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HKU SPACE Community College

Global Issues & Everyday Life/ 1819 Sem. 1

Source: http://prod-upp-image-read.ft.com/db00e896-7f0d-11e4-a828-00144feabdc0

Topic 4: Politics
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Today’s agenda
• Power and the state: Basic concepts
• Globalization and the state
• Identity and politics
• Globalization and violent conflicts
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POWER AND THE STATE

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Basic concepts

• Power ( 權力 )
• Dahl: “A has power over B to the extent that (s)he can
get B to do something that B would not otherwise
do.”
• Weber: The ability to achieve desired ends and
control others despite resistance from others
• Having more power than others gives you the ability
to get more valued things sooner.
• Wealth is often an important (but not the sole) source
of power.
• Authority ( 權威 )
• The use of legitimate power where force is
unnecessary
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What is political?

• Bilton (2002:195)
• “…any process involving the exercise of control,
constraint and coercion in society is political.”
• “Any unequal relationship has political dimensions…”
• Lasswell: Polities = deciding “who gets what,
when, and how”
• In short, an analysis of power and politics in no
way confines us to simply a discussion of the
state or government. It is relevant to many other
social contexts, even within relationships that
look seemingly personal
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State and power

• Theorizing power at the level of the
state in a globalizing world
• Understanding the state as an
organizational entity
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The rise of the modern (nation-)state

• The growth of capitalism in Western Europe was

associated with the rise of the modern state,
dating back to 15th century Europe
• Before: low rate of literacy and limited mobility;
“Christendom” ( 基督王國 ), or a collective unified by
Catholicism and ruled from Rome, was perhaps the
only polis people saw themselves belong to other than
any polis beyond the local village or feudal estate ( 封建
領主 )
• Modern state: the rise of rational, centralized,
specialized institutions that utilize a complex
administration and social control
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• The emergence of the nation-state was

associated with the following trends:
• Decline of dominant religious thinking and a
greater acceptance of secular authority (linked with
the Enlightenment, or what Weber referred to as
the rationalization process)
• The breakup of empires, esp. the Austrian, Ottoman
and Russian empires, with the territorial boundaries
of nations demarcating the crucial political units
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GLOBALIZATION AND THE STATE

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The Westphalian Constitution of world politics

• The idea of borders is a relatively recent historical

invention.
• The state-centric conception of world politics as we
are used today did not emerge till the 17th century.
• Clip: Why countries exist?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7ark8cRiSw
• 17th century
• Development of the Westphalian Constitution of world
order
• The Peace Treaties of Westphalia and Osnabruck (1648)
established the legal basis for modern statehood and laid out
the normative structure for modern world politics
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• Key features
• Agreement among European leaders to recognize each other’s ruling
(sovereign) rights over their own territories in a way that is free from
outside interference.
• This agreement eventually crystallized into the doctrine of a sovereign
state.
• 20th century
• Global empires (e.g. British empire) collapse  national self-
determination and development of sovereign statehood 
these principles because the universal organizing principles
of world politics
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• What is the state?

• Weber (1948): The state is “a human community that
(successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate
use of physical force within a given territory.”
• Mann (1986) on the components of a state:
• Government – some kind of centered political
organization and administration
• Population or constituency
• Territorial boundaries
• Ability to project and enforce power and authority
over this bounded territory
• Recognition within an “inter-state system”
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• Two dimensions to the state:

• Territorial dimension
• States as geopolitical units, both
domestically and juridically in relation to
other states
• Organizational dimension
• The state as a set of governing institutions
and organizations authorized to make and
implement binding rules
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• Reminder: state scope ≠ state capacity

• Bernstein and Lu (2003:16) on the 5
dimensions of state capacity
• Five dimensions
• Extractive capacity ( 汲取能力 )
• Steering capacity ( 領航能力 )
• Legitimation capacity ( 認受能力 )
• Coercive capacity ( 壓制能力 )
• Capacity to control and administer ( 行政和操控能
力)
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Towards a Post-Westphalian order?

From state-centric geopolitics to geocentric global politics
• Impacts of globalization
• Blurring divisions between the domestic and international
domains
• States are increasingly embedded in global webs of
• Multilateral institutions and multilateral politics like the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO, established in 1949 by countries from W.
Europe and N. America) and WTO
• Transnational associations and networks like the International
Chamber of Commerce and the World Muslim Congress
• Global policy networks of officials, corporate and non-governmental
actors like the Global AIDS Fund and Roll Back Malaria Initiative
• Formal and informal transgovernmental networks of governmental
officials dealing with shared global agendas like the Financial Action
Task Force on money laundering
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• All these point to the rise of a global polity

where interests are articulated and aggregated.
• This global governance complex involves formal
and informal structures of political coordination
among
• Governments
• Intergovernmental and transnational agencies
• Both private and public
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Question: Has state autonomy been compromised?

• The scale of political life has changed as politics are no
longer confined to the achievement of order and justice
within territorial boundaries.
• Trade-off between effective governance and self-
governance.
• Globalization and the double democratic deficit
• Tension between democracy (territoriality rooted system of rule)
and global capitalism (i.e. operations of the global market and
transnational corporate networks), and the ability of the former
to monitor the latter
• Power asymmetries and distorted global politics: how global
institutions may prioritize the interest of global elites over that of
the wider world community (issues about representation in the
global institutions)
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IDENTITY AND POLITICS

Relationship between economics, culture, and politics
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• Relationship between power and groups

(e.g. interest groups, organizations, parties,
etc.)
• Discussion of power inevitably involves
the discussion of group formation and
group mobilization
• Political groups or organizations
constitute collective attempts to advance
some identifiable cause (which can be
rational or non-rational)
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Why are concepts like race, ethnicity, nation

and the state related?
• They are relevant to understanding group
formations and political conflicts
• Majority vs. minority group
• Intergroup relationship
• Degree of social solidarity
• Social integration vs. social exclusion
• Identity politics and culture wars
• Policies on minority groups
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Identity politics & group formation

• Issues regarding group formation
• Relevance of the economy
• Economic system and the distribution of resources (global
capitalism)
• Stratification, mobility, and inequality (flexible economy
and the rise of the precariat)
• Interests  conflicts  group formation  actions
• Relevance of culture
• Cultural wars and identity politics
• How do these cultural wars (e.g. over war, ethnicity, nation,
religion, class..) lead to in-group/out-group formation
• How do these interact with the political?
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GLOBALIZATION AND VIOLENT CONFLICTS

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Ethnic and nationalist politics

• There has been increasing political fragmentation on
the local and regional level, especially those fueled by
ethnic and nationalist sentiments since the 20th century
• Increasing and more deliberate targeting of entire
“’peoples’ as ‘the enemy’” (Markusen and Kopf)
• Estimated death-toll through murderous ethnic and
political cleansing during the 20th century
• 60-120 million
• Civilian death
• WWI: 5%
• WWII: 60%
• Wars in the 70s and 80s: >80%
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Globalization and nationalism

Simultaneous integration and fragmentation
1. Political globalization
2. Fragmentation of states into small states
and regions
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1. Political globalization
• Coming together…
• Growth of international and regional forms of
government during the postwar period
• E.g. the United Nations, the European Union, ASEAN-
Associations of South East Asian Nations
• Imposition of an international consensus order based on
shared values and laws
• Growth of international non-governmental
organizations
• E.g. Greenpeace, the Global Environment Network,
Doctors Without Borders, Red Cross, and Amnesty
International
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• Driven apart…
• Simultaneous happenings during the 20th
century:
• New forms of politics have redefined political
interests on a non-class basis, some of which have
a global perspective to them (e.g. environmental
issues)
• End of the Cold War in 1989
• The collapse of Soviet communism  fragmentation
of states (refer to next section)
• Militarization of the periphery countries
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2. Fragmentation of states into small states and regions

• Increasing political fragmentation on the local and
regional level, especially those fueled by ethnic and
nationalist sentiments
• Trends
• Regionalization
• The “consolidation and formalization of economic
integration among a group of geographically proximate
economies” (Rosamond 2000) – e.g. European Union in
1993
• Simultaneous rise of nationalism, which renders
regional orders problematic
• Problems with ethnic conflict, esp. in weak states
• Possibilities for global democracy?
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Violent conflict in today’s world

• Post-WWII
• Violent conflict between states has become a rarity
• Europe
• “Zone of peace” through the extension and expansion of integration
through trade, treaty, and incorporation into the European Union
• End of 1970s
• Vast majority of conflicts (95%) were intra-state ethnic and
revolutionary wars
• Today’s wars mainly
• engage ethnic or religious groups within the same country
• Are called irregular warfare because an entire region may be a
battleground without a clear delineation of soldiers or the
military (vs. the civilians)
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• Why bother?
• Violent conflict is contagious
 Refugees  add economic hardship to host countries
 Weapons may also spread to neighboring states

Source:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Markus_Auer2/publicatio
n/272243596/figure/fig2/AS:294714575212545@1447276838
336/Figure-22-Global-Trends-in-Armed-Conflict-1946-2012-
Center-for-Systemic-Peace-2013a.png
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References
• Armstrong, K. 2004. “Resisting Modernity.” Harvard International Review
25(4):40-45.
• Baylis, J. and S. Steve. 2006. The Globalization of World Politics, 3rd ed.
Oxford University Press.
• Beck, Ulrich. 2000. What is Globalization? MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc.
• Bernstein, T.P. and Xiaobo Lu. 2003. Taxation without Representation in
Contemporary Rural China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bilton, T. et al. 2002. Introductory Sociology, 4th Ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
• Haralambos, M., and M. Holborn. 1995. Sociology: Themes and
Perspectives, 4th Ed. London: Collins.
• Mann, Michael. 1986. Introduction in The Sources of Social Power Vol. I: A
History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760. NY: Cambridge
University Press.