We need to talk about ....the state

Governments have long been an easy target for public anger - whether defined as the particular collection of personalities who form a particular political regime OR as the administrative systems which provide our public services. But underlying attitudes to the state  tend to ebb and flow....25 years ago "the State"  was very much out of favour - with the low point being probably the 1997 World Bank annual development report "The State in a changing world" which reflected the neo-liberal critique of the very concept of state provision which had become the default mode.

The new millennium saw the beginnings of a realisation that the pendulum had swung too far toward business and deregulation; and that the state did have important functions to manage The global financial crash of 2008 should have brought us to our senses - but didn't.
It is rather Covid 19  which has brought the whole issue of the role and performance of government back into public debate

Last month Pankaj Mishra had a superb long article in LRB about what the performance of different states on Covid 19 tells us.
And an article in the forthcoming issue of the Political Quarterly - "Covid 19 and the blunders of our governments" - by Gerry Stokes et al is an early example of the sort of academic treatment we can look forward to in the near future (be warned - this may be behind a paywall - but an annual sub for the best UK political journal is under 20 pounds!) The article sets the UK government's performance in the pandemic in the wider context of the political science literature of the past 25 years on "policy blunders" and makes some recommendations which, I have to say, I found very weak.
But first, Mishra

The escalating warning signs – that absolute cultural power provincialises, if not corrupts, by deepening ignorance about both foreign countries and political and economic realities at home – can no longer be avoided as the US and Britain cope with mass death and the destruction of livelihoods.
Covid-19 shattered what John Stuart Mill called ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion’, forcing many to realise that they live in a broken society, with a carefully dismantled state. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it in May, unequal and unhealthy societies are ‘a good breeding ground for the pandemic’. Profit-maximising individuals and businesses, it turns out, can’t be trusted to create a just and efficient healthcare system, or to extend social security to those who need it most. 

East Asian states have displayed far superior decision-making and policy implementation. Some (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) have elected leaders; two (China, Vietnam) are single-party dictatorships that call themselves communist.
They share the assumption that genuine public interest is different from the mere aggregation of private interests, and is best realised through long-term government planning and policy. They also believe that only an educated and socially responsible elite can maintain social, economic and political order. The legitimacy of this ruling class derives not so much from routine elections as from its ability to ensure social cohesion and collective well-being. Its success in alleviating suffering during the pandemic suggests that the idealised view of democracy and free markets prized since the Cold War will not survive much longer.

Few narratives are more edifying, as economies tank and mass unemployment looms, than the account of the ‘social state’ that emerged in Germany in the second half of the 19th century. In "Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age" (1998), Daniel Rodgers showed that many Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries returned from stays in Germany with ideas that would inform the New Deal.

‘The state must take the matter into its own hands,’ Bismarck announced in the 1880s as he introduced insurance programmes for accident, sickness, disability and old age. German liberals, a tiny but influential minority, made the usual objections: Bismarck was opening the door to communism, imposing a ‘centralised state bureaucracy’, a ‘state insurance juggernaut’ and a ‘system of state pension’ for idlers and parasites. German socialists saw that their Machiavellian persecutor was determined to drive a wedge between them and the working class. Nevertheless, Bismarck’s social insurance system wasn’t only retained and expanded in Germany as it moved through two world wars, several economic catastrophes and Nazi rule; it also became a model for much of the world. 

Japan was Germany’s most assiduous pupil, and the Japanese, in turn, inspired China’s first generation of modern leaders, many of whom spent years in Tokyo and Osaka. Despite the defeat and devastation of the Second World War and the US occupation, Japan has continued to influence East Asia’s other late-developing nation-states: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam.
What made Germany such a compelling prototype for Japan? It is that Germany was a classic ‘late developer’ – the archetype of all nation-states in Asia and Africa. It unified only in 1871 and began to industrialise nearly a hundred years after Britain. Its leaders had to cope with the simultaneous challenges of rapid mechanisation and urbanisation, the disappearance of traditional livelihoods, the growth of trusts and cartels as well as trade unions, and an intensifying demand, articulated by a vibrant socialist movement, for political participation.

Fascinating stuff - which owes not a little to Francis Fukuyama's brilliant 2 volume study of "The Origins of Political Order - and Decay"
Regular readers will know that I am trying to complete a book with the title "Is Admin Reform really all that sexy?"  I last blogged about my efforts at the beginning of the year  This is clearly the signal to get back to work!

The state of the state - part II

I've been silent the last couple of days simply because I have been surfing on the subject of state-building which I realised I had not mentioned in my paper on how the European expert system is supporting the development of institutional capacity in transition countries. I was started on the trail by an interesting article by the much-maligned Francis Fukuyama which caught my attention because it used the phrase "intellectual silos" - a hobby-horse of mine as my regular readers will know. I haven't read his 2004 book on "state building" but was able to read some of the interesting and critical articles he has produced on various aspects of governance assistance - and have suitably referenced them in my Varna paper, a final version of which I will shortly put on my website. But the matrix he has developed (with "scope"and "strength" as the 2 axes)is a useful framework for thinking. And complements Colin Talbot's blog which, serendipidously, appeared at the same time.

We live not in one state, but five. Our modern British state has evolved over time, adding new layers of activity. As each layer is added, the old ones are retained but become part of a larger whole. In this case, the five layers are: the security state; the judicial state; the fiscal state; the economic state; and, finally, the welfare state. Let’s use these five to compare the coalition government with its predecessors.
The security state encompasses the basic organs that allow the government to exercise a monopoly of force at home and abroad, and maintain the peace – the armed forces, intelligence services, police, and so forth. The security state prospered under both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, if for very different reasons. For Thatcher it was principally ‘the enemy within’ that had to be fought; for Blair it was terror and crime. Both continued to expand the security state and extend its powers, and did relatively little to reform them. Neither took much notice of civil libertarian objections.
The coalition, in contrast, has set about cutting back the security state, radically reducing its funding and launching widespread reforms to the armed forces, police and prisons. This is the opposite of what Thatcher did as she squared up to the unions, especially the miners. It is either a very brave, or very stupid, approach to weaken the security state just when a government might need it most.
The picture on the judicial state is rather more mixed. Thatcher tried to weaken it in most areas but strengthened it in others (trade union laws). Blair somewhat strengthened it, especially through the Human Rights Act and the creation of the Supreme Court. The coalition seems bent on rolling back some of these reforms.
We all know what is happening to the fiscal state. For the first time a government is seriously trying to do what Mrs T never really tried and Mr B never even attempted – a permanent rolling back of fiscal expenditure. For an excellent picture on this see here.
The economic state, meanwhile, was significantly rolled back by Thatcher, and only very partially reinvented under Labour, through regulatory extension, until the financial crisis of 2008. Suddenly the economic role of the state moved centre stage again, in a very big way, to save the banks and re-stabilise the economy. But even flagship projects such as high-speed rail cannot hide the fact that the coalition is trying to erode the economic state again, through re-privatising the banks, avoiding major bank re-regulation, scaling back supply-side labour market interventions, abolishing regional development agencies and the like. They also want to carry out the biggest privatisation of all – turning the NHS into a provider marketplace.

And, finally, the welfare state. Thatcher tried to curtail it, but largely failed. New Labour expanded it – though not by as much as is often supposed. The coalition is clearly trying to roll back what it sees as the dependency state. It is doing this by marketising the NHS, reducing benefits, ‘freeing’ schools, and cutting welfare services across the board. Moreover, it sees these cuts as permanent. It is clear that the aim is to reduce taxes before a 2015 election in such a way that, like the privatisations under Thatcher, the cuts become politically impossible to reverse.
The coalition – or at least David Cameron – offers the alternative of the Big Society. But this is merely a post-modern version of Victorian do-gooding – charity and philanthropy dressed up in ‘crowd-sourced’ clothing.
So across the board this is a government seemingly intent on rolling back the frontiers of the state in virtually every area – a far more ambitious agenda than even the fabled Thatcher ever attempted I'm not sure about the distinction between the fiscal and economic states - but, given what the UK Coalition Government seems to be attempting in the way of a shrinking of the state (and how the UK always seems to be blazing fashionable governance trails), this is clearly a space worth watching!

The town of Sliven on the Thracian plain has produced (and inspired) quite a few good painters (home town of Dobre Dobrev). This is a painting of the area by one of the other artists I admire - Vladimir Manski.

.