Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: globality in historical perspective
- Part I Critique
- Part II History and agency
- Part III State
- 6 State in globality
- 7 Relations and forms of global state power
- 8 Contradictions of state power: towards the global state?
- Part IV Conclusion
- References
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
7 - Relations and forms of global state power
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: globality in historical perspective
- Part I Critique
- Part II History and agency
- Part III State
- 6 State in globality
- 7 Relations and forms of global state power
- 8 Contradictions of state power: towards the global state?
- Part IV Conclusion
- References
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Summary
Throughout this book, I have proposed that we understand state in terms of the twin concepts of state relations (or the social relations of state power) and state forms (the formal institutional expressions of these relations). Both of these concepts are broad in character. To the extent that states have become ever more powerful in society, more and more social relations have had, directly or indirectly, the character of state relations. Society in general has been increasingly incorporated into the mode of reproduction of state power. This was most evident in the era of classic total war, in the ways in which war and war preparation included more and more areas of social relations. There was an extensive statization of social relations, which was reflected in the comprehensive restructuring of state forms. States as institutions became formally concerned with ever larger areas of social life: with economic management and social welfare as well as war and law.
In principle we can see states as ‘janus-faced’, looking both ‘inwards’ to society and ‘outwards’ to interstate relations, or concerned with both surveillance and warfare. This understanding of the state, common to most historical sociology, is an advance on the concepts of domesticated political science and sociology, on the one hand, and international relations, on the other, which simply reproduce the separation of the two sides of the state without grasping the relations between them.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Theory of the Global StateGlobality as an Unfinished Revolution, pp. 195 - 231Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000