Multilevel Governance and Multilevel Metagovernance
Changes in the EU as Integral
Moments in the Transformation and Reorientation of Contemporary Statehood
This on-line
version is the pre-copyedited, preprint version. The published version can be
found here:
‘Multi-level
governance and multi-level meta-governance’, in I. Bache and M. Flinders, eds, Multi-Level
Governance, Oxford: OUP, 49-74, 2004.
***
This chapter develops a strategic-relational
approach to the European Union as a key point of intersection in the
transformation of statehood. The argument unfolds in four steps. It first
introduces the strategic-relational approach and its implications for the study
of government and governance. This approach gives equal attention in principle
to the structural and strategic features of the state as a social relation and
also provides a basis to periodize state formation. Second, interest turns to
competing theoretical accounts of the EU as an emerging state form or political
regime. Thus I distinguish state- and governance-centric approaches, consider
two variants of each, and offer three criticisms of each main
approach. The two statist approaches are liberal intergovernmentalism and
supranationalism (a superstate); and the two governance accounts comprise
multilevel governance and the ‘network polity’ (or, sometimes, network state).
A third section develops a strategic-relational account of the emergence, restructuring,
and strategic reorientation of the European Union and the development of new
forms of metagovernance such as the open method of coordination. A key element
of my critique and reformulation of other analyses is a distinctive, ironic
approach to market, state and governance failures and the correlative need for
sophisticated forms of reflexive meta-steering of state development.
A Strategic-Relational Approach to the
State and Governance
The strategic-relational approach (hereafter SRA) is a
general theoretical framework for addressing structure and strategy at various
scales of social life from its micro-foundations to its most general
macrostructural dynamics. Applied to the state (and, a fortiori, to
its role in governance), it regards the state neither as a unitary political
subject nor as a passive, instrumentalizable thing but as a complex
social relation (cf. Poulantzas 1979). It treats the state as a
relatively unified ensemble of socially embedded, socially regularized, and
strategically selective institutions, organizations, social forces and
activities organized around (or at least involved in) making collectively
binding decisions for an imagined political community. While it certainly
accepts that there are material and discursive lines of demarcation between the
state quainstitutional ensemble and other institutional orders and
the lifeworld, the SRA also emphasizes the material interdependence of the
state apparatus and state practices with other institutional orders and social
practices. In this sense it is socially embedded. Moreover, as Tim Mitchell
argues, ‘[t]he state should be addressed as an effect of detailed processes of
spatial organization, temporal arrangement, functional specification, and
supervision and surveillance, which create the appearance of a world
fundamentally divided into state and society. The essence of modern politics is
not policies formed on one side of this division being applied to or shaped by
the other, but the producing and reproducing of this line of difference’ (1991:
95). These detailed processes also divide the globe fundamentally into different states
and societies and thereby create a more or less complex inter-state system. The
manner in which these divisions are drawn and reproduced has specific effects
on the political process and the effectivity of state power. This is why the
SRA emphasizes the heuristic concept of strategic selectivity. This refers to
the ways in which the state considered as a social ensemble has a specific,
differential impact on the ability of various political forces to pursue
particular interests and strategies in specific spatio-temporal contexts
through their access to and/or control over given state capacities – capacities
that always depend for their effectiveness on links to forces and powers that
exist and operate beyond the state’s formal boundaries. This means that
analysts must look beyond the state to examine its embedding within a wider
political system, its relationship to other institutional orders and functional
systems, and to the lifeworld (or civil society). In turn the attempted
exercise of state power (or, better, state powers in the plural)
will reflect the prevailing balance of forces as this is institutionally
mediated through the state apparatus with its structurally-inscribed strategic
selectivity.
The SRA’s main methodological conclusion is that state
power must be studied not only in terms of the state’s basic structure,
institutional architecture, and specific organizational forms but also from the
viewpoint of its strategic capacities both within the political system more
generally and vis-à-vis the wider nexus of functional systems and the
lifeworld. In this sense, the SRA is inconsistent with a purely state-centred
approach insofar as the latter assumes that the state can be examined in
isolation and treated as an independent variable. In contrast the SRA examines
the state in terms of its structural coupling and co-evolution with a wider set
of institutions and social practices. Putting the state in its place in this
way does not exclude (and, indeed, presupposes) specifically state-engendered
and state-mediated processes; but it does require that these be considered in
their broader social context and that their effects are related to the
strategic choices and conduct of particular actors within and beyond the state
(see Poulantzas 1979, Jessop 1990).
It follows that to talk of state managers, let alone
of the state itself, exercising power is at best to perpetrate a convenient
fiction that masks a far more complex set of social relations that extend far
beyond the state apparatus and its distinctive capacities. Interestingly, this
is reflected in the practices and discourses of state managers themselves. For,
whilst they sometimes proudly claim the credit for having initiated and carried
through a general strategic line or a specific policy, at other times they happily
seek to offload responsibility for state actions and/or outcomes to other
social forces (or to force majeure) at one or more points elsewhere
in the ongoing struggle over power. While the constitutionalization and
centralization of state power enable responsibility to be formally attributed
to named officials and bodies, this should not lead us to fetishize the fixing
of formal political responsibility at specific points and/or in specific
personages. We should always seek to trace the circulation of power through
wider and more complex sets of social relations both within and beyond the
state. This is especially important where the growing complexity and mass
mediatization of the exercise of state power lead to a search for charismatic
leaders who can simplify political realities and promise to resolve them. For
charisma actually serves to hide complex, if not chaotic, behind-the-scenes
practices which would be hard to explain or defend in public (Grande 2000).
Attention to the circulation of power also matters where state power is
undergoing major transformations and losing some of its formal constitutional
and hierarchical aspects – as is the case with recent developments in the
emerging Europolity as part of a more general reorganization of the inter-state
system (see below).
Studying the state from a strategic-relational
perspective requires attention to at least six interrelated dimensions. Three
dimensions primarily concern formal institutional aspects of the state regarded
as a social relation. They are modes of political representation and their
articulation; the internal articulation of the state apparatus; and modes of
intervention and their articulation. Each of these dimensions has its own
structurally-inscribed strategic selectivities and, while analytically
distinct, all three typically overlap empirically. They can be studied at
different levels of abstraction and complexity, ranging from the most basic
state forms through to specific regimes in particular conjunctures. The other
three dimensions concern the discursive and action-oriented aspects of the
state qua social relation and give the first three dimensions
their strategic meaning. These aspects give content to the more formal features
of the state and it is the contest among social forces over their definition,
articulation, and implementation that mediates structural and strategic changes
in the state in given conjunctures. These three aspects comprise, first, the
political projects articulated by different social forces that are represented
within the state system, seek such representation, or contest its current
forms, functions and activities; second, the prevailing state project with its raison
d’état – or governmental rationality – and statecraft[1] that seeks to impose an always relative
unity on the various activities of different branches, departments and scales
of the state system and that also defines the boundaries between the state and
its environment as a precondition of the ongoing attempts to build such an
improbable internal unity; and, third, the hegemonic projects that seek to
reconcile the particular and the universal by linking the nature and purposes
of the state into a broader – but always selective – political, intellectual
and moral vision of the public interest, the good society, the commonweal, or
some analogous principle of societalization. These six aspects also provide one
basis for periodization of state formation and transformation.
The forms of intervention associated with the state
and statecraft are not confined to imperative coordination, i.e., centralized
planning or top-down intervention. Paraphrasing Gramsci (1971), who analysed
the state apparatus in its inclusive sense as ‘political society + civil
society’ and saw state power as involving ‘hegemony armoured by coercion’, we
could also describe the state apparatus as based on ‘government + governance’
and as exercising ‘governance in the shadow of hierarchy’. Studies of
governance treat it as a general phenomenon concerned with issues of strategic
co-ordination rather than as a state-specific matter. In broad terms,
governance refers to mechanisms and strategies of co-ordination adopted in the
face of complex reciprocal interdependence among operationally autonomous
actors, organizations, and functional systems. Thus governance occurs in all
social fields and its students have examined a wide range of such mechanisms
and strategies, including markets, clans, networks, alliances, partnerships,
cartels, associations, and states. But governance is sometimes identified more
narrowly with one specific mode of coordination: reflexive self-organization
based on continuing dialogue and resource-sharing among independent actors to
develop mutually beneficial joint projects and to manage the contradictions and
dilemmas inevitably involved in such situations. In these terms governance can
be contrasted with ex post coordination based on the formally
rational pursuit of self-interest by individual agents; and with various forms
of ex ante imperative coordination concerned with the pursuit
of substantive goals established from above. This definition is the primary one
adopted below in my discussion of multilevel governance (hereafter MLG). Such
heterarchic mechanisms (as contrasted to market anarchy or bureaucratic
hierarchy) have long been used in co-ordinating complex organizations and
systems. They are especially suited for systems (non-political as well as
political) that are resistant to top-down internal management and/or direct
external control and that co-evolve with other (complex) sets of social
relations with which their various decisions, operations, and aims are
reciprocally interdependent.
State-Centric Perspectives
State-centred approaches tend to adopt, albeit
implicitly more than explicitly, the ideal-typical late nineteenth-century
sovereign national state as their reference point and examine the EU in one of
two ways. Some commentators note the emergence of an increasingly important new
supranational arena in which sovereign national states attempt to
pursue their own national interests. This new arena is a site of
intergovernmental (here, international) relations rather than a site to which
important sovereign powers have been transferred and so, however important it
has become for the joint pursuit of intergovernmental interests, it does not
culminate in a new state form. This approach is often termed liberal
intergovernmentalism (see especially Hoffman 1995; Moravcsik 1998). Other
commentators identify a tendential, emergent, upward re-scaling of
the traditional form of the sovereign state from the national to the
supranational level. This is expected to culminate sooner or later in a new
form of supranational statehood. They suggest that the associated re-allocation
of formal decision-making powers is leading to a more or less complex form of
multilevel government under the overall authority of a
supranational superstate (see Pinder 1991; Taylor 1975; Weiler 1981). Whether
the joint decision-making that characterizes this emerging superstate is a
transitional feature or will remain once the superstate is consolidated is
still uncertain.
For liberal intergovernmentalists, on the one hand,
national states are, and will necessarily remain, the key players in the
emerging European political space. States abandon little or none of their
sovereign authority and retain a comprehensive constitutional mandate in
contrast to the limited powers of the European Union. Thus inter-state
interactions overwhelmingly take the form of international relations oriented
to the pursuit of national interests, involving at best the provisional pooling
of sovereignty for the pursuit of joint interests. For some this provides a new
means to enhance the power and authority of the national state (e.g., Moravcsik
1998). More generally, rather than the leading to the transcendence of the
national state, intergovernmental cooperation is said at most to produce a set
of interlocking international arrangements among a self-selected group of national
states. While this may eventually lead to aStaatenbund or
confederation (e.g., a United Europe of National States), it could be blocked
at any stage if one or more national states feel that their respective national
interests would be hurt if the process continued.
Supranationalists, on the other hand, must posit a
paradoxical transitional process in which national states conspire in their own
transcendence (Aufhebung) as they promote supranational state formation.
This involves a re-territorialization of political power as the three key
features of the modern sovereign state are re-scaled upwards and
re-differentiated vertically: Staatsgewalt (organized
coercion), Staatsgebiet (a clearly demarcated territorial
domain of state authority), and Staatsvolk (state subjects).
This is linked to the re-scaling (and, perhaps, re-organization) of mechanisms
for constitutionalizing and legitimating state authority in the expanded
territory. Two factors distinguish the emergence of the supranational state (or
superstate) from the simple territorial expansion of a single national state
that absorbs all (or some) of the territories occupied by other relevant
national states. First, it emerges from an agreement among independent national
states to surrender their sovereignty and transfer it to a higher authority.
Second, each of the affected national states becomes a subordinate unit of the
new state whilst keeping the same territorial boundaries. Thus the new
superstate is a multi-tiered state apparatus.
What do these two approaches imply for the analysis of
multilevel political relations? First, in the case of the upward re-scaling (or
re-territorialization) of state sovereignty, the development of multilevel
government could be seen as a transitional effect of the transition. In other
words, it would take the form of relations between an emergent, but still
incompletely realised, supranational state and existing, not yet transcended,
national states. Moreover, if the emergent, but still incomplete, supranational
state were to assume the form of a bi- or multi-tiered federal superstate (Bundesstaat),
there would also be scope for analysing the relations between the different
tiers of government with the tools previously used for analyzing the dynamics
of other federal states. Second, in the case of international relations,
multilevel government could be interpreted in terms of distinctive features of
the intergovernmental institutional arrangements established by national states
and/or the specific governance strategies that they pursue from time to time.
In terms of the language introduced by Collinge (1999) to analyse the
relativization of scale, while the European Union level becomes an increasingly
important nodal scale in the overall exercise of state power,
national states continue to form the dominant scale. Given the
complexities of state power in such circumstances, it might be more
appropriate, then, to call this multilevel governance in the shadow of
national government(s).
While liberal intergovernmentalism appears more
persuasive than supranationalism, especially for the earlier stages of European
economic and political integration, the statist approach as a whole errs on
three main grounds: it adopts a restricted account of the state as a sovereign
territorial apparatus, employs an anachronistic reference point, and is marred
by its very state-centrism. First, although the essence of the state may well
consist in the territorialization of political power, political power
can nonetheless be territorialized in different ways. Yet analyses of the EU as
an emerging supranational state tend to focus on three features of the state
apparatus: (a) its monopoly of organized coercion; (b) the
constitutionalization of state power through the rule of law and a clear allocation
of authority; and (c) control over its own money, taxes, and state budget. This
implies that the most significant criteria for assessing whether a European
superstate has emerged are the development of a European Kriegs- und
Friedensgemeinschaft (a War- and Peace-Community, complete with a
European army subject to supranational control, a European police force for
internal security, and a European foreign and security policy oriented to the
pursuit of distinctively European interests in the wider world system of
states), an explicit European constitution (which locates sovereign power at
the apex of a multi-tiered political system, defines the relationship between a
jointly sovereign European executive, legislature, and judicial system, and
determines the division of powers and competencies between the different tiers
of government), and a European monetary system, fisco-financial system, and a
large, centralized budget. Anti-federalists already claim that the EU has
developed these features or, at least, will soon do so. Liberal
intergovernmentalists note the absence of all or most of these same features
and conclude that the EU is primarily an arena in which traditional national
territorial sovereign states compete to influence European policies, politics,
and political regimes. Despite these disagreements, however, both sides
fetishize formal constitutional and juridical features and ignore de
facto state capacities and the modalities of the exercise of state
power. They also focus excessively on territoriality at the expense of
extra-territorial and non-territorial features.
Second, state-centred theorists overlook the
successive historical transformations of the modern territorial state forms
from the mid-to-late nineteenth century onwards. This means that they adopt an anachronistic model
of the national territorial state as their criterion for judging whether and
how far a European superstate has emerged. This claim can be illustrated from
Willke’s periodization of the modern state. He distinguishes four stages: the Sicherheitsstaat,
which is concerned to defend its territorial integrity at home and abroad; the Rechtsstaat,
which provides legal security for its subjects; the Sozialstaat,
which establishes and extends welfare rights to its subjects; and the Risikostaat,
which protects its citizens from a wide range of unexpected and uncontrollable
risks. These stages are associated with the primacy of different state
resources, namely, Gewalt (organized coercion), Recht (law
grounded in a constitution), Geld(national money and state
budgets), and Wissen (organized intelligence) (Willke 1992).
Although I do not accept that the ‘risk state’ is the most useful concept for
the contemporary state, Willke’s approach does highlight changes in the
relative primacy of state resources. This suggests that the absence of a
European army-police, constitution, and massive budgets may be less important
than the presence of the EU’s ability to mobilize organized intelligence and
other forms of soft intervention that shape how national and regional states
deploy their respective capacities (cf. Sbragia 2001). Overall, this suggests,
first, that the key resources in today’s Staatenwelt (world of
states) – at least as far as relations among advanced bourgeois democratic
states are concerned – are not so much coercion or money but soft law and
intelligence; and, second, that the appropriate model for analyzing EU state
building is not an idealized 19thcentury liberal
state but the actually existing late 20th century
state – whether this be a competition state, the regulatory state, or the
Schumpeterian workfare post-national regime.
A related aspect of this second problem is the
adoption of anachronistic normative assumptions about European political
democracy. We should compare the still emergent EU polity with actually
existing national democracies rather than earlier democratic systems – whether
nineteenth-century liberal nightwatchman states, interwar interventionist
states, or postwar Keynesian welfare national states with catchall governing
parties. Contemporary western states tend to towards authoritarian statism,
with strong executives, mass-mediatized plebiscitary democracy, and
authoritarian mass parties (cf. Poulantzas 1979). Thus, if there is a
democratic deficit in the European Union, it may be linked to the contemporary
form of statehood more generally, with deficits on different scales reinforcing
each other. This in turn suggests that attempts to develop more democratic
forms of representation and greater democratic accountability must be oriented
to a different understanding of the nature and feasibility of democracy.
The third problem with state-centric analyses is
precisely their state-centrism. In particular, they tend to naturalize the
state-society distinction. Yet the boundary between state and society is
socially constructed, internal to the political system, and liable to change.
Thus, adequately to interpret changes in the EU as moments in the
reorganization and reorientation of contemporary statehood, we must consider
how the wider political system is organized and how changes in its territorial
boundaries may contribute to the more general reorganization of state power
(see below). The latter must also be related to the changing patterns of
strategic selectivity linked to a changing institutional architecture and new
forms of political mobilization. This implies in turn that the European Union
is not a fixed form of state (apparatus) but an aspect, a path-shaping as well
as path-dependent institutional materialization, of a new balance of forces
that is expressed, inter alia, in state building.
Governance-Centric Approaches
Simple governance-centric approaches hold that the
constitutionalized monopoly of violence and top-down modes of intervention
associated with modern states are irrelevant or even harmful in an increasingly
complex global social order. Thus they focus on the tendential de-statization of
politics (or de-hierarchization of the state) rather than the de-nationalization
of statehood; and they emphasize the enhanced role of reflexive
self-organization in solving complex coordination problems that involve a wide
range of partners or stakeholders beyond as well as within the state. This
provides two bases on which to analytically distinguish de-centred forms of
governance from the activities of centralized sovereign states. On the one
hand, the sovereign state can be seen as the quintessential expression of
hierarchy (imperative coordination) because it is, by definition, the political
unit that governs but is not itself governed. Hence, beyond the sovereign
state, we find the anarchy of interstate relations and/or the heterarchy of a
self-organizing international society. And, on the other hand, it is primarily
concerned with governing activities in its own territorial domain and defending
its territorial integrity against other states. In contrast, governance is
based on reflexive self-organization (networks, negotiation, negative
coordination, positive concerted action) rather than imperative coordination.
And it is concerned in the first instance with managing functional
interdependencies, whatever their scope (and perhaps with variable geometries),
rather than with activities occurring in a defined and delimited territory.
Adopting this approach leads to the view that the EU
is a major emerging site of governance that involves a plurality of state and
non-state actors on different levels who attempt to coordinate
activities around a series of functional problems. Without reference to
non-state as well as state actors and to functional as well as territorial
issues, the multilevel governance approach would be hard to distinguish from
intergovernmentalism. Thus the key question becomes how state and non-state
actors manage, if at all, to organize their common interests across several
territorial levels and/or across a range of functional domains. In this respect
there are two main approaches: the self-described multilevel governance
approach with its primary stress on the vertical dimension of multilevel
governance and a parallel body of work that puts more emphasis on its
horizontal dimension through the notion of the ‘network polity’ (sometimes
referred to, less fortunately, as the ‘network state’).
In the present context, multilevel governance involves
the institutionalization of reflexive self-organization among multiple
stakeholders across several scales of state territorial organization. This has
two implications. First, state actors would cooperate as negotiating partners
in a complex network, pooling their sovereign authority and other distinctive
capacities to help realize collectively agreed aims and objectives on behalf of
the network as a whole. They would operate at best as primus inter
pares in a complex and heterogeneous network rather than as immediate
holders of sovereign authority in a single hierarchical command structure. Thus
the formal sovereignty of states is better seen as one symbolic and/or material
resource among others rather than as the dominant resource. Indeed, from a
multilevel governance perspective, sovereignty is better interpreted as a
series of specific state capacities (e.g., legislative, fiscal, coercive, or
other state powers) rather than as one overarching and defining feature of the
state. Thus states will supply other resources, too, that are not directly tied
to their sovereign control over a national territory with its monopoly of
organized coercion, its control over the national money, and its monopoly over
taxation (Krätke 1984; Willke 1992). State involvement would therefore become
less hierarchical, less centralized, and less directive in character. Other
stakeholders in turn contribute other symbolic and/or material resources (e.g.,
private money, legitimacy, information, expertise, organizational capacities, or
power of numbers) to advance collectively agreed aims and objectives. Second,
in contrast to the clear hierarchy of territorial powers associated in theory
with the sovereign state, multilevel governance typically involves tangled
hierarchies and complex interdependence. Thus the EU functions less as a
re-scaled, supranational sovereign state apparatus than as a nodal point in an
extensive and tangled web of governance operations concerned to orchestrate
economic and social policy in and across many different scales of action with
the participation of a wide range of official, quasi-official, private economic
interests, and representatives of civil society.
The network polity (or state) provides a complementary
account of the nature of the European state political system. Three variants
can be noted: Castells’ ambiguous claims about the European network state, a
Foucauldian view that interprets recent patterns of European governance as a
shift to an advanced (neo-)liberal form of governmentality, and governance-theoretical
accounts of the network polity. The third variant is the most widespread but I
will comment briefly on each.
Castells has gained attention in some circles
for his recent extension of the overworked ‘network’ metaphor from the economy
and society to the state. But his brief account of European governance is
rendered ambiguous by his confused and confusing attachment to the concept of
‘network state’. Castells claims that the EU is organized essentially as a
network that pools and shares sovereignty. As such, rather than involving the
transfer of authority up to a European state that thereby supplants existing
European nation-states, the European Union as a whole tends to
operate as a network state. He defines the latter as a state that shares authority
(that is, in the last resort, the capacity to impose legitimized violence)
along a network. Here Castells retains the conventional Weberian notion of the
state as an apparatus possessing a legitimate monopoly of violence over a given
territorial area, implying that the authority of the European Union corresponds
to a specific territorial domain. But he adds that, by definition, a network
has nodes, not a centre, thereby implying that control over this monopoly is
more or less dispersed rather than centralized. This is particularly likely
because nodes may vary in size and be connected to the network by asymmetrical
ties. Indeed, the nodes formed by member states do differ in their respective
powers and capacities; and even the three largest member states have different
strengths (technological, industrial, financial, military).[2] This dispersion of authority and influence
among nodes in the European ‘network state’ is reflected in the complex,
variable, and changing geometry of European institutions. Thus Castells notes
that the EU combines control of decision-making by national governments (the
European Council, its rotating presidency, and regular meetings of the Council
of Ministers); management of common European business by a euro-technocracy,
directed by the politically-appointed European Commission; and symbolic
legitimacy vested in the European Parliament, the Court of Justice and the
Court of Auditors. The endless negotiations in this set of institutions, and
among the national actors pursing their strategies, may, argues Castells, look
cumbersome and inefficient. But it is exactly this indeterminacy and complexity
that enable the EU to muddle through, accommodating various interests and
changing policies, not only from different countries, but from the different
political orientations of parties elected to government (2000: 2, 5). From this
brief summary it can be seen that Castells’ account is still strongly imprinted
by state-theoretical assumptions and that his major innovation relative to
their usual expression in liberal intergovernmentalism and/or supranationalism
is to use the idea of ‘network’ to reveal some (but far from all) of the
complexity of the linkages between national states and European institutions.
A useful overview of the Foucauldian approach to
the changing ‘arts of international government’ (distinguishing between
imperialism, developmentalism, and the ‘new regionalism’) is presented in
Larner and Wallace (2002). Whilst referring in general terms to the EU as the
most advanced form of the ‘new regionalism’ considered as a form of liberal
governmentality, they enumerate several key distinguishing features of this new
art of international governmentality drawing on developments in North America
and the Asian Pacific as well as Europe. Haahr (2002) provides a parallel
Foucauldian study focused primarily on the emerging ‘open method of
coordination’ (OMC) that was formally announced during the 1999 Portuguese
Presidency.[3] The OMC is a ‘soft’ form of governance
that differs from traditional top-down ‘positive government’ and the previous
trend towards a European ‘regulatory state’ based on a neo-liberal Ordnungspolitik(on
which, see Majone 1997). As such, it involves concerted, centralized formulation
of objectives, quantification of indicators for measuring progress towards such
objectives, decentralized implementation, and systematic monitoring of
different member states’ progress. It thereby enables member states to address
problems at the European level without ceding new juridical competencies to the
European Union (Haahr 2002: 7-8). In this sense, argues Haahr, the OMC reflects
advanced liberal forms of government. These embody a notion of structured and
conditioned freedom: they are ‘practices of liberty’ that establish and
facilitate liberty but also discipline it and constrain its exercise. They
govern through the manipulation of techniques and mechanisms rather than more
directly through a classical liberal and/or Keynesian welfarist manipulation of
processes. Thus, while these new techniques of rule involve contracts,
consultation, negotiation, partnerships, empowerment, and activation, they also
set norms, standards, benchmarks, performance indicators, quality controls and
best practice standards. In short, ‘[a]dvanced liberal rule operates through
our freedom, through the way this freedom is structured, shaped, predicted and
made calculable’ (Haahr 2002: 9). Re-scaled from national states to the
European level, this is seen in the declared role of the OMC to help member
states evolve their own policies in new and major areas in line with the
constitutional principle of subsidiarity and in consultation with relevant
regional and local political authorities as well as with the social partners
and civil society. By developing strategies, setting and monitoring targets,
and forming partnerships, such ‘advanced liberal’ forms of governmentality can
both mobilize and discipline the energies of civil society. In this way, while
member states appear as agents capable of devising strategies and achieving
objectives without being directly subject to EU diktat, the European Commission
can appear as the institution empowered to assess their relative performance in
attaining the consensually-determined agreed objectives (Haahr 2002: 10-14).
More conventional governance-theoretical analyses of
the emerging European network polity start out from the difficulties of relying
on rigid hierarchical coordination in contexts characterized by complex
reciprocal interdependence among different fields across different scales
(Ladeur 1997; Pitschas 1995). Ansell provides a good overview of this approach
and summarizes his (and other) findings as follows:
… the networked polity is a structure of governance in
which both state and societal organization is vertically and horizontally
disaggregated (as in pluralism) but linked together by cooperative exchange (as
in pluralism). Organizational structures in the networked polity are organic
rather than mechanistic, which means that both knowledge and initiative are
decentralized and widely distributed. Horizontal relationships within and
across organizations are at least as important as vertical relationships, and
organizational relationships in general follow a pattern of many-to-many
(heterarchy) rather than many-to-one (hierarchy). Exchange is diffuse and/or
social rather [than] discrete and/or impersonal. The logic of governance
emphasizes the bringing together of unique configurations of actors around
specific projects oriented toward integrative solutions rather than dedicated
programs. These project teams will criss-cross organizational turf and the
boundary between public and private. State actors with a high degree of
centrality in the web of interorganizational linkages will be in a position to
provide facilitative leadership in constructing or steering these project
teams’ (Ansell 2000: 311).
Three main criticisms can be levelled at the main
governance-centred approaches, excluding for present purposes Castells and the
Foucauldians (I will return to Haahr’s analysis in my comments on ‘multilevel
metagovernance’). First, reflecting its different disciplinary roots and wide
range of applications, work on governance often largely remains at a
pre-theoretical stage: it is much clearer what the notion of governance
excludes than what it contains. This is reflected in a proliferation of
typologies of governance mechanisms constructed for different purposes and a large
measure of (often unspoken) disagreement about what is included, what excluded,
from the overall concept. Thus many early analyses served to establish that the
EU political system cannot easily be assimilated to, and studied in terms of, a
traditional conception of government; but it was unclear exactly how multilevel
governance operates to produce the European polity, how objects of governance
are defined in this context, and how stakeholders are defined. Later work has
begun to address these problems but often does so for specific policy areas or
policy networks, leaving open the issue of how different multilevel governance
regimes are connected, let alone how, if at all, they may acquire a relative
unity. Related to this comparative underdevelopment of the governance concept
are marked ambiguities in the referents of multilevel governance. For the term
is used to capture several trends in the development of the contemporary state
– the de-nationalization of statehood, the de-statization of politics, and the
re-articulation of territorial and functional powers. The fact that it is used
to describe the interaction of three analytically distinct trends (each with
its own countertrend) or, at least, to characterize their combined impact,
suggests that the concept may obscure as much as it clarifies about recent
changes.
Second, governance theories tend to be closely
connected to concerns about problem-solving and crisis-management in a wide
range of fields. This has led some governance theorists to focus on specific
collective decision-making or goal-attainment issues in relation to specific
(socially and discursively constituted) problems and to investigate how
governance contributes to problem-solving (for a belated self-criticism on this
score, see Mayntz 2001). But this can easily lead to a neglect of problems of
governance failure, i.e., the tendency for governance to fail to achieve its
declared objectives; and, a fortiori, neglect of the various
responses of different agents or subjects of governance to such failures as
they attempt to engage in different forms of metagovernance (on governance
failure and metagovernance, see Jessop 2000a, 2002b). Two aspects of
metagovernance are relevant here. On the one hand, because many studies of
governance are concerned with specific problem fields or objects of governance,
they tend to ignore questions of the relative compatibility or incompatibility
of different governance regimes and their implications for the overall unity of
the European project and European statehood. And, on the other hand, many
empirical studies have overlooked (or, at least failed to theorize) the
existence of meta-steering. This complicated process, which Dunsire (1996) has
aptly termed ‘collibration’, involves attempts to modify the relative weight
and targets of exchange, hierarchy, and networking in the overall coordination
of relations of complex interdependence. Yet such meta-steering is central to
many of the disputes over European integration and/or state formation and has
long been a key issue on the agenda of the European Union itself, especially
regarding the different steps in integration. This is reflected in the
increasing resort to partnerships, comitology, social dialogue, and the
mobilization of non-governmental organizations and social movements as
additional elements in the attempts to guide European integration and to steer
European Union policy-making and implementation (cf. Scott and Trubek 2002).
The ‘Lisbon Strategy’, with its advocacy of the extension of the ‘open method
of co-ordination’, and the recent White Paper on Governance are the latest
phases in this search for appropriate mechanisms of metagovernance (see below).
Third, work on multilevel governance and the
network polity poses fundamental issues about the extent to which a network
polity will remain tightly anchored in territorial terms (as opposed to being
necessarily territorially embedded) despite its highly pluralistic functional
concerns and its equally variable geometries. Schmitter raised just such issues
in another context, when he identified four possible, ideal-typical future
scenarios for the emerging Europolity. These scenarios were generated in true
sociological fashion through the formation of a two-by-two property space based
on two dichotomized dimensions of political regime formation: (1) an
essentially Westphalian versus ‘neo-medieval’ form of territorial organization;
and (2) heterogeneous and flexible versus tightly ordered and highly stable
functional representation.[4] The most interesting (and, he suggested,
more plausible) scenarios both involved flexibility on the second dimension.
They are a condominio (a neo-medieval state system with
flexible functional representation and policy-making) and a consortio (a
largely intergovernmental Europe des patries with polycentric,
incongruent flexible functional representation and policy-making). A
Westphalian state re-scaled to the European level with a well-ordered and
congruent European system of functional representation (to produce a stato,
which could be considered equivalent to a supranational European
superstate) was deemed unlikely; and a confederatio (a
neo-medieval territorial arrangement with tightly organized and stable
functional representation) was judged even more implausible (Schmitter 1992).
As an open-ended thought experiment only loosely
linked to empirical analysis, Schmitter’s typological exercise is not directly
relevant to my main objectives in this chapter. But it does serve two purposes
in the present context. For it suggests, first, that studies of multilevel
governance and/or network forms of political organization should not ignore
issues of territorial organization; and, second, once both sets of issues are
posed together, issues of multilevel metagovernance become central both in
practice and in theory. To these twin conclusions we might add a third, namely,
the need to question how far analyses of the political actors in the European
Union can be confined territorially to its member states (and, perhaps,
candidate states) and functionally to organized interests and movements that
are anchored primarily within the political space directly organized and controlled
by the European Union and its member states. For the forms, pace, and extent of
European integration are also relevant to other states (notably the USA and
USSR) and to a wide range of non-state forces with strong roots outside the
European Union.
Each of these problems has severe implications for an
adequate analysis of multilevel governance. In particular, they have produced a
situation described by Weiler and Wessels as comprising ‘too many case studies, ad
hoc lessons from limited experiences and organizational description
[and] too little theoretical mediation’ (1998: 230n). In part, of course, this ad
hoccery reflects the real complexities of the emerging European
polity. Indeed, it would be surprising if no such complexities existed. For
national states also involve heterogeneous patterns of government and/or
governance, with patterns varying with the objects of state intervention, the
nature of policy fields, the changing balance of forces in and beyond the
state, and so on. In this sense, perhaps, we may be witnessing a re-scaling of
the complexities of government and governance rather than a re-scaling of the
sovereign state or the emergence of just one more arena in which national
states pursue national interests. It is to these complexities at the national
scale that I now turn in order to provide some insights into how we might
re-think the emerging EU polity.
Changes in Statehood in Advanced Capitalist
Societies
Here I advance three inter-related propositions about
recent trends in national states to provide just one possible approach to the
‘theoretical mediation’ called for by Weiler and Wessels. These three trends
are derived from theoretically-informed observation of developments in
developed capitalist economies in all triad regions rather than Europe alone.
In this sense, their generality across these regions (and, hence, their
occurrence elsewhere) suggests they are not generated by processes peculiar to
the European region. For this reason they can help to contextualize and
interpret recent trends in the development of European statehood (cf. Ziltener
1999). But it must also be recognized that these trends have many different
causes. They should not be treated as singular causal mechanisms in their own
right, which would mean neglecting their essentially descriptive, synthetic,
and generalized nature. Nor should they be thought to entail unidirectional
movement or multilateral convergence across all national or triadic regimes.
Instead, they can, and do, take different empirical forms (for example, on the
differing dynamics of cross-border regions in North America and Europe, see
Blatter 2001).
First, there is a general trend towards the de-nationalization of
territorial statehood. This trend should not be mistaken,pace Shaw
(2000), for the rise of a ‘global state’ – at least if the concept of state is
to retain its core meaning of the territorialization of a centralized political
authority so that a ‘global state’ amounts to a single ‘world state’. Instead
it represents a re-articulation of different levels of the territorial
organization of power within the global political system. As such it is
reflected empirically in the ‘hollowing out’ of the national state apparatus
with old and new state capacities being reorganized territorially on
subnational, national, supranational, and translocal levels. State powers are
moved upwards, downwards, and sideways as state managers on different scales
attempt to enhance their respective operational autonomies and strategic
capacities. One aspect of this is the gradual loss of the de jure sovereignty
of national states in certain respects as rule- and/or decision-making powers
are transferred upwards to supranational bodies and the resulting rules and
decisions are held to bind national states. Another aspect is the devolution of
authority to subordinate levels of territorial organization and the development
of transnational but inter-local policy-making. The overall result is the
proliferation of institutionalized scales of political decision-making, the
increasing complexity of inter-scalar articulation, and a bewildering variety
of transnational relations.
Countering this trend is the enhanced role of national
states in managing inter-scalar relations. That is, national states seek to
control what powers or competencies go up, down, or sideways and to exercise
this control so as to enhance their capacities to realize their current state
projects; and they also seek, as far as possible, to retain the competence to
revoke such transfers of powers and/or to implement them in ways that do least
damage to their capacity to secure institutional integration and social
cohesion with their corresponding territories. In this sense, even if state
powers and competencies are no longer exercised in the framework of the
national state qua ‘power container’, the advanced states
still retain considerable autonomy in regard to how to organize and re-scale
state powers to promote state projects. The key question then becomes how far
the movement of competencies or powers away from the national state is
irreversible either constitutionally (such that attempted repatriation of
powers would be subject to legal sanction or a constitutional use of armed
force) or informally (such that attempts to repatriate powers would be regarded
as politically illegitimate and/or economically infeasible). This said, it is
generally easier for national states to reclaim powers and competencies
devolved downwards or sideways than those that are shifted upwards (but see
below).
Second, there is a trend towards the de-statization of
the political system. This involves a shift from government to
governance on various territorial scales and across various
functional domains. There is a movement from the central role of the official
state apparatus in securing state-sponsored projects and political hegemony
towards an emphasis on partnerships between governmental, para-governmental,
and non-governmental organizations in which the state apparatus is often only
first among equals. Governance involves the complex art of steering multiple
agencies, institutions, and systems that are both operationally autonomous from
one another and structurally coupled through various forms of reciprocal
interdependence. Governments have always relied on other agencies to assist
them in realizing state objectives or projecting state power beyond the
formally-defined state apparatus. But this familiar reliance on government and governance
has been increased and re-ordered. This is reflected in the proliferation of
public-private partnerships in various guises to supplement and sometimes to
replace more traditional forms of corporatism and concertation. The relative
weight of governance has also increased on all levels – including horizontal
cross-border transactions as well as coordination across different vertical
scales from the local through the triads to the global level. Nonetheless this
need not mean the loss of state capacity. Indeed a shift to governance can
enhance the capacity to project state power and achieve state objectives by
mobilizing knowledge and power resources from influential non-governmental
partners or stakeholders.
Countering this shift is government’s increased role
in metagovernance. For political authorities (on and across all
levels) are becoming more involved in all aspects of metagovernance: they get
involved in redesigning markets, in constitutional change and the juridical
re-regulation of organizational forms and objectives, in organizing the
conditions for self-organization, and, most importantly, in the overall process
of collibration. In this last respect, they provide the ground rules for
governance and the regulatory order in and through which governance partners
can pursue their aims; ensure the compatibility or coherence of different
governance mechanisms and regimes; act as the primary organizer of the dialogue
among policy communities; deploy a relative monopoly of organizational
intelligence and information with which to shape cognitive expectations; serve
as a ‘court of appeal’ for disputes arising within and over governance; seek to
re-balance power differentials by strengthening weaker forces or systems in the
interests of system integration and/or social cohesion; try to modify the
self-understanding of identities, strategic capacities, and interests of
individual and collective actors in different strategic contexts and hence
alter their implications for preferred strategies and tactics; and also assume
political responsibility in the event of governance failure. These emerging
metagovernance roles mean that different forms of coordination (markets,
hierarchies, networks, and solidarities) and the different forms of
self-organization characteristic of governance take place ‘in the shadow of
hierarchy’ (cf. Scharpf 1994: 40).
Third, there is a complex trend towards the
internationalization of policy regimes. The international context of domestic
state action has extended to include a widening range of extra-territorial or
transnational factors and processes; it has become more significant
strategically for domestic policy; the key players in policy regimes have also
expanded to include foreign agents and institutions as sources of policy ideas,
policy design, and implementation; and there is an increasing number of
increasingly influential international regimes across a growing range of policy
fields. This trend is reflected in economic and social policies as states
become more concerned with ‘international competitiveness’ in the widest sense
and with the transnational constraints, consequences, and conditions of state
action. It is also reflected in the development of global public policy
networks and increasingly ambitious plans for the harmonization (not standardization)
of policy regimes across many policy fields. Somewhat ambiguously countering
yet reinforcing this trend is a growing ‘interiorization’ of international
constraints as the latter become integrated into the policy paradigms and
cognitive models of domestic policy-makers. And, more clearly representing a
counter-trend, we find that states (on all levels) are now increasingly active
in attempting to shape the nature of international regimes, their
interrelations, and their local implementation. Currently, it is again the
national state that generally has the key role in these struggles to shape
international regimes and to shape their local implementation, using whatever
arenas are available to this end. This is because the national state is generally
the only political organization that is empowered to bind its citizens to
international commitments. The European Union is an increasingly important
exception to this rule, however, differing significantly from the supranational
organization of the other triad regions in this regard.
In short, these three changes do not exclude a
continuing and central political role for national states. But it is a role
that is necessarily redefined as a result of the more general re-articulation
of the local, regional, national, and supranational levels of economic and
political organization. Unless or until supranational political organization
acquires not only governmental powers but also some measure of
popular-democratic legitimacy, the national state will remain a key political
factor as the highest instance of bourgeois democratic political
accountability. How it plays this role will depend on the changing
institutional matrix and shifts in the balance of forces as globalization,
triadization, regionalization, and resurgent local governance proceed apace.
Possibly the most important role for the national state here is in
metagovernance, i.e., coordinating different forms of governance and ensuring a
minimal coherence among them. In this sense Shaw (2000) is right to claim that
the national state core to governance will not go away. But this will be less
governmental and more oriented to issues of metagovernance. But there is no
point at which a final metagovernance instance can be established to coordinate
the myriad subordinate forms of governance – this would re-introduce the
principle of sovereignty or hierarchy that growing social complexity and
globalization now rule out.
I have introduced these three trends for one major
reason. If the national state can no longer be understood in terms of the
received notion of the sovereign national state, then perhaps this notion is
also inadequate for studying the evolving EU as a state form. Indeed, we can go
further: if the national state is changing in the ways that I have suggested,
then the future position and activities of the EU within a re-territorialized,
de-statized, and internationalized Staatenwelt must be very
carefully reconsidered. What we are witnessing is the re-scaling of the
complexities of government and governance rather than the
re-scaling of the sovereign state or the emergence of just one more arena in
which national states pursue national interests.
Much the same point can be made through changes in the
state’s form and functions regarding capital accumulation. These can be studied
along four key dimensions. The first concerns the state’s distinctive roles in
securing conditions for profitable private business. This is the broad field of
economic policy and matters because market forces alone cannot secure these
conditions. The second dimension refers to the state’s distinctive roles in
reproducing labour power individually and collectively over various timespans
from quotidian routines via individual lifecycles to intergenerational
reproduction. This is the broad field of social policy and matters because
market forces and civil society alone cannot fully secure these conditions in
contemporary conditions. The third dimension refers to the main scale, if any,
on which economic and social policies are decided – even if underpinned or
implemented on other scales. This is important as economic and social policies
are politically mediated and the scales of political organization may not
coincide with those of economic and social life. The fourth concerns the
relative weight of the mechanisms deployed in the effort to maintain private
profitability and reproduce labour-power by compensating for market failures
and inadequacies. Top-down state intervention is just one of these mechanisms;
and, as is well known, states as well as markets can fail. This suggests the
need for additional governance mechanisms and, a fortiori, for an
active collibrating role for the state (see above).
Referring to these four dimensions, the postwar state
in northwestern Europe can be described ideal-typically as a Keynesian welfare
national state (or KWNS). First, the state was distinctively Keynesian insofar
as it aimed to secure full employment in a relatively closed national economy
and did so mainly through demand-side management and national infrastructural
provision. Second, social policy had a distinctive welfare orientation
insofar as it (a) instituted economic and social rights for all citizens so
that they could share in growing prosperity (and contribute to high levels of
demand) even if they were not employed in the high-wage, high-growth economic
sectors; and (b) promoted forms of collective consumption favourable to the
Fordist growth dynamic based on mass production and mass consumption. Third,
the KWNS was national insofar as these economic and social
policies were pursued within the historically specific (and socially
constructed) matrix of a national economy, a national state, and a society
composed of national citizens. Within this matrix, the national territorial state
was mainly responsible for developing and guiding Keynesian welfare policies.
Local and regional states acted mainly as relays for these policies; and, in
addition, the leading international regimes established after WW2 were mainly
intended to restore stability to national economies and national states. And,
fourth, the KWNS was statist insofar as state institutions (on
different levels) were the chief supplement and corrective to market forces in
a ‘mixed economy’ concerned with economic growth and social integration.
For reasons explored elsewhere (Jessop 2002b),
the KWNS experienced a major and multiple crisis in the late 1970s and early
1980s. It has since been tendentially replaced by a new form of state with new
functions on these four dimensions. I have termed this the Schumpeterian
workfare post-national regime (or SWPR). It can be described in ideal-typical
terms as follows. First, it is Schumpeterian insofar as it
tries to promote permanent innovation and flexibility in relatively open
economies by intervening on the supply-side and to strengthen as far as
possible their overall competitiveness.[5] Second, as a workfare regime,
the SWPR subordinates social policy to the demands of labour market flexibility
and employability and to the demands of economic competition. This includes
putting downward pressure on the social wage qua cost of
international production but, given the economic and political limits to
welfare cuts, it is especially concerned with the re-functionalization of the
inherited welfare state to serve economic interests. The state also attempts to
create subjects to serve as partners in the innovative, knowledge-driven,
entrepreneurial, flexible economy and its accompanying self-reliant,
autonomous, empowered workfare regime. Third, the SWPR is ‘postnational‘
insofar as the national territory has become less important as an economic,
political, and cultural ‘power container’. This is associated with a transfer
of economic and social policy-making functions upwards, downwards, and sideways
and with an increasing role for supranational non-governmental bodies and
quangos in policy advocacy and policy transfer. And, fourth, given the growing
recognition of state as well as market failure, the SWPR is associated, as we
have seen, with a dual shift from government to governance and, just as
importantly, from government to metagovernance.
This account of the three trends and countertrends in
statehood and the distinction between the KWNS and SWPR also applies, of
course, to the emerging Europolity. For the latter is an integral moment in the
de-nationalization of the state, the de-statization of politics, and the
internationalization of regimes – without being the highest level to which
national state powers are shifted upwards, at which new forms of partnership
are being organized, or on which the internationalization of policy regimes is
occurring. Likewise, the changes in the dominant strategies used to build the
Europolity, however ineffective, the forms it assumes, however impure, the
functions that it exercises, however imperfectly, and the theoretical paradigms
used to interpret it, however flawed, are all related to the periodization of
the state in the advanced capitalist economies. Thus, to narrate rather
breathlessly the phases of Europolity development detailed at length by
Ziltener (1999), the initial steps towards Western European integration were
initiated through a transatlantic coalition aiming to promote a postwar
reconstruction that would integrate Western Europe into the economic and
political circuits of Atlantic Fordism (cf. van der Pijl 1984); during the boom
years of Atlantic Fordism, the ‘Monnet mode of integration’ was concerned to
create a ‘Keynesian-corporatist’ (sic) form of statehood on the European
level that could secure the conditions for different national fordist modes of
development (cf. Ruigrok and van Tulder 1996) but developed crisis symptoms as
the member states pursued divergent strategies in response to the
interconnected economic and political crises in/of Fordism; the resulting
crisis in European integration prompted the search for a new mode of
integration and led to the internal market project – with important conflicts
between neo-liberal, neo-corporatist, and neo-statist currents – and the
development of new modes of economic and political coordination (cf. van
Apeldoorn 2002); after a period of experimentation with new modes of
coordination, the provisional outcome of these conflicts can be discerned in a
new ‘Schumpeterian workfare’ mode of integration and coordination concerned to
promote the structural competitiveness of Europe in a globalizing
knowledge-based economy (cf. Telò 2002). Ziltener also suggests that the
dominant line of conflict regarding Europolity construction during the Monnet
period of Keynesian-corporatism was supranationalism versus
intergovernmentalism and that the Delors project could be seen as a failed
supranational attempt to rescale the Keynesian welfare state to the European
level (1999: 129-30, 18-184). To this we might add that the shift towards a
European SWPR is clearly associated with a shift in the dominant line of
conflict around appropriate forms of multilevel governance and the ‘network
polity’. This story is too brief, of course, to do justice to the complexities
of European integration, the complexities of modes of coordination, their
intended functions, and their variation with the objects of coordination, and
the complexities of competing paradigms and paradigm shifts within and across
different disciplines. But it does illustrate the need to periodize the
Europolity and, indeed, to locate it in a broader context concerned with the
reorganization of statehood on a still more global scale.
The European Union and Multilevel Metagovernance
I now apply the preceding arguments on metagovernance
to the European Union as part of the more general change in the forms of
statehood. There are at least two levels of failure – the failure of particular
attempts at governance using a particular governance mechanism and the more
general failure of a mode of governance. Thus, corresponding to the three basic
modes of governance (or coordination) distinguished above, we can distinguish
three basic modes of metagovernance and one umbrella mode. First, there is the
reflexive redesign of individual markets and/or the reflexive reordering of
relations among two or more markets by modifying their operation, nesting,
articulation, embedding, disembedding, or re-embedding. There are also ‘markets
in markets’. This can lead to ‘regime shopping’, competitive ‘races to the
bottom’, or, in certain conditions, ‘races to the top’. Moreover, because
markets function in the shadow of hierarchy and/or heterarchy, attempts are
also made by non-market agents to modify markets, their institutional supports,
and their agents to improve their efficiency and/or compensate for market
failures and inadequacies. Second, there is the reflexive redesign of
organizations, the creation of intermediating organizations, the reordering of
inter-organizational relations, and the management of organizational ecologies
(i.e., the organization of the conditions of organizational evolution in
conditions where many organizations co-exist, compete, cooperate, and
co-evolve). This is reflected in the continuing redesign, re-scaling, and
adaptation of the state apparatus, sometimes more ruptural, sometimes more
continuous, and the manner in which it is embedded within the wider political
system. And, third, there is the reflexive organization of the conditions of
self-organization through dialogue and deliberation. There are many activities
involved here from organizing opportunities for spontaneous sociability through
various measures to promote networking and negotiation to the facilitation of
‘institutional thickness’. Fourth, and finally, there is collibration or ‘metagovernance’
proper (see above). This involves managing the complexity, plurality, and
tangled hierarchies found in prevailing modes of co-ordination. It is the
organization of the conditions for governance and involves the judicious mixing
of market, hierarchy, and networks to achieve the best possible outcomes from
the viewpoint of those engaged in metagovernance. In this sense it also means
the organization of the conditions of governance in terms of their structurally
inscribed strategic selectivity, i.e., in terms of their asymmetrical
privileging of some outcomes over others. Unfortunately, since every practice
is prone to failure, metagovernance and collibration are also likely to fail.
This implies that there is no Archimedean point from which governance or
collibration can be guaranteed to succeed and that there will always be an
element of irony in attempts to engage in collibration in the face of likely
failure.
Governments play a major and increasing role in all
aspects of metagovernance: they get involved in redesigning markets, in
constitutional change and the juridical re-regulation of organizational forms
and objectives, in organizing the conditions for self-organization, and, most
importantly, in collibration. Thus metagovernance does not eliminate other
modes of co-ordination. Markets, hierarchies, and heterarchies still exist; but
they operate in a context of ‘negotiated decision-making’. On the one hand,
market competition will be balanced by cooperation, the invisible hand will be
combined with a visible handshake. On the other hand, the state is no longer
the sovereign authority. It becomes just one participant among others in the
pluralistic guidance system and contributes its own distinctive resources to
the negotiation process. As the range of networks, partnerships, and other
models of economic and political governance expand, official apparatuses remain
at best first among equals.
It is in this context that we can best interpret the
continuities and discontinuities in the development of the European Union as a
moment in the structural transformation and strategic reorientation of
statehood in a world of states that is not limited to Europe but extends to the
global polity (cf. Hettne 1997; Shaw 2000; Sørensen 2001). For the European Union
can be seen as a major and, indeed, increasingly important, supranational
instance of multilevel metagovernance in relation to a wide
range of complex and interrelated problems. While the sources and reach of
these problems go well beyond the territorial space occupied by its member
states, the EU is an important, if complex, point of intersection (or node) in
the emerging, hypercomplex, and chaotic system of global governance (or,
better, metagovernance) and is seeking to develop its own long-term ‘Grand
Strategy’ for Europe (Telò 2002: 266). But it is still one node among several
within this emerging system of global metagovernance and cannot be fully
understood without taking account of its complex relations with other nodes
located above, below, and transversal to the European Union.
It is clearly premature at a time when the European
Union is conducting yet another debate on its future governance to predict the
eventual shape of what is bound to be a complex and compromise-based form of
multilevel metagovernance in the shadow of a post-national form of statehood.
This underlines that the development of multilevel metagovernance is a
reflexive process, involving intergovernmental conferences and other modes of
meta-constitutional conversation (Walker 2000). But there can be little doubt
that the overall movement is towards metagovernance rather than a rescaling of
the traditional form of sovereign statehood or a revamped form of
intergovernmentalism inherited from earlier rounds of European integration. As
an institutionalized form of metagovernance, emphasis falls on efforts at
collibration in an unstable equilibrium of compromise rather than on a
systematic, consistent resort to one dominant method of coordination of complex
interdependence. Apparent inconsistencies may be part of an overall
self-organizing, self-adjusting practice of metagovernance within a complex
division of government and governance powers. Seen as a form of metagovernance,
the emphasis is on a combination of ‘super-vision’ and ‘supervision’, i.e., a
relative monopoly of organized intelligence and overall monitoring of adherence
to benchmarks. But in this evolving framework, there is also a synergetic
division of metagovernance labour between the European Council, the specialized
Councils, and the European Commission. The European Council is the political
metagovernance network of prime ministers that decides on the overall political
dynamic around economic and social objectives, providing a ‘centripetal
orientation of subsidiarity’ (Telò 2002: 253), acting by qualified majority,
and playing a key intergovernmental and monitoring role. The European
Commission plays a key metagovernance role in organizing parallel power
networks, providing expertise and recommendations, developing benchmarks,
monitoring progress, exchanging best practice, promoting mutual learning, and
ensuring continuity and coherence across Presidencies. This is associated with
increasing networking across old and new policy fields at the European level as
well as with a widening range of economic, political, and social forces that
are being drawn into multilevel consultation, policy formulation, and policy
implementation.
New methods of multilevel metagovernance are
being developed and combined in a complex system of metagovernance (cf. Scott
and Trubek 2002) that is ‘being made more precise and applied (with adaptations
as for its intensity) to other fundamental policy fields, traditionally under
the competence of national and sub-national authorities: education, structural
reform and internal market, technological innovation and knowledge-based
society, research and social protection’ (Telò 2002: 253).[6] From a strategic-relational perspective,
this clearly implies a shift in the strategic selectivities of the modes of
governance and metagovernance in the European Union. For, while it builds on
past patterns of liberal intergovernmentalism and neo-functionalist spillover,
it has its own distinctive momentum and will weaken more hierarchical forms of
coordination (whether intergovernmental or supranational). It also entails
complementary changes in the strategic selectivities of national states and
subordinate levels of government and governance, calling for new forms of
strategic coordination and new forms (meta-)governance in and across a wide
range of policy fields.
The pattern of multilevel metagovernance in the
European Union is still evolving and, given the inherent tendencies towards
failure typical of all major forms of governance (market, hierarchy, network,
etc.) as well as metagovernance itself (Jessop 2002a, 2002b), continuing
experimentation, improvisation, and adaptation is only to be expected.
Nonetheless:
‘the perspective would be that of a new system of
democratic legitimacy and governance: multilevel (international, national,
supranational, transnational), multifaced (territorial, functional, modern and
post-modern) and with a multitude of actors (social, economic, political and
cultural; institutional and extra-institutional), rather than that of a
classical democratic normative model – federal/constitutional or
democrat/republican’ (Telò 2002: 266; cf. Schmitter 1992).
Thus the key issue for a research agenda into this new
form of statehood becomes the manner and extent to which the multiplying
levels, arenas, and regimes of politics, policy-making, and
policy-implementation can be endowed with a certain apparatus and operational
unity horizontally and vertically; and how this affects the overall operation
of politics and the legitimacy of the new political arrangements.
Concluding Remarks
I have argued that neither the state- nor the
governance-centric perspective is adequate for analyzing the complexities of
multilevel governance in Europe. Each approach is flawed theoretically in its
own distinctive ways; nor can their respective deficits be overcome by
combining them to produce a more coherent account. Each approach is also
plagued to different degrees by anachronistic views about the contemporary
world – whether about the state or about the objects and subjects of
governance. This means that neither approach can capture the novelty of the
emerging European polity as a ‘political machine’ for multilevel metagovernance
(cf. Barry 2001). The alternative approach offered here draws on the
strategic-relational approach and its application to the more general
transformation of contemporary political economy as a means to contextualize
and ‘theoretically mediate’ recent changes in statehood. This has two sets of
implications for future research.
First, regarding the more immediate questions of
governance and metagovernance, the SRA emphasises the strategic selectivity of
institutional arrangements. Multilevel government, multilevel governance, and
multilevel metagovernance arrangements will all have their own distinctive
strategic selectivities, i.e., they are never neutral among actors, interests,
spatio-temporal horizons, alliances, strategies, tactics, etc. They also have
their own distinctive modalities of success, failure, tension, crisis,
reflexivity, and crisis-management. These selectivities and modalities depend
on specific institutional, organizational, and practical contexts and few
generalizations are possible about them (for further discussion, including some
possibly hubristic generalizations, see Jessop 2002b). Nonetheless, one
generalization that can safely be hazarded is that the belief that multilevel
governance can solve old problems without creating new ones is wishful thinking
(cf. Mayntz 2001). In turn this implies the need for an ironic,
experimental approach to multilevel metagovernance that is concerned to ensure
requisite variety in available modes of coordination as well as appropriate
levels of reflexivity, super-vision, and supervision in their combination and
implementation.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, it is only by
situating the changing political forms of the European Union as part of the
ongoing transformation and attempted reregulation of global capitalism as well
as part of the more general transformation of statehood in response to major
socio-cultural as well as politico-economic changes that one can adequately
understand what is at stake in these changes. Among other interesting results,
this approach reinforces the importance of examining not only multilevel
governance but also multilevel metagovernance. For the
development of the European Union can be seen as part of continuing efforts
(often at cross-purposes) by key economic and political actors to produce an
appropriate balance between different modes of economic and political
coordination across functional and territorial divides and to ensure, under the
primacy of the political, a measure of apparatus unity and political legitimacy
for the European Union. This has taken different forms at different periods in
the pursuit of the European project, especially as this has been shaped at
different times by shifts in the relative weight of Atlanticist and European
economic and political strategies, by shifts in the relative weight of liberal
and neo-liberal échangiste (money capital) perspectives and
neo-corporatist and neo-mercantilist productivist projects, and by the
tendential shift from a KWNS approach concerned to create a single market to
realize economies of scale to a SWPR approach concerned to transform the
European Union into the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy
and to ‘modernize’ the European social model. In addition, of course, this
European-wide multilevel metagovernance project is being conducted in
conditions of successive rounds of expansion (which have increased the
heterogeneity of the growth dynamics and modes of regulation of different
regional and national economies as well as the forms and extent of uneven
development and inequalities) and in conditions where national economies and
national states have been subject to their own individual structural problems
and crises as well as the shared crisis-tendencies derived from their
integration into the circuits of Atlantic Fordism and into the emerging
globalizing knowledge-based economy. And, finally, this multilevel
metagovernance project is part of a broader post-Westphalian
‘meta-constitutional conversation’ that is occurring between non-state and state
actors (including meta-states such as the EU) as they struggle to develop and
institutionalize a new political order (Walker 2000). While it has not been
possible within the limits of a short chapter to develop the analysis that this
approach demands, I hope enough has been said to show the promise of the
strategic-relational approach as one among several alternatives to be explored
in future work on the European Union.
Acknowledgement
The arguments on governance in this chapter have
benefitted from discussions at various times with Henrik Bang, Ulrich Beck,
Frank Deppe, Edgar Grande, Liesbet Hooghe, Beate Kohler-Koch, Gary Marks,
Markus Perkmann, Rod Rhodes, and Gerry Stoker. I also learnt much from the
Sheffield conference. Given the idiosyncrasies of its approach to governance as
well as many other matters, it is especially important that the usual
disclaimers apply.
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Endnotes
[1] Statecraft
(the art of government) can be considered as a repertoire of skilled,
discursive practices that reflexively monitor events and activities beyond as
well as within the state and thereby inform state projects and attempts to
exercise state power.
[2] Castells argues, for example, that Germany
is the hegemonic economic power, Britain and France have greater military
power; and all three have at least equal technological capacity compared with
other member states (2000: 5).
[3] For an alternative Anglo-Foucauldian
account of Europe as a ‘network state’ that is also inspired by actor-network
theory, see Barry 2001.
[4] I have simplified and renamed the
dichotomies on Schmitter’s two axes for the sake of brevity; see his text for
the complete version, expressed, as usual, inimitably.
[5] This first term in the SWPR ideal type
invokes Schumpeter, the theorist of innovation, entrepreneurship, and
competition, rather than Keynes, the theorist of money, employment, and
national demand, as its emblematic economist.
[6] Telò is commenting on the open method of
coordination but his comment can be generalized to other forms of
meta-governance, including partnership, comitology, social dialogue, and so
forth.
