The Globalisation and the Rise of the Fortress State
by Clyde W. Barrow
pp. 90-101 Issue 18 (9,2) – July-December 2022 ISSN (online): 2539/2239 ISSN (print): 2389-8232 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14718/SoftPower.2022.9.2.5
Abstract
Since the 1990s, globalization theory has routinely dismissed the nation-state as irrelevant to understanding contemporary political and economic development. A series of books and articles have thus argued for the crisis of the nation-state, the withdrawal of the state and even the end of the nation-state. This article instead considers the relationship between the theory of globalization and the theory of the state to argue that nation-states are the main agents of globalization, as well as the guarantors of the political and material conditions necessary for the accumulation of global capital. This text argues that globalization theory has constructed a distorted antinomy, which ignores significant developments in neo-Marxist state theory. To understand the process of globalization, it is important to recognize that the state is always present within the social relations of production. In this way, it is possible to understand that the new globalized system of capital accumulation has resulted in an a widening asymmetry between the state’s responsiveness to demands for policies that facilitate capital accumulation as opposed to policies that sustain its democratic legitimacy. This asymmetry is increasingly generating national state forms that are “fortress states” prone to using repressive mea- sures to protect capital accumulation against democratic popular demands for protective regulations and social welfare provision.