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January 11, 2008
In an interview at Eurozine entitled Denationalized states and global assemblage Saskia Sassen picks up on the decay of the liberal state theme mentioned in this earlier post. She says:
What is happening today is on the one hand a decay (objectively speaking) of liberalism even as an ideology – being replaced with neoliberalism, attacks on the welfare state, etc – and, on the other hand, a decay of the structural conditions within which Keynesian liberalism could function.
She says that this is evident in the US and in other liberal democratic regimes that are neo-liberalizing their social policies, hollowing out their legislatures/parliaments, and augmenting as well as privatizing or protecting the power of their executive or prime ministerial branch of government.
That is to say, we will see these trends where we see the conditions I identify for the US, even though they will assume their own specific forms and contents. I would say that Blair's reign in the UK especially since the war on Iraq has clearly moved in this direction. Instead of being guided (and disciplined!) by the Cabinet, which is parliament based, Blair set up a parallel "cabinet" at Downing Street from which he got much of his advice and confirmations of the correctness of his decisions. This had the effect of hollowing out the real Cabinet.
A similar process in the centralization of executive power happened under John Howard's regime in Australia. Big governance decisions were made without cabinet on ocassions-- eg. around the water issue in the Murray-Darling Basin.
The inference is traditional liberalism is in crisis, or at least being attacked by the governments themselves as well as by powerful economic actors and certain traditional society sectors, such as fundamentalist evangelical groups in the US. Why should it last forever?
Perhaps the real question is whether the state in countries such as the US is liberal, or ever was liberal. It may have implemented liberal policies, and the legislature at various times did embed liberal norms in the state apparatus. But these did not always last. Today we are witnessing yet another set of breakdowns.
Sassen says that today's "social question" – the groups that are marginal or excluded in today's economic circuits and the political subjectivities that this gives birth to illuminates like few others the decaying capacity of the liberal state to handle the social question – given the type of liberalism that has evolved over the last twenty to thirty years and the context within which today's liberal state operates.
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