458 Globalization and the Changing Logic of Collective Action
processes lead in turn to the whipsawing of states between structural pressures
and organizational levels that they cannot control in a complex, circular fashion.
Thus economic globalization contributes not to the supersession of the state by a
homogeneous world order as such but to the differentiation of the existing national
and international political orders, as well. Indeed, globalization leads to a growing
disjunction between the democratic, constitutional, and social aspirations of people—
which continue to be shaped by and understood through the framework of the
territorial state—and the increasingly problematic potential for collective action
through state political processes....
Despite these changes, of course, states retain certain vital political and economic
functions at both the domestic and international levels. Indeed, some of these
have paradoxically been strengthened by globalization. But the character of these
functions is changing. New collective action problems undermine the constraining
character of previously dominant political and economic games. As a result,
policymakers everywhere are seeking to restructure the state so that it can play
new roles in the future. While the state retains a crucial role in the political-
economic matrix of a globalizing world, however, its holistic and overarching
character...may be increasingly compromised. The state today is a potentially
unstable mix of civil association and enterprise association—of constitutional state,
pressure group, and firm—with state actors, no longer so autonomous, feeling
their way uneasily in an unfamiliar world....
The structural coherence, power, and autonomy of states themselves clearly
have become problematic in recent years. Over the past four centuries, the state
has become the repository of probably the most important dimension of human
society—social identity, and in this case, national identity. This sense of national
identity has been reinforced both by nationalism and by the spread of democratic
institutions and processes. Indeed, liberal democracy has constituted the most
important linkage or interface between social identity on the one hand and state
structures and processes on the other. Therefore, the first main bulwark of the
state, even in a globalizing world, is found in the deep social roots of
gemeinschaftlich national identity that have developed through the modern nation-
state. Such identities are bound to decline to some extent, both through the erosion
of the national public sphere from above and from the reassertion of substate
ethnic, cultural, and religious identities from below. Thus the decay of the cultural
underpinnings of the state—of rain-or-shine loyalty—will be uneven, and in
economically stronger states this decay is likely to proceed more slowly than in
weaker ones.
This will be particularly true if the potential capacity of the more developed
states to provide infrastructure, education systems, workforce skills, and quality-
of-life amenities (usually classed among the immobile factors of capital) to attract
mobile, footloose capital of a highly sophisticated kind is effectively mobilized.
On the one hand, the ability of states to control development planning, to collect
and use their own tax revenues, to build infrastructure, to run education and
training systems, and to enforce law and order gives actors continuing to work
through the state a capacity to influence the provision of immobile factors of
capital in many highly significant ways. If Europe, Japan, and the United States