activities on other scales from the local to the triad to the international and
global levels.
Fourth, following a temporary decline in Marxist theoretical work, interest has
grown in the speciWc forms and functions of the capitalist type of state. This can be
studied in terms of the state’s role in: (a) securing conditions for private proWt—
theWeld of economic policy; (b) reproducing wage-labor on a daily, lifetime, and
intergenerational basis—theWeld of social policy broadly considered; (c) managing
the scalar division of labor; and (d) compensating for market failure. On this
basis Jessop ( 2002 ) characterizes the typical state form of postwar advanced
capitalism as a Keynesian welfare national state. Its distinctive features were an
economic policy oriented to securing the conditions for full employment in a
relatively closed economy, generalizing norms of mass consumption through the
welfare state, the primacy of the national scale of policy-making, and the primacy
of state intervention to compensate for market failure. He also describes the
emerging state form in the 1980 s and 1990 s as a Schumpeterian workfare postna-
tional regime. Its distinctive features are an economic policy oriented to innovation
and competitiveness in relatively open economies, the subordination of social
policy to economic demands, the relativization of scale with the movement of
state powers downwards, upwards, and sideways, and the increased importance of
various governance mechanisms in compensating for market failure. Other types
of state, including developmental states, have been discussed in the same terms.
Fifth, there is interest in the changing scales of politics. While some theorists are
inclined to see the crisis of the national state as displacing the primary scale of
political organization and action to the global, regional, or local scale, others
suggest that there has been a relativization of scale. For, whereas the national
state provided the primary scale of political organization in the Fordist period of
postwar European and North American boom, the current after-Fordist period is
marked by the dispersion of political and policy issues across diVerent scales of
organization, with none of them clearly primary. This in turn poses problems
about securing the coherence of action across diVerent scales. This has prompted
interest in the novelty of the European Union as a new state form, the re-emergence
of empire as an organizing principle, and the prospects for a global state
(see, for example, Beck and Grande 2005 ; Shaw 2000 ).
Finally, ‘‘governance’’ comprises forms of coordination that rely neither on
imperative coordination by government nor on the anarchy of the market. Instead
they involve self-organization. Governance operates on diVerent scales of organi-
zation (ranging from the expansion of international and supranational regimes
through national and regional public–private partnerships to more localized
networks of power and decision-making). Although this trend is often taken to
imply a diminution in state capacities, it could well enhance its power to secure
its interests and, indeed, provide states with a new (or expanded) role in the
meta-governance (or overall coordination) of diVerent governance regimes and
state and state-building 127