Abstract
The chapter discusses the influence on political participation of a number of processes reflecting the shift from the Keynesian welfare nation-state to the neoliberal regime of globalization: the shrinking of welfare provisions over the last decades, the managerialization of administration and social policy, the internationalization of decision making processes, and the localization and informalization of policy making.
While political participation in the Keynesian period was based on corporatist power relations around the welfare state, neoliberalism has led to social and political fragmentation, market individualism and a new emphasis on self-responsibility and self-help. At the same time, while neoliberal globalization has strengthened the role of a series of international organizations and institutions in political decision making, political participation at the societal level remains to a great extent confined within national boundaries.
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Notes
- 1.
“After the 1970s, a long period of low wages pushed workers more and more to rely on credit as the form through which they were able to maintain their standard of living. As well, they looked to a rising stock market to boost their pension funds, and those with homes cheered rising house prices because the increase in their wealth reduced the need for savings and so allowed greater consumption. This further fragmented the working class and undermined its cohesion as an independent social force. While the struggle for wages and public benefits depended on and built class solidarity, looking to credit (and lower taxes) to sustain their private lives led to an atrophy of collective capacities” (Albo et al. 2010, p. 127).
- 2.
Although NPM is often thematized as a “coherent whole of global significance” (Clarke et al. 2000, p. 7), the ways it is understood by various political leaders and administrative staff differ radically. The same can be said about its implementation. For instance, differences between the state-centric administrative models of continental Europe and the communitarian Anglo-american ones reflect the contrasting characters of legalistic and managerial bureaucracies, respectively, while in the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, institutions have been built to adjust the administration to the market economy (with regard to differences among various countries, see König 2001, p. 268).
- 3.
NPM ultimately advocated the self-limitation of the public administration apparatuses and the adoption of efficiency standards certified by quality assurance organizations, evaluation procedures, strategies to instigate competition, flexibilization of labour, etc.
- 4.
The popular book Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector by Osborne and Gaebler set the foundations of “entrepreneurial” and “market oriented” governance. The principles of governments of this kind, which according to Osborne and Gaebler (1992, p. 25) should be “steering rather than rowing” are illustrated in the following passage: “(Entrepreneurial governments) promote competition between service providers. They empower citizens by pushing control out of the bureaucracy, into the community. They measure the performance of their agencies, focusing not on inputs but on outcomes. They are driven by their goals – their missions – not by their rules and regulations. They redefine their clients as customers and offer them choices – between schools, between training programmes, between housing options. They prevent problems before they emerge, rather than simply offering services afterward. They put their energies into earning money, not simply spending it. They decentralize authority, embracing participatory management. They prefer market mechanisms to bureaucratic mechanisms. And they focus not simply on providing public services but on catalyzing all sectors – public, private and voluntary – into action to solve their community’s problems” (Osborne and Gaebler 1992, pp. 19–20).
- 5.
The post-Keynesian state not as a “weak state” manipulated by market forces, but as a powerful and well equipped one, intervening in many different ways, is treated in Hirsch (1992).
- 6.
For instance, the recent political project “Big Society” of the British government aims at the empowerment of communities and social entrepreneurship. Similarly, the “Big Society Network” undertakes initiatives to support and guide local actors and professionals of social economy with the motto “Power to the People”, see http://www.thebigsociety.co.uk/.
- 7.
On the one hand, such actors have been considerably benefited by global neoliberalism. On the other, they represent an ideology of globalization towards a “frictionless capitalism” (Zizek 2009, p. 28).
- 8.
“I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’, ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society. Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families. No government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbor. Life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation”. Thatcher’s interview, Women’s Own, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689.
- 9.
It should be stressed however, that the governmentality discussed by Foucault does not imply the withdrawal of the state from governance. On the contrary, it implies a transformation of politics aiming at the restructuring of social relations of power. This is why, contrary to other readings of Foucault, Lemke suggests an understanding of Foucault’s governmentality as one that sheds light on the shifts of state power. The often assumed withdrawal of the state is essentially an extension of neoliberal governance: “What we observe today is not a diminishment or reduction of state sovereignty and planning capacities but a displacement from formal to informal techniques of government and the appearance of new actors on the scene of government (e.g., nongovernmental organizations) that indicate fundamental transformations in statehood and a new relation between state and civil society actors. This encompasses, on the one hand, the displacement of forms of practices that were formerly defined in terms of nation-state to supranational levels and, on the other hand, the development of forms of subpolitics ‘beneath’ politics in its traditional meaning. In other words, the difference between state and society, politics and economy does not function as a foundation or a borderline but as element and effect of specific neoliberal technologies of government” (Lemke 2002, p. 58).
- 10.
According to Agamben (2005, p. 18), declaring a “state of emergency”, which “is today underway in varying degrees to all Western democracies” and reflects “an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as a normal technique of government” (ibid., p. 14), tends to become the dominant form of governance due to different reasons. Whether for the “war on terror”, for financial crises or for internal social crises, such as urban riots, extreme measures are taken. Shock-therapies are imposed to maintain normality to such a degree, that “state of emergency” itself tends to become a condition of normality (Zizek 2009, p. 47). In most cases, the new threats are invisible and unclear: fundamentalist Muslims threatening the West after September 11, riots in urban areas against law and order, market speculators threatening national economies. In a short time, these threats serve to justify the disciplination of the internal society. As a result, by resorting to the “state of emergency”, the state acts against the society itself that it is supposed to protect.
- 11.
The “Great Bailout” was a response to the collapse of some of the world’s leading banks, such as Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia bank, or of AIG, the world’s largest insurance company, followed by the meltdown of a series of European banks. As McNally (2011, p. 2) argues, this meant that “governments in the world’s largest economies anteed up something in the order of $20 trillion – an amount equivalent to one and a half times the US gross domestic product – via a massive intervention without historical precedent”. This “Great Bailout” was according to McNally (ibid.: 4) a way of “mutating”, as he puts it, private debt into public.
- 12.
For instance, Rodrik (2011) notes with regard to the current Euro-crisis: “EU needs either more political union if it wants to keep its single market, or less economic union if it is unable to achieve political integration”. And he suggests that “the more orderly and premeditated the coming break-up of the Eurozone, the better it will be”.
- 13.
Even protests are now considered as obsolete and unable to put pressure on governments. In this frame, “it makes no sense to protest”, as the former Prime Minister of Greece G. Papandreou has suggested. Not only because protests hinder the “general good”, but also because even if states were willing, they would still be incapable of negotiating. As G. Papandreou put it “those who protest in city squares are appealing to national democratic systems, which are weak and hostage to global powers and weaknesses of a global regional system”. (Speech at the Bank of Greece, 01.06.2011, http://www.naftemporiki.gr/podcast/listenclip.asp?id=38043).
- 14.
Jürgen Habermas, interview at the Financial Times (30.04.2010) http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/eda3bcd8-5327-11df-813e-00144feab49a.html#axzz1bFwBBC67.
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Markantonatou, M. (2013). The Post-Welfare State and Changing Forms of Political Participation. In: Demetriou, K. (eds) Democracy in Transition. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30068-4_3
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