Globalization, Liberalization, and Prospects for the State

Author(s): James Putzel

Source: International Political Science Review / Revue internationale de science politique
, Jan., 2005, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Jan., 2005), pp. 5-16
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.

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International Political Science Review (2005), Vol 26, No. 1, 5-16

I P SR RISP

Globalization, Liberalization, and Prospects

for the State

JAMES PUTZEL

ABSTRACT. Patterns of globalization and liberalization need to be

examined in light of their political consequences, especially in the
context of situations of state collapse and violent conflict. Champions of
globalization can be divided into two camps - the advocates of economic
liberalization and the promoters of global governance. They share a
common skepticism of the state, which ignores both the developmental
lessons of history and the perverse impact liberalization has had on
peace and security. While liberalization has transformed the terrain of
politics, privileging a form of semi-democracy, problems of violent
conflict highlight the urgent need for the reconstitution of modern
states in the developing world.

Keywords: * Crisis * Democracy * Failed states

Introduction
Few issues have given rise to more debate than the impact of patterns of
globalization and liberalization on the prospects for development in the South.
While some regions of the developing world, mainly concentrated in Asia, have
experienced rapid growth and significant poverty reduction, most of Africa and
much of Latin America have experienced economic stagnation, or decline, and
witnessed a rise, if not in poverty then in inequality. Much worse has been an
increasing incidence of violent conflict, state collapse, and war. What relation
exists between the patterns of globalization and liberalization over the past two
decades and patterns of crisis, breakdown, and state collapse in the developing
world? From varying vantage points all the contributions to this collection address
this question.
This collection emerges out of a much larger project studying "crisis states."'
The project is devoted to an examination of why, in the context of rapid global

DOI: 10.1177/0192512105047893 ? 2005 International Political Science Association

SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

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6 International Political Science Review 26(1)

change and significant social, economic, and political crises, some communities
and polities have broken down, even to the point of violent conflict, while others
have not. The project encompasses work across the developing world with
partners and researchers based in the UK, India, South Africa, Colombia, Egypt,
and Afghanistan and research undertaken much more widely within those
regions.
In what follows, I situate the contributions to this collection, first, in a review of
the debates about globalization and liberalization within a historical perspective.
The next section looks at the relationship between liberalization and processes of
state collapse. Lastly, I consider the wider prospects for political change in the
context of patterns of globalization and liberalization.

Globalization and Liberalization: Reconsidering the Evidence

It is difficult to get beyond hyperbole and rhetorical flourish when considering
debates about processes of globalization and liberalization - two terms that have
dominated international policy (and especially international development)
discourse and the great public debates of the turn of the century. Joseph Stiglitz,
former chief economist of the World Bank, has become somewhat incongruously
a guru for the worldwide "anti-capitalist" movement writing about how
"globalization today is not working for many of the world's poor" (Stiglitz, 2002:
214), while Martin Wolf (2004), a leading commentator on economic affairs in the
pages of the Financial Times, cheered on by former US Treasury Secretary Larry
Summers and echoing the doctrine of his former employers (World Bank, 2002),
lays out the case for "why globalization works."
Of course, what both these authors are talking about, as Wolf (2004: Ch. 2)
clarifies, is "liberal globalization" - the "integration of economic activities via
markets" driven by both technological changes (advances in communications and
transport) and policy changes (reliance on market forces, rather than the state, to
steer economic activity). That this process has been driven for two centuries by the
expansion of capitalism has been clear at least since 1848 when Marx and Engels
(1966: 112) famously described how the "bourgeoisie has through its exploitation
of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and
consumption in every country" and replaced "local and national seclusion and
self-sufficiency" with the "universal inter-dependence of nations."
It is also clear that the process has proceeded unevenly at different points in
time, driven inexorably forward by technological innovation and the pursuit of
private profits, but tempered and shaped by politics. Indeed, it has become almost
commonplace to point out that in some ways the global economy, though
operating at a much smaller scale than today, was more integrated in the late 19th
century than at the start of the 21st (Baldwin and Martin, 1999; Sachs et al., 1995;
Wolf, 2004). The whole point of Wolf's (2004: 6-7) polemic is to argue that what
he calls "antiglobalization.com," the "mobilization networks . . . of disparate
groups" (environmentalists, human and gender rights activists, and all manner of
nongovernmental organizations), risks joining the socialists, neo-Marxists, and the
even more dangerous "mercantilists, nationalists and assorted anti-liberal groups
of the right," indeed "the nationalist and fascist opponents of liberal capitalism"
that have in the past thwarted the advance of liberal integration.
The champions of globalization today can be divided into two groups. First,
there are those like Wolf and the dominant voices in the international financial

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 PUTZEL: Globalization, Liberalization, and Prospectsfor the State 7

organizations (the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World
Trade Organization) who are promoting policies of economic liberalization - what
Stiglitz (2002: 53) argues are the three pillars of the "Washington Consensus," that
is, "fiscal austerity, privatization and market liberalization."2 Second, there are
those, following the ideas of Anthony Giddens (1998: 28-33), who celebrate the
creative possibilities of globalization and the "rise of the 'new individualism."' He
argues that the "transformation of space and time" has fundamentally weakened
the nation-state, "regenerating local identities," and forcing national governments
to work in coalitions with each other, with regions, with nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs), and transnational corporations to provide a form of
"governance" over society and economy, which is no longer the prerogative of
governments.
Both groups share a deep skepticism of the "state." The advocates of
liberalization condemn the state's meddling in what is best left to market actors,
and the advocates of "global governance" point to the state's tendency to make
war and trample the rights of individuals. Needless to say, both share a
commitment to individualism: the liberalizers privileging individual choice and
the social democrats committed to "the new individualism" privileging universal
human rights. In an interesting way, both groups appeared to be coming together
around what was beginning to be considered a "post-Washington Consensus,"
until the Bush administration rejected attempts at reaching consensus around the
management of international political and economic affairs. By 1997, the critics
of the Washington Consensus had forced a major policy shift among managers of
the international financial organizations.4 However, this entailed less a
reconsideration of the role of the state, than a marrying of the objectives of fiscal
austerity, privatization, and market liberalization with the goals of "participation."5
The NGOs and advocates of global civil society could become partners to private
entrepreneurs and corporations in the development process (Putzel, 2004a).
The argument that globalization cum liberalization, both in its earlier episodes
in the 19th century and through the past two decades of the 20th century,
represented an unqualified boon for poverty reduction and economic progress
was masterfully demolished by Branko Milanovic (2003). Comparing the two
periods of rapid liberalization (1870-1913 and 1978-98), Milanovic demonstrates
the consistent Janus-faced character of globalization - a benign and positive face
for some, but a deeply malignant one for many. In the 19th-century episode, there
was an expansion of trade between western Europe and its settler offshoots, wage
convergence between North America and Europe through the exodus of labor
from the former to the latter, a rapid expansion of telegraph communications and
railroads, and a flow of capital from Europe to capital-poor regions such as
Argentina and Russia. However, he reminds us that globalization was spread at the
point of a gun, with indentured labor flowing to plantations in Southeast Asia and
Latin America, rapacious corporate activity such as the Dutch East Indies
Company's pillage of Indonesia, and a genocide in Congo of up to 10 million
people - "globalization was colonialism." While there may have been wage
convergence in a small part of the world, the 19th century as a whole saw the
wholesale deindustrialization of India and an absolute impoverishment of
important parts of today's developing world.
Even more strikingly, comparing 1960-78, the period of import substitution,
protectionism, the promotion of infant industries, and foreign exchange controls,
with 1978-98, the age of structural adjustment and liberalization, Milanovic shows

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8 International Political Science Review 26(1)

that growth was between two and three times greater in the first period. What is
more, during the era of structural adjustment, the poorest regions of the world
grew more slowly than the richer regions. Inequality between the rich regions and
the poor was stable in the first period and vastly increased in the 1980s and 1990s.
The story of benign globalization simply cannot account for the fact that overall
per capita GDP has not budged in Africa throughout the period and in 24
countries on the continent it was lower in 1998 than in 1975 and in half of these it
was below the level of 1960. The malignant effects were also not limited to Africa,
as DiJohn (in this collection) demonstrates in Venezuela, where liberalization has
been associated with deepening stagnation and increased income inequality.
Wade (in this collection) follows Milanovic to examine the global context in
which states "fail," making still sharper holes in the case for benign globalization
cum liberalization. He takes forward the debate on widening world income
inequality and looks at the impact of transnational corporations, the barriers to
technology diffusion, the bias in North-South terms of trade, and the manner in
which the wealthy countries dominate international decision-making processes
that "govern" the world economy. Webster (in this collection) documents how
industrial liberalization is transforming South Africa's "world of work." He shows
how, in the automobile sector, the tearing down of old barriers has stimulated
sharp technological advance and greatly improved working conditions, for those
who still have employment. This is in sharp contrast to the negative conditions in
the household appliance industry, especially beyond South Africa's borders.
Looking out across the continent and indeed across many regions of the
developing world, manufacturing sectors seem more akin to South Africa's
household appliance sector than to its automobile industry.
Taking the long view, there are simply no historical examples of development
occurring under the conditions of openness and liberalization promoted in the
South by the international development community. Whether one looks at today's
rich countries, or those developing countries that have achieved success over the
past half-century (South Korea, Taiwan, China, and more recently India),
accelerated growth has required state involvement, control over the allocation of
foreign exchange, and subsidies and protection for infant industries (Chang,
2002). The great achievers in relation to growth and poverty reduction during the
recent decades of liberalization have been China and India, but their success was
based in no small measure on the illiberal characteristics of their economies
(Milanovic, 2003). Even Martin Wolf (2004: 199-204, 288-95) grudgingly accepts
that the arguments of Stiglitz (2002), Rodrik (1999), and especially Chang (2002),
which point to the limitations of trade liberalization as an engine of growth, the
problems of financial liberalization, the barriers on labor migration, and the need
to foster infant industries, must be taken seriously.6
The advocates of social-democratic global governance point to the oppor-
tunities that globalization, accompanied by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, has
created to advance the cause of human rights, to challenge dictatorial rule, and to
spread the principles of democracy throughout the developing world (Held, 2004;
Kaldor et al., 2003). Mason (in this collection) argues that new "alternative spatial
configurations" generated by globalization have begun to eclipse state sovereignty
and allowed the emergence of alternative sources of authority that can improve
weak states such as that found in Colombia. The 1990s witnessed a shift in the
international community, marked by UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-
Ghali's "Agenda for Peace" (1992), toward a willingness to intervene in (some)

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 PUTZEL: Globalization, Liberalization, and Prospects for the State 9

situations of gross violations of human rights. A new criteria of liberal democracy

has been advanced in most international development organizations to judge the
relative fitness and legitimacy of states, making it difficult, though by no means
impossible, for dictatorial regimes to gain legitimacy in the world arena.
However, several trends emerged with the new millennium which make the
hopes of the advocates of social-democratic globalization appear overly optimistic.
Gutierrez (in this collection) demonstrates how the prescriptions of liberal
democracy have made military coups less likely in the Andean region, but how
these have combined with economic liberalization to favor a form of "semi-
democracy" limiting the possibilities for voice. At a wider level, the disappearance
of the Soviet bloc has also removed the "checks and balances" within the
international system, leaving hegemonic power in the hands of the USA, which,
under the George W. Bush administration, has shown a renewed willingness to act
selectively and unilaterally against the wishes of international organizations
(Putzel, 2004b). Fundamentally, the strength and quality of the international
organizations and the rules they enforce will, for the foreseeable future, depend
on the strength and quality of their member states. While there is a potentially
positive role for the expanded voice and influence of non-state actors, an
examination of events surrounding the invasion of Iraq, under the leadership of
the USA and the UK, shows how little effect these forces can have in determining
the course of events. Clearly, the role of states remains crucial. Just how crucial
they are is demonstrated not only by the power of the USA within the world
system, but also by the chaos that ensues where states break down and collapse.

Liberalization, State Collapse, and War

While we saw above that the era of liberalization at the end of the 20th century did
not represent a great advance in economic growth and poverty reduction outside
of parts of Asia, neither was it a period of increased peace. Research at Uppsala
University (2004) demonstrates that the number of countries experiencing
significant violent conflicts was larger in 1980-2001 than in the 1960-79 period in
every region of the world except for Asia. When including "minor" conflicts and
the number of separate conflicts in each country, the trend is even more
pronounced. Even more importantly, the increase in violent conflicts has
overwhelmingly been within rather than between countries. Increased violence
and warfare has generally been ascribed to the end of the Cold War and the
collapse of the Soviet Union, which led not only to a sharp rise in the number of
violent conflicts in Europe, but also to a sharp decline in support for weak states in
Africa once held together by rival power blocs interested in promoting the stability
of their "proxies" on the continent (Reno, 2002). However, it is difficult to
imagine that the policies of liberalization have not had an impact on the patterns
of state breakdown and violence, especially in Africa.7
The number and severity of violent conflicts in Africa since 1980, the genocide
in Rwanda in the early 1990s, the collapse or near collapse of state authority in
Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo,
coupled with new standards of what constitutes acceptable state behavior, have led
many to interrogate the continued viability of states in Africa (Bain, 2003; Herbst,
1996; Reno, 2002). There is little doubt that at the time of independence in the
1960s, the new states in Africa were ill-equipped for long-term survival, with very
poorly formed markets, limited productive capacity, poorly formed health and

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10 International Political Science Review 26(1)

education systems, very low skill levels, weakly integrated territories, and skeletal
administrative systems. Clapham (2002) argued that incentive structures faced by
the elites who came to power did little to promote the capacity for internal
security and allowed the evolution of patrimonial forms of government. When
faced with dwindling resources to control their territories through patronage,
many state leaders turned to outright repression.
After the oil price rises in the 1970s and burdened by debt, much of the African
continent was facing crisis. In 1979, the World Bank published a report on the
condition of Africa (Berg Report, 1979) that attacked the failure of overly
centralized forms of economic management and laid out an agenda for structural
adjustment and liberalization. Over the next two decades, with a rapid decline in
aid and financial credit, especially after the end of the Cold War, states were
confronted with demands to privatize assets, to open import markets, and, by the
1990s, to create conditions for good governance. It is hardly surprising that in a
few decades the states of Africa were unable to create either the economic basis
for growth or the conditions for democratic governance, which had taken
centuries to establish in Europe. Structural adjustment sought to attack neo-
patrimonialism and the misconceived state-centric model of development, "but at
the cost of undermining those mechanisms by which governments of fragile states
had sought to keep themselves in power, and in the process to maintain at least
some semblance of state authority" (Clapham, 2002: 785).
Right across the developing world, the removal of trade barriers combined with
the relaxation of state control over foreign exchange provided subnational and
non-state actors access to international markets, enabling both the sale of
resources (including narcotics and diamonds) and the purchase of commodities
(including weapons), as well as avenues to spirit profits away to banks in European
and North American cities hungry for deposits (Naylor, 1994, 1996). This created
a perverse and vicious cycle: falling state revenues, leading to increasing
ineffectiveness of authority, allowing expanded smuggling, leading to further
declines in revenue. This pattern of incentives could only increase violence (Keen,
in this collection). With markets overwhelmingly stronger than states, the inter-
national organizations' advice to state leaders about strengthening the regulatory
functions of the state seem, in retrospect, either disingenuous or entirely naive.
In his examination of Sierra Leone, Keen (in this collection) looks at how the
international financial organizations contributed both to processes of war and
problems in securing peace. During the war the government underpaid its
soldiers, providing incentives for their active involvement in smuggling, looting,
extortion, and illegal mining - but it received praise from the international
organizations for presiding over sound macroeconomic management. That praise
led to a sharp decline in the legitimacy of international actors and boosted the
credibility of the opposition Revolutionary United Front. Most worrying, despite
the negative impact of their actions on the course of the war over a whole decade,
Keen discusses how a similar package of advice and set of incentives may be
hindering the consolidation of the peace.
Even if adjustment is not seen as the cause of state collapse, its measures
undoubtedly reinforced state weakness. In almost a decade of work, Stewart (1998;
Stewart et al., 2001) demonstrated that violent conflicts are most likely to emerge
where societies are marked by "horizontal inequality," or the unequal distribution
of income and political power between groups - defined by region, ethnicity, class,
and religion (rather than as a result of vertical inequalities, which is the way

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 PUTZEL: Globalization, Liberalization, and Prospectsfor the State 11

income distribution and power is commonly measured). Stewart's work also

showed how weak governments entering conflict fared far worse than others and
tended to exacerbate the conflict. The potential impact of liberalization programs
needs to be assessed by how they are likely to affect and address such patterns of
inequality and state weakness. To the extent that liberalization reduces fiscal
strength, or perhaps, more appropriately, pre-empts its creation, redistributive
means are impossible, thus governments' ability to redress regional disparities or
to promote redistributive policies that might reduce horizontal inequalities
becomes entirely undermined. In drawing lessons from this research, FitzGerald
(2001) argued that in the context of wars and immediate postwar situations, there
is a need to break from policies favoring devaluation, reduced government
expenditure, and import liberalization.8
A growing number of scholars and policy-makers have argued that, in the face
of outright state collapse, the international community (principally via the United
Nations) must consider presiding over the reorganization of the hitherto
unquestionable boundaries of states and consider reviving some form of
"trusteeship" (Bain, 2003; Helman and Ratner, 1993; Herbst, 1996). While some
of these suggestions (a return to traditional authorities and city states) are both
far-fetched and undesirable, cases such as Eritrea and, perhaps in the future,
Somaliland (Herbst, 1996), provide evidence that more viable states may emerge
from some of these "wars of underdevelopment" (Brittain, 2002) in a way that
parallels the historical process of state formation. It also must not be forgotten
that, in countries such as Uganda and Mozambique, states have emerged from war
reinforced to preside over difficult development challenges.
There is an implication in much of the writing about collapsed and collapsing
states that the normal prescriptions of liberalization need to be suspended due to
aggravated conflict, but after peace is consolidated, they can and should be
revived. However, an examination of how patterns of globalization and
prescriptions of liberalization have affected, not collapsed states, but "states in
crisis" raises fundamental questions about such a conclusion.

Liberalization, "Crisis States," and Political Prospects

The cases of outright state breakdown and collapse into war remain relatively
small in number, but the cases of states under severe stress (what I refer to as
"crisis states") are much more numerous. By looking at these examples, it is
possible to gain a better sense of the medium- and long-term impact of liberalizing
trends on politics in the developing world. Several of the articles in this collection
consider how liberalization has affected patterns of political organization and
decision-making, patterns of corruption that were one of the principal targets
of liberalizing reforms, and, more generally, the prospects for democratic
governance.
Liberalization has changed the manner in which politics is organized in much
of the South. Wade describes how the easy exit options offered to finance-based
elites have eroded economic citizenship and incentives to push for long-gestation
projects. Webster and Brett, in their discussion of Southern Africa, and DiJohn, in
the case of Venezuela, demonstrate how the increased informalization of
employment has accelerated the decline of traditional sites of political claim-
making and organization, undermining political parties in Venezuela, while
raising the need for new forms of political organization in South Africa. Wade

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12 International Political Science Review 26(1)

suggests that the lack of internal sectoral economic integration has made class
alliances much more difficult, thus handicapping democratic regimes.
Consistent with arguments of the advocates of social-democratic globalization,
Mason suggests that expanding sites of political organization are reinforced by
transnational networks (Webster's new "transborder solidarities"). Webster reports
the rise of influence of religious organizations, a development consistent with
Mason's alternative sources of authority. In a state that enjoys considerable
legitimacy, this can be a boon for democracy, but where state legitimacy is weak,
the increased role in politics played by religious organizations, which are by
definition exclusionary and usually legitimized and resourced from abroad, can
have a corrosive effect.
Di John shows how the requirement of building state capacity plays second
fiddle to that of leveling down the role of the state in the economy. Liberalizers
have bemoaned the inefficient role of bloated bureaucracies in many parts of the
developing world, but Di John shows how state size can play a role in maintaining
social cohesion. Indeed, Keen demonstrates that the hiving off and underpaying
of state employees, and especially members of the security forces, contributed to
the rise of violence in Sierra Leone.
Downsizing public budgets and outsourcing activities has changed the balance
of power between executive authorities and legislatures and the relation between
executive authorities and social constituencies. Representative political systems
have always involved some aspect of "delivery of the goods" to constituents. Liberal
reforms have both reduced the size of such resources and weakened the influence
of representatives in their allocation. In places where decentralization has been
implemented effectively, local political authorities may well have increased their
power, but this change in allocative procedures has weakened the role of
representative assemblies and therefore also the political parties organized within
them. Fewer resources are available to build political support and networks within
constituencies. While the absolute amount of resources has in most cases
decreased, executive authorities have greater arbitrary authority over what
remains and tend to build patronage systems beyond political parties.
Gutierrez shows how rule by referendum has increased, as has the practice of
impeachment of executive authorities in the Andean region (a similar trend can
be observed in the Philippines and Indonesia). In the Philippines, where
legislatures have been too weak to oust presidents, a renewed role for the military
has emerged.9 Keen shows how, under President Stevens in Sierra Leone, the
expansion of personalized rule was facilitated by processes of privatization.
Downsizing and outsourcing has left the security sector, and particularly the
armed forces,'0 the most organized and cohesive component of the state. While
international promotion of democratic, as opposed to authoritarian, norms of
government may have made outright military putsches at least temporarily less
likely as Gutierrez shows,"1 military organizations appear to be playing important
and decisive roles in an age of new populism and weak politics (see DiJohn in this
collection).
Paradoxically, while liberalization formulas were promoted all over the
developing world as a primary means to fight corruption, the evidence presented
in several of the articles in this collection demonstrates how privatization and
deregulation have had precisely the opposite effect (Di John, Brett, and Keen)."2
In both Venezuela and Zimbabwe, there was a vast underestimation of the capacity
required within the state to manage liberalization, especially the regulatory

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 PUTZEL: Globalization, Liberalization, and Prospects for the State 13

functions required with rapid privatization. The simultaneous requirement for

speedy reductions in budget deficits made the prospects for expanding capacity to
regulate new private operations still more difficult to achieve.

Conclusion: Challenging the Premature Obituary of the State

Most damaging in the development prescriptions advanced over more than two
decades has been the failure to examine the political requirements for economic
reform and the failure to consider the potential impact of reforms on the
structure and practice of politics.
The wars that have mushroomed since the end of the Cold War are not so
much "new wars" in the language of the advocates of global governance (Ignatieff,
2001; Kaldor, 1999), as they are a very old type of war between rival potentates,
bandits, warlords, repressive patrimonies, and religious aspirants. These are the
type of wars that preceded the foundation of nation-states and their proliferation
is unlikely to be thwarted without the creation of sound political authorities
organized on the territorial principles of the modern state. There may well be a
role for the international community to play in reviving notions of "trusteeship"
where states have collapsed and there may also be a role for "global civil society" to
assist in these processes.
However, the positive move within the international community toward a new
basis of humanitarian intervention will only contribute to securing peace if the
community's actions are consistent and undertaken without prejudice to one or
another great power. Nothing demonstrates more clearly the continued
pertinence of the modern state than the particularly powerful role played by the
world's strongest state, the USA. The quality of the international organizations
that aspire to provide global governance depends fundamentally on the quality of
its members - individual states. Even the possibilities for increased regional
governance are entirely dependent on the evolution of member states sharing
common values (Nathan, 2004).
When states collapse, the first order of business must be to engage in their
reconstruction. The parameters of the international economy, as well as the
requirements of development and the limitations of capacity, may well mean that
the most appropriate and feasible types of state in conditions of late development
are semi-democratic ones. But if that has to be the case, state reformers might well
look more to the model of Malaysia than Venezuela. The former has, in many ways
against all odds, created considerable capacity and managed ethnic diversity
through continual attention to problems of horizontal inequalities, through
decidedly semi-democratic or semi-authoritarian means. Globalization and liberal-
ization have radically transformed the terrain of politics, but the role, and indeed
the need for the establishment or reinforcement, of modern states has never been
more important.

Notes

1. See a description of the project and its voluminous product at www.crisisstates.com.

2. The "Washington Consensus" was a phrase coined by Williamson (1990) to refer to 10
policy issues around which the powerful in Washington DC (the US government and
the international financial organizations) could agree. Williamson presented a more
nuanced understanding of the consensus than Stiglitz and took his own distance from
the policies he described.

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14 International Political Science Review 26(1)

3. These would include advocates of social-democratic globalization such as David Held

(2004) and enthusiasts of global civil society such as Mary Kaldor (Kaldor et al., 2003)
and the sociologist Ulrich Beck (2003), who bemoans what he calls the persistence of
"methodological nationalism."
4. An article in The Economist in November 1996 speculated about the emergence of a "new
consensus" in response, interestingly, to social unrest, state collapse, and violence in
Latin America. Further evidence of a shift came with the publication of the World
Development Report 1997 (World Bank, 1997) devoted to an examination of the role of
the state in the development process. Following the Asian financial crisis of 1997,
Stiglitz (1998), while still in the World Bank, argued for a new "post-Washington
Consensus," but the renewed importance he hoped to give to the state's role in
development never became the basis of a consensus in official Washington.
5. An early and thorough assessment of the Bank's 1997 report was provided by Hildyard
(1998), demonstrating that despite a new attention to the need for an "effective state,"
in regulatory terms, the principal prescriptions of neoliberal reform contained within
the Washington Consensus remained intact.
6. He fails, however, to engage seriously with the work of either Milanovic or Wade (Wolf,
2004: 152-9).
7. The absence of scholarship investigating the relationship between two decades of
structural adjustment in Africa and patterns of violence and war on the continent is
striking. Morrisson (1998) presented cross-country comparative data arguing that it was
the absence of structural adjustment programs that was more likely to cause violent
conflict.
8. See Brfick (2001) for a similar argument on Mozambique.
9. This can be seen in the decisive role played by the armed forces in changing presidents
at moments of crisis since 1986.
10. In many cases, policing functions have been decentralized and outsourced - creating
another set of problems.
11. I say temporarily as there appears to be a shift in especially the US tolerance for military
authority as it wages its "war on terror."
12. For the Southeast Asian case, see Putzel (2002).

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Biographical Note

JAMES PUTZEL is Reader in Development Studies and Director of the Crisis States
Research Centre, London School of Economics. His current research focuses on
politics and governance in crisis states, including work on understanding "Failed
States," political Islam in Southeast Asia, and the politics of the HIV/AIDS crisis,
on which he has undertaken research in Uganda, Senegal, and Malawi. In
addition to publications on the Crisis States website (http://www.crisisstates.com),
recent publications include: "The Philippine-US Alliance in Post September 11
Southeast Asia" in Mary Buckley and Rick Fawn's Global Responses to Terrorism: 9/11,
Afghanistan and Beyond (Routledge, 2003) and "The Politics of Action on AIDS: A
Case Study of Uganda" in Public Administration and Development in February 2004.
ADDRESS: Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics, Houghton
Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK [email: j.putzel~lse.ac.uk].

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