Globalization and the Future of the Nation State

From 14 to 18 June 1999, Joachim Hirsch, Professor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, visited the IHS’s Department of Political Science. He discussed the future of the nation state in the light of recent globalization trends.

Considering different strands of regulation theory, Hirsch analyzed the changing relation between polities and economies of nation states since World War II. With the rise of the Keynesian Welfare State, politicians in advanced industrial countries were used to view their tasks as almost managerial. They quite successfully invested into the economy via the state-owned enterprises, thus being able to counter the cyclical downturns of the national economies until the early 1970s.

With the end of stable high growth rates for the European and North American advanced industrial economies, the intensification of the Vietnam War and the end of the Bretton Woods Economic Regime, Keynesian policies became costlier and gradually were abandoned in most countries during the 1970s and early 1980s. Since then a rapidly increasing internationalization of the world economy has led to a number of phenomena as rising trade and financial flows, which have been made possible by technological innovations in information and communication technologies, as well as deregulation strategies of the advanced industrialized countries, which have been described as globalization.

The internationalization of governance functions carries a number of risks for the nation states.

One consequence of these globalization trends has manifested itself in the difficulties the nation states ran into when they tried to regulate their economies, which has become a highly difficult task due to the high mobility of capital and goods. An important strategy of the governments of advanced industrialized countries was to build international governance regimes and institutions addressing topics as the ozone layer or international trade. The EU is an interesting phenomenon in this respect as it is more than a regime, but less than a state or even a confederation of states. The internationalization of governance functions is an important step, which, however, carries a number of risks for the nation states. The most important of these risks may be the legitimization problem, which all international regimes and institutions have to struggle with – the latest example was provided by the low turnout at the elections to the EU Parliament.

The light at the end of the tunnel might be provided by another recent phenomenon in politics, which has not been directly legitimized by traditional democratic thinking. This phenomenon is constituted by the non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which flourish on subnational, national, regional, and international level. Together with international regimes and institutions, NGOs might help facilitate international governance and even create a form of international public, thereby partially legitimizing the new forms of governance.

Joachim Hirsch is Professor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, FRG. He has been publishing widely on matters of globalization, democracy, the role of the state as well as regulation theory. r

EUROSASE Workshop ”European Advancements in Socio-Economics”

The main Issues of the EUROSASE Workshop ”European Advancement in Socio-Economics” at the SASE ‘99 World Conference in Madison/Wisconsin on 8– 11 July, 1999, include an overview of approaches, methodology, and outcomes related to the topics ”innovations, institutions, and organizations” and ”long-term structural changes and transformations”; the agenda on socio-economic research and the medium-term development of the socio-economic knowledge base on innovations, in view of institutional change; the potentials of innovations in the field of socio-economic research introducing European research programmes, institutes, and networks; the ”Eurosase-think desk” – presentation of the prototype of an internet-based, network-oriented workgroup tool for socio-economic research.

Panel Program Outline

Advancements in Socio-Economics on Innovations, Institutions and Organizations

Chair: Raymond Saner (Centre for Socio-Economic Development, Geneva).

Rogers J. Hollingsworth (University of Madison/Wisconsin); Karin Knorr-Cetina (University of Bielefeld); Jerald Hage (University of Maryland).

Advancements in Socio-Economics on Long-term Structural Changes and Transformations

Chair: Wolfgang Streeck (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne).

Karl H. Müller (Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna); Jonathan Turner (University of California at Riverside); Gantcho T. Gantchev (New Bulgarian University, Sofia).

Presentation of a Prototype of the EUROSASE-”Thinkdesk” Karl S. Althaler (Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna); Lukas Fetz (Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna)

Opposition against Milosevic in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

Claire Wallace and Christian Härpfer

President Clinton stated that his one aim in bombing the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was to dislodge President Milosevic. In this he was backed up with more or less enthusiasm by other NATO member countries. But what was the support for Slobodan Milosevic and the opposition inside Serbia? The results of an academic and representative sample survey of 1000 respondents carried out in Spring 1998 in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in co-operation with the Serbian research organisation Argument can help answer this question.

The results of the analysis of the population’s trust in the government, in the President, in the Prime Minister, and in the current political system seem to indicate quite conclusively that, at least before the war had broken out, the majority of Serbians and Montenegrins (around two thirds) did not support the President or the regime in their country. At that time, potential opposition was quite high and took a higher anti-government stance than was usual in Central and Eastern European Countries. 43 percent of the interviewed were negative towards the regime in the sense that they were negative on all four indicators, thus making up the group of core opponents. 21 percent scored positively on all four indicators, thus indicating the core supporters as it were.

From this analysis we can conclude that the majority of opponents was likely to be composed of urban dwellers, people with higher education, men more than women and younger people. Those who opposed the Milosevic regime were also pro-European in their attitudes and the ones most likely to support reforms in all Central and Eastern European countries. They constituted the most likely opposition and the future generation.

The survey also achieved surprising results as to popular presentations of Serbians and Montenegrins in Austrian mass media. During the war in Kosovo some mention was made of the idea of Pan-Slavism and the anti-Western stance of the Serbs. Contrary to this, we found that by far the majority of Serbians and Montenegrins were pro-Western in their outlook. Altogether 86 percent wanted to join the European Union, both in order to ensure both political and economic stability, and 53 percent even wanted to join NATO. When asked whether they thought their country should develop according to local traditions or according to the western model, 63 percent chose the western model. Therefore, the majority of Serbs looked towards the west and saw themselves as part of the west (even if their leader did not). Indeed, the majority of them wanted to join the very institutions which during the war turned against them. Perhaps encouraging the integration of the FRY into Europe would have been a better strategy for encouraging opposition to Milosevic, as the Germans and others have suggested.

It is often claimed that Serbins and Montenegrins are nationalistic and anti-democratic in their outlook and that this is responsible for many of the problems in their country. Again, we would need to distinguish the rhetoric of the politicians from the opinions of the people, thus differentiating between the level of the political elite and the Serbian public. Our survey found that the citizens of the FRY were not at all the most nationalistic amongst the Central and Eastern European countries – in fact they were among the least nationalistic, as measured by the variables we were using. This observation corresponds with the results obtained in another survey, according to which the population of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was bitterly disappointed about the political and economic development and the dreary state of the treatment of ethnic questions and largely expressed the wish to leave the country, especially that group of people who least supported the Milosevic regime. r