Have a read this post about the developing characteristics of the national security state in the US controlled by the Republicans. In this post Glenn Greenwald says:
The excesses and extremist conduct in which our government [the Bush Adminsitration] now engages has become so commonplace as to be mind-numbing. We detain U.S. citizens and stick them in military prisons with no trial, charges or even access to lawyers. We use torture as an interrogation tool. We use secret, off-the-book Soviet-era gulags that are beyond the reach of the law. We send people to the most repugnant governments to be tortured. And the President has expressly embraced the theory that he has the power to break the law.
There certainly appears to be no limits on what Bush followers will endorse in the name of fighting The Enemies, domestic ones included, sometimes most prominently. And what is so significant about this is that the institutions which previously existed as a safeguard against arbitrary punishment and abuse of power -- things like due process guarantees, Congressional oversight, an adversarial media, whistleblowers -- have all been steadily eroded. The administration has seized the power to arrest people without charges, hold them in secret prisons, use torture to interrogate them, etc. That is all out in the open and prompts defenses of these practices from its followers. That makes the attempt to equate political opposition with criminality and even treason -- one of the most common tactics of the administration and its followers -- all the more dangerous.
A common thesis about the informatiion economy holds that the process of globalisation is pervasive, impacting on all aspects of social life. It is associated with the decline of the nation state. The overall impact of globalisation has been to de-link financial capital from actual production, and to increase the dependency of national economies across the globe to the dictates of fluctuations in financial markets.
Consequently, the power of nation states to stabilise domestic economic conditions through fiscal and monetary policy has been severely undermined. Financial capitalists can act with speed to shift investments from one ailing industry (or risky country) to another anywhere in the global economy.
That is a good account of the economic shifts taking place arround us. What is debatable is the implication that is often made. Thsi implication is that globalisation has precipitated, and caused, the decline of the nation state.---the nation state is loosing power, is in decline; and is adrift. This happened mainly because globalisation has made all national economies depend upon the performance of their financial markets. And these financial markets are globally integrated. The state has therefore lost control over monetary policies and interest rates - key levers of national economic policy.
Has it?
It is true that big shifts are taking place in the new economy. For instance, we have the undermining of the social safety net including unemployment, health and other social benefits for the poor and sick. We also have changes to protected labour markets, minimum wage legislation, and the national system of industrial relations built around negotiation and consensus with a strongly organised union movement. The changes in the labour market are centred mainly on the rise of 'flexible labour' and the growth of part-time, self-employed, non-formal and other forms of temporary and outsourced employment. We also have changes in class consciousness away from the old collective one assocated with the Fordist economy based on large factories making the same product moving along the same conveyor belt, towards a more individualised one.
But this does not necessarily mean the nation state is adrift in the sense of decline. It can still shape development and it still can choose from a range of strategic objectives.
In Four Articles 1931-1938 Carl Schmitt argues for the emergence of a total state. How relevant, or useful, is this idea to the current situation of the conservative national security state fighting the war on terrorism?
Schmitt traces the emergence of the total state in a variety of ways. He says:
"In every modern state, the distinction between state and economy emerges as the real issue of the current, direct questions of internal policy. They can no longer be answered by means of the old liberal principle of unqualified non-interference and unrestricted non-intervetion. ..In the present day state, the economic questions constitute the core of the difficulties of the internal policy, and all the more so, the more modern and industrial the state is. Internal and foreign policies are economic policies to a considerable extent, and...not just as customs and trade policy or as social policy."
"At the very moment whern the victory seemed to be fully its own, parliament, the legislative body, the vehicle and keystone of the legislative state, turned into a contradiction-ridden structure, disowning its own qualifications and premises of its victory [over the old monarchy]. Its previous position and superiority, its expansionalist drive at the expense of the government, its representation in the name of the people, all that presupposed the distinction between state and soceity did not survive the parliament's victory, at least not in that form."
"...a stage for unifying free debate among free representatives of the people, from a transformer of narrow party interests into a supra party will, into a stage for the pluralistic division of the organized societal powers."