New State Spaces

My digging into the history of welfare states and state theory has led me to New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood, by Neil Brenner. The book offers an incredible synthesis of writing on the state and globalization from the past several decades towards a theory and method of scale analysis. Brenner argues that the debate of “the state is King/the King is dead” overlooks what for him is a central feature of neoliberal governance in the context of globalization — the proliferation of scales and the reordering of relationships between scales. Brenner suggests that theorists of globalization have paid special attention to the growth of the supranational scale (represented in such institutions as the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank) while neglecting what for him is a scale of increasing significance — the subnational. For Brenner, the nation state remains an important site, but one that is being refigured through the rise of regions, cities, and zones, to name a few subnational sites, as (semi-)autonomous centers of governmental authority and economic activity. Though Brenner’s study focuses on Europe, I am trying to work out the applicability to the U.S. context. In some ways, it seems that the system of federalism in the U.S. and its division of governmental authority between a central national government and subnational state governments both predates and anticipates the European model. Reading Brenner makes me wonder if the U.S. case may evidence not a delegation (or devolution) to subnational authority, since states have always had realms of states rights, but rather a reordering of relationships between federal and state authority, with subnational states increasingly making the ground for federal authority; Florida in Bush Jr.’s first “election” perhaps? The book is offering me some helpful ways to thinking about post-welfare state governance in the U.S. through such scalar relationships.