoting its own disaggregation (Genschel and Seelkopf, 2015; Cerny, 1997). In sum, one of the ironies of the development of liberal internationalist world order is that the processes of ‘global governance’ are increasingly fragmented and beyond the conscious direction of any one political power (Cerny, 2016a; McKeon, 2017a). While their form is predominantly liberal, the longevity of this liberalism is not guaranteed.

To conclude, the state has become a key abettor of its own involvement in and subordination to the new anarchy, caught up in transnational, crosscutting webs of power and structural change that it can neither manage nor control (Cerny, 1990). The very overarching structural anarchy that once seemed to make states into Waltz’s (1979) ‘unit actors’ has ironically served to undermine that status in complex and diverse ways. How we respond to this new anarchy is the key challenge of our time.

Dimensions of the new anarchy: From levels to networks

In the absence of the Weberian, let alone the Hobbesian state, we are compelled to rethink the structural form of the global. This is not well-charted territory. How then should we conceptualise ‘international relations’ in the absence of a formal analytical hierarchy of state and non-state and with the complex plurality of non-state actors at the centre of our analysis?

We are typically compelled to see world politics in terms of levels or ‘images’, moving upwards from individual motivations as a cause of social order, to the internal affairs of a state or the structures of politics, to the relatively autonomous and emergent structures of ‘the international’ seen as an interstate system – Waltz’s ‘third image’ (Waltz, 1959). Waltz’s images of world politics, and the generation of an autonomous international domain, were a reflection of the post-imperial state system that came about between 1945 and the early 1970s. Bipolarity, great power politics and the proliferation of post-colonial states made the ‘third image’ realistic in a way that it would not have been but 30 years earlier.

This account of levels remains ingrained in our conceptual framing of world politics but is increasingly outdated. It is a radical and misleading oversimplification. World politics is now more adequately understood as a complex set of relations between individuals and social groups, from classes to vested interests, tribes to religions that relate across state and regional boundaries, mediated at different speeds by different technologies, social bonds and identities (see also Prichard 2017, this issue). These forces pull against one another and reconstitute politics in unforeseen ways. These relations can be vertical, between constitutionally ordered superiors and inferiors; horizontal, across civil society; or diagonal, that is relations of power constituted between social groups and host or foreign states, or multinational corporations and publics in foreign countries.

One way to think about the new architecture of world politics, then, is through materialising networks of agency that crystallise as functional material or ideological nodes that are relatively enduring and emergent properties (Lawson, 2012; see also Ashworth, 2017). Global actors are always situated in some locale or other (Latour, 2005: 173–174), constituted by the material relations within which they are situated and shaped by the ideological forces which give these processes meaning. The situated activities of people and ‘things’ constitute the global through their purposeful interactions, interactions which take place in very distinct rooms, places and times, and sometimes with very distant co-actors, and mediated by specific material technologies, processes and capital, impinging causal ‘objects’ in their own right. In this respect, the global is made through the everyday behaviours of people but people that are differentially capacitated. Material and ideological structures precede these interactions, shaping and changing them imperceptibly, but they are themselves changed, in turn, by the ways in which concrete actors act, a process called ‘structuration’. The morphological character of these emergent social structures (Archer, 1995), relatively ossified technologies and practices that emerge from the stabilised interactions of peoples, against which others must push, is always instantiated in the activities of individuals in their social groups, even if the causal forces most salient to those practices were first established thousands of miles away and by groups and networks sustained by people they may never meet. For example, franchising, social movement mimicry, combating climate change or earning a living are all social practices through which the global is recreated and also challenged.

From this perspective, levels are an oversimplification. It is sociologically and methodologically more productive to consider all social relationships as constituted horizontally, always through concrete traceable causation, whether material or ideological, through actors that interact in developing and maintaining particular institutions and structures over time. So, for example, while semi-dematerialised price mechanisms by which markets and institutions relate to each other and to the wider economy, society and polity, shape our interactions, they do so through people and material processes that connect them (Coole and Frost, 2010; Srnicek, 2013). They do not take place ‘above’ or ‘below’ us, as the three-level image of world politics suggests (Waltz, 1959) but through our interactions with the computers, logistics and groups of people next to us (Latour, 2005: 178). The process is itself non-linear and causally complex, and for methodological and analytical reasons we should conceptualise these relations as a dialectical spectrum of the ‘flat’ and the ‘rugged’ – horizontal, mediated and non-linear (Cudworth and Hobden, 2011; Jackson and Nexon, 1999).

By way of illustration, the development of what has been called a ‘bailout state’ (Taibbi, 2013) underlines the way actors and political processes can only increasingly react to price changes that are independently produced by market and institutional transactions, many of which are automated. Actors’ social positioning shapes their range of possible responses to material processes. A key contemporary change is that the state is no longer the key determinant of that positioning. Other globalising trends include the development of information and communications technologies that circle the globe, while also creating the potential for backlashes of diverse kinds as awareness of global-level problems, inequalities and instabilities spreads. Notions of ‘above’ and ‘below’ might lead us to believe that there are domains that exist according to distinct logics, beyond the reach of everyday actors, but our approach suggests that this way of seeing things is flawed, analytically and descriptively. It is through our everyday practices that the global is instantiated. None of this is to deny the very real social and material hierarchies that structure social life, nor that social life is a universal domain directly accessible to all people. It is through co-action that we are able to ‘reach’ these otherwise inaccessible planes, with emergent structures prohibiting our access differentially and in intersecting ways. Our framework for analysis simply suggests that ‘flattening the social’, as Latour (2005) puts it, and then tracing how new forms of uneven fragmentation emerge, opens up new ways of identifying agency in the structures of its own reproduction.

This approach also decentres the state by placing it alongside other social groups – rather than above the social and below the international (for more, see Prichard 2017, this issue). This anarchises our social ontology, and also makes the social more anarchic, opening up the possibility of radical agency, by bringing more realism into the theory of state agency. Attempts to consolidate and centralise power and authority, to develop notions of levels and social hierarchy, to extend the reach of the state, have all been the mission of modernity (Scott, 1998). And yet the entropic characteristics of social life continually militate against this.

The key to understanding processes of organisation, manipulation and problem solving in any sociopolitical structural context is the way strategically situated actors are able to mobilise and manage material resources, influential contacts, ideologies and mind sets, and knowledge in order to take advantage of and exploit the constraints and opportunities, especially points of access, embedded in those structures in the pursuit of their preferred outcomes, whether monetary, status-oriented or power-wielding. Thinking about social interaction as strategic positioning in webs of complex social interdependence demands we think about order itself in plural ways as the emergent product of complex, mutually constituting processes.

The new anarchy and some perennial problems: An agenda for debate

Transformations in the power of state and capital are reconstituting world politics. This process of reconstituting needs a normative corollary, a new constitutional moment. The new republicanism points the way here (see, for example, Pettit, 1997). The new republicanism contrasts with the liberal constitutional moment in three important ways. First, liberal constitutionalism develops legal institutions to prevent arbitrary interference in the private pursuits and property of individuals and nations. Non-interference leaves existing distributions of property and power intact since it prohibits interference in historic distributions of both (Nozick, 1974). The new republicanism, by contrasts, rests on the principle of non-domination. Where existing distributions of power and privilege are recognised to precipitate arbitrary domination of one individual or group by another, then a ‘constitutional provision’, an institutionalised third party, is introduced to regulate and counter that dominating relationship (Pettit, 1997: 68). The radical wing of this new constitutionalism draws on an abolitionist heritage, proclaiming the institution of private property to precipitate such an arbitrary but constitutionally defended mode of structural domination (Gourevitch, 2015), and that constitutional provisions must include things like people’s tribunes and radical modes of participatory democracy (McCormick, 2011).

These new Marxist accounts are becoming increasingly otherworldly. The radical pluralisation of politics and power pulls against the re-composition of the nation-state, seen as a central bulwark against entrenched economic power. But this republican moment can be pushed further. The radical pluralisation of global power, and the constituencies of global order, suggests the need for a form of political and economic order that is equally decentred but capable of constraining power. Daniel Deudney’s model of republican federalism points the way here. For Deudney, constellations of power can be mutually constrained both upwards and downwards by the pluralisation and federalisation of political control, or what he calls the implementation of negatives on power, or ‘negarchy’ (Deudney, 2007). Pushing this further, anarchists of all hues have pushed the federal moment into the political economic domain, arguing for the consolidation of workplace democracy and the re-territorialisation of political control to account for the plural social groups through which we realise our political agency, whether towns, regions or clubs (Prichard, 2013; Proudhon, 1979).

Rather than a remedy for a bygone era, the radical pluralisation of political order suggests precisely the opposite. Whether Proudhon in the 1870s, Mitrany in the interwar years (Ashworth, 2017), or Murray Bookchin half a century later, the antidote to the consolidation of state and economic power, was a form of radical political and economic disaggregation and re-federalisation that could re-harness complexity in the interests of all (Bookchin, 1974). The object is to pluralise ‘constitutional provisions’ ad infinitum. Let us consider the merits of this proposition in three areas, inequality, insecurity and global economic power.

First: inequality. In today’s world, the extensive scale of financial globalisation has dramatically increased the inequalities between the rich and poor. This is at the heart of current debates about the ‘99%’ and the ‘1%’. In this multinodal world, the extensive networks of finance enable these actors to control outcomes in ways that states can either promote – as in support for particular institutions or financial centres such as London or New York – or attempt, generally ineffectually, to regulate. A lack of centralisation makes control less effective, so the argument goes, while a hollowing out of political and legal institutions has led to many a pundit to draw parallels with late 1930s European politics. Political and legitimacy crises are being met with Rousseauean responses (e.g. Bickerton et al., 2006), calling for the reaffirmation of popular sovereignty at precisely the time at which these unified publics are least visible, and their creation leads to a crass populism.

If we conceptualise economic and political power as disaggregated and decentralised, networked and plural (or neoplural), rather than centralise political power in response, we might then decentralise, disaggregate and federate it (Prichard 2007, 2013). Relinking the economy with public power might be better facilitated through a cooperative economic model, reintroducing democratic control over workplaces and neighbourhoods, towns and regions, negotiating title as well as the terms of political participation (Prichard 2010). This would need to run in tandem with the strengthening of labour laws and unions, diversifying power and constraining it where it is actualised: in the workplace and through global supply chains (see also Landemore, 2013; Srnicek and Williams, 2015).

For example, across Northern Europe, but particularly in Iceland, Pirate Party activists have campaigned on platforms of radical ‘liquid’ democracy (Blum and Zuber, 2016; Cammaerts, 2015). Here, policies are ‘crowd sourced’ and developed through active discussion between politicians and publics, incorporating real-time online evaluation of proposals and policy, and mimicing and drawing on elements of the radical activism of the general assemblies and spokes councils of the Occupy camps. The successful attempt to crowd source a new Icelandic constitution between 2011 and 2012 is one example of this (Landemore, 2015, 2016) but this process could be extended to constitutionalise every emergent political organisation, from cities to regions, to industrial unions, all generated through this neoplural world order, and then aggregated through further constitutional means. Alongside the democratic control of the workplace, this reconstitutinalisation might meet problems of control and legitimacy, while giving the people the means to redress questions of economic inequality by taking control of their labour and political power. Taking control of the new ‘silk roads’ (Frankopan, 2015) of economic interactions – the logistical supply chains of world economic order – by the workers would link (or disrupt) localities across vast spaces.

Second: security. This pluralisation of political constituencies could alternatively be read as exacerbating the conceptualisation of politics as between ‘tribes’ and ‘centralising elites’ or the ‘reinvention of tradition’ – the restructuring and even direct manipulation of histories, identities and narratives (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) – in reaction to globalising trends, including the distortion of religion and the rebirth of populist nationalism. These tendencies clash with centralising and modernising logics of development, exacerbating tensions between great powers and recipient states, producing new imperial logics, new client and puppet states and economic-industrial command structures. We see this in the Ukraine, the South China Sea, Bolivia/Chile, in Africa and particularly in Afghanistan, where national boundaries merely exacerbate what are fundamentally local, tribal and regional disparities and antagonisms, often not merely the revival of precolonial distinctions but manipulated pseudo-traditions such as ‘making American great again’.

In the absence of meaningful public power, and the absence of constraints on the powerful, whether media barons, industrialists, politicians or religious leaders, the manipulation of publics is inevitable. The disaggregation of publics suggests new counterpowers that might be reconstitutionalised through decentralising constitutional provisions. This is the quintessence of Deudney’s concept of negarchy, where powers (conceptualised in material and ideological terms) are constrained by countervailing powers, and then federated.

Third: global capital. In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, there is growing personal, public and corporate indebtedness rather than deleveraging (Farrell et al., 2008; Fuller, 2016). Derivatives and securitisation still drive the debt economy which dwarfs the equity market. Market ‘flexibility’ outruns regulators and policymakers, while in the real economy foreclosures, debt defaulting, debt strikes and simple miscalculations mean another major crisis is only one systemic shock away. In the context of increasing inequality and continued and unnecessary austerity policies, finance for the sake of capital is probably unfit for purpose. In 2008, the state was arguably an effective firebreak, but only at the expense of the public, who had to carry the burden of multi-trillion bailouts of the financial sector.

On one hand, diversifying risk in this context might be better achieved by socialising property through the cooperative control of the economy, bringing local power and transnational linkages to bear on the governance of the market, rather than through centralisation. The answer to bad regulation might therefore be not more or less regulation, but diversified and locally controlled regulation, in a framework that puts decision-making in the hands of those most likely to be affected by crashes – an economic subsidiarity to match the political principle so common in debates in the EU (Föllesdal, 1998). This would be to develop a set of economic counterpowers developed from the ground up. This might involve a plethora of decision-making bodies in the short term, but in the medium term this demands a participatory process of economic decision-making (e.g. Albert, 2003). Here, people can reclaim control of the economy through cooperatives, transnational labour unions, peasant solidarity struggles like La Via Campesina and innumerable others. On the other hand, such developments may prove overly idealistic in the face of the new structural complexities and uneven dynamics of twenty-first-century world politics. Only time will tell.

Conclusion

The new anarchy is populated by uneven, unequal and only dimly perceived social, economic and political forces and processes. Will the emerging structuration process lead to a new, less pluralistic balance of forces, a ‘transnational neopluralism’ (Cerny, 2010)? Can this new constellation be constitutionalised in all its plural complexity?

From the perspective sketched here, transnational neopluralism consists in uneven crosscutting and interlinked horizontal networked relationships, between individuals and groups, across multiple sites of power. It currently revolves around what Lindblom (1977) called the ‘privileged position of business’, further entrenched in an interdependent, globalising world. This is an anarchy ushered in, ironically, by neoliberal globalisation, a complex, internally paradoxical political process, neither an inevitable progression to a world polity nor a subordinate dimension of the interstate system. The state’s role in this process has been one of both facilitator and unwitting casualty, leaving the way open to colossal financial interests and the reactive challenge of civil society, which has to bear the burdens of this seismic post-Cold War change. In this context, a return to the institutions of state sovereignty is a Quixotic even reactionary enterprise. The ‘sovereignty’ Krasner called ‘organised hypocrisy’ is turning into a different kind of hypocrisy through the dialectic of globalisation and fragmentation, with new forms of fascism more likely to predominate if the state and capital combine against the majority, scapegoating the foreign and deploying the military industrial complex to sustain historic privileges of race and class.

Alternatives to the nation-state are sorely needed, and conceptualising an alternative global constitutionalism, that is a non-dominating and universal, is an historic challenge. Much of modern political thought and international political theory is premised on a move from anarchy to order, where the latter is understood in terms of statism. We need to rethink this move, foregrounding the new pluralism of the global order and consider constitutionalising order in anarchy. If we do not, then the dialectic of globalisation and fragmentation will lead at worst to increasing conflict and anomie, at best to muddling through a ‘durable disorder’ (Minc, 1993).

Footnotes

Author biographies

Philip G Cerny is a Professor Emeritus of Politics and Global Affairs at the University of Manchester and Rutgers University-Newark. He received his PhD from the University of Manchester. His most recent book is Rethinking World Politics: A Theory of Transnational Neopluralism (Oxford University Press, 2010). He received the Distinguished Scholar Award of the IPE Section of the International Studies Association in 2011, and until recently, chaired the Research Committee No. 36 (Political Power) of the International Political Science Association.

Alex Prichard is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Exeter. His research expertise sits at the intersection of anarchist studies, International Relations theory, political theory and the history of ideas. He is the founder and co-convener of the Political Studies Association Anarchist Studies Network, and founder and co-editor of the Manchester University Press monograph series, Contemporary Anarchist Studies. He is currently a co-investigator on an ESRC Transforming Social Science project, entitled ‘Anarchy as Constitutional Principle: Constitutionalising in Anarchist Politics’ ().

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The new anarchy: Globalisation and fragmentation in world politics

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Conceptualising diversity versus convergence in the new anarchy

Whither the state?

Dimensions of the new anarchy: From levels to networks

The new anarchy and some perennial problems: An agenda for debate

Conclusion

Footnotes

Author biographies

References