From Nation to Market States – the loss of a moral community
Recent elections in the western world have highlighted something of a crisis of the liberal democratic relationships between state and society. Many have suggested that we are living in a period when the basic assumptions about the role of the state and how it works are shifting. The vision of the Nation State came to dominate Europe and North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It assumed that government is trustworthy or legitimate because it promises to this particular coherent nation – both a piece of territory and a fairly homogeneous community – effective defence against outside attack and a high degree of internal stability. The internal stability was based on a firm directive hand in the economy and a safety net of public welfare provision. Those who governed the state were seen as guaranteeing the objective good of the community, including the moral welfare of its constituents; and its success in managing all this was the obvious foundation for its claim for civil obedience.
Liberal education was the means by which the society was prepared to part by complying with the norms set by the State.
In the late twentieth century, the cracks in the structure became increasingly visible.
Traditional ideas of defending territory and citizens became increasingly nonsensical as intercontinental missile technology designed to carry weapons of mass destruction and, conversely, fundamentalist groups willing to undertake suicide missions in public places overtook traditional means of prosecuting war. More strategic means and perhaps above all deterrent counter threats are relied on when things look menacing.
Economically, capital can increasingly be moved around the world where the markets please, ignoring frontier controls. These are market economies and nation state governments cannot protect national economies in the way they used to, and therefore they cannot guarantee employment in the ways they once could, rather they have continually to negotiate favourable deals with fickle and mobile investors.
Yet these unstable employment patterns generate more and more unmanageable welfare levels. And at the same time people’s expectations about the level and quality of public service and support are higher than ever and are kept high by the prevailing culture of consumer power.
Such aspirations towards more consumer power are fed by the carrier of culture that is mass communication. The incentives to push for equality of access both to consumer goods and to certain kinds of civil liberties are powerful as never before.
It is inevitably beyond the nation state to meet the expectations of a consumerist society in this rapidly changing context, and this has led to a change in the way the state operates, it has become a late-modernist market state.
In this new political mode, the function of the government is to create an environment in which individuals or groups can carry out their own negotiating to secure the best outcome for them by agreeing the best deal or pursuing what they want.
Foucault distinguishes the governmentality of the modern state from sovereignty by noting that the former has no interest in disposing things to lead to the common good, but rather the role of government is “to ensure that the greatest possible quantity of wealth is produced, that the people are provided with sufficient means of subsistence, that the population is enabled to multiply, etc.”
And this involves deregulation and the withdrawal of the state from many of those areas where it used to bring some kind of moral pressure to bear. Government is therefore free to encourage enterprise but not to protect against risk; it is certainly not free as once it was to propose a common social policy as the constituency is made up of such diverse and vocal minorities. That together with successive politicians trying to draw a distinction between their private morality and a public morality means that there is, not surprisingly, much in the way of coherent moral policy.
In the market state the individual is left to make the best decisions for themselves. This is all well and good in the short term where direct benefit can be calculated. But what of decisions about matters that may affect them in the distant future or may not directly affect them at all? Evidence from both government and financial institutions suggests that, for instance, retirement pension provision for many in the United Kingdom is far from adequate because neither state nor the individual has taken responsibility for that longer-term provision. Nor have adequate resources been invested in the prison and probation services to address the high re-offending rate and the vast expense of the increasing prison population. Neither of these matters is sufficiently popular to attract the action of a reactive government.
In this context, political conflict is likely to be about shifting patterns of advantage rather than major ideological concerns. The state acting as guarantor of personal choice raises short-term expectations and invites instability through a reactive administration ruled by opinion poll and pressure groups. ‘Policy’ becomes a series of disconnected decisions divorced from history or tradition or an overarching or underlying ideology.
One danger in this is that to facilitate some of its goals and avoid chaos, government is likely to rely increasingly on centralised managerial authority. And whilst seeking to respond adequately to consumer demand, the paralysis this inevitably causes is overcome only by flexing the muscles of its executive authority. Ultimately government and culture drift apart, and government abandons the attempt to give moral shape to society. It is a model that has nothing to say about shared humanity and the tough investment needed to create and maintain a shared world of values.
Yet one has to ask how any society can hold together against the forces of disruption without some commonly accepted beliefs about what is right and good and true, and therefore, without some commonly understood and broadly supported sanctions against deviations which threaten to destroy society? The evidence appears to point all too clearly towards a conclusion that the liberal, secular democratic state is in grave trouble. Newbigin insightfully stated as early as 1989 that:
The attacks on it from powerful new religious fanaticisms are possible only because its own internal weaknesses have become so clear…
The truth of this has only been underlined in the early years of the twenty-first century, and the world holds its breath to see if it is equipped to overcome this challenge or further disintegrate giving even greater scope for a new world order.
If we follow this analysis of issues facing western democracies and the evaluation of the zeitgeist which gives rise to them, how can we move towards making a difference to the way society operates in a way that is consistent and coherent with Christianity?
