Taking Back Control?

The era of hyperglobalisation, once hailed as the 'end of history', was characterised by boundless capitalist expansion. The neoliberal revolution gave rise to a politics of scale aimed at the centralisation and unification of states and state systems: the replacement of national with global governance or, in Europe, of the nation-state with a supranational superstate, the European Union.

The 'New World Order' proclaimed by the United States in the wake of the Soviet collapse proved to be ungovernable by democratic means. Instead, it was ruled through a combination of technocracy and mercatocracy, failing spectacularly to provide for political stability, social legitimacy, and international peace. Marked by a series of economic and institutional crises, hyperglobalisation gave rise to various kinds of political countermovements that rebelled against and ultimately stopped the upward transfer of state authority in its tracks.

Taking Back Control? analyses the ongoing tug-of-war between the forces of globalism and democracy, of centralisation and decentralisation, and unification and differentiation of states and state systems. It explores how these forces are tied to the advance of global capitalism and the prospects for its social and democratic regulation.

Exploring the possibility for states and the societies they govern to take back control over their collective fate, the book is an attempt at a renewed theory of the state in political economy. Inspired by the work of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes, it discusses the potential outlines of a state system allowing for democratic governance within and peaceful cooperation between sovereign nation-states.