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This chapter explores the concept of the state, looking at various theories of the state and identifying its major characteristics and then how far real states measure up to these characteristics. Finally, it examines the issue of whether the state is still as fundamental a political institution as it has been over the past four centuries
One of the typical features of contemporary imperialism is the growing and indispensable importance of state support, particularly for big capital. Boron argues that ‘virtually all of the world’s largest corporations have experienced decisive support from government policies and trade barriers to make them viable’. 1 However, much contemporary writing tends
6 Rethinking the state Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectful, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. — George Orwell The United States spent more on its big bank bailout, which helped the banks to maintain their generous bonuses, than it spent to help those who were unemployed as a result of the recession that the big banks brought about. — Joseph Stiglitz1 The Great Recession of 2008 and its aftermath alerted us once again to the dangers of an unfettered and unregulated market. The US, followed by the UK
M1634 - HAYWARD TEXT.qxp:ANDY Q7 27/1/09 13:23 Page 189 8 Governance, state and polity This chapter examines the conceptualisation of ‘governance’ in Irish official discourse in relation to both the Irish ‘state’ and the European ‘polity’. ‘State’ and ‘polity’ constitute the broad conceptual and institutional supporting frameworks for the meaning and significance of governance in nation-statehood and European Union respectively. The traditional narrative of the state is national self-determination, i.e. quest of the nation to decide and direct its own forms
Introduction This chapter is about national ties and how they are supposed to act as a glue that holds the state together in the eyes of its citizens. A nation-state, so the story goes, is one where all the people in the state are bound together by ties of national solidarity. The solidarity legitimates the state – it tells the citizens why they are members and why it is right for the state to exist
8 A permanently leaner state? The concluding chapter considers the durability of the processes of restructuring and the efforts to create a permanently leaner state that are now taking place, particularly in the UK. It argues that despite the radicalism of the changes being ushered in, they are nonetheless vulnerable to later roll-back In surveying the state and its institutional ‘stickiness’, Chapter 2 suggested that gradual change processes may have a rather more limited character than it sometimes appears. While the scholarly pendulum has now swung
response to its extensive exploitation of the oil and gas trade in the Middle East, and its dependence on the dominance of the US dollar, Nafeez Ahmed (2015) presciently described IS as the ‘cancer of modern capitalism’. Owing to its declaration of a Caliphate, paramilitary operations, and state-building practices, IS was until 2017 sometimes described as a quasi-nation state ( Cronin 2015 ), in contrast to the widely recognised networked and global geo-economic orientation of AQ. Building upon these existing explanations of neo-jihadism, in this chapter I illustrate
3835 Understanding Chinese:Layout 1 12/7/12 11:04 Page 39 2 The Party-state The CCP is at the heart of Chinese politics. In Western liberal democracies, the separation between state and political parties is a fundamental principle and political parties compete via regular elections to govern the state. In the Chinese system, the formal separation between state and Party has little meaning with the CCP and the state effectively merged. Most people, irrespective of the political system, judge politics by its outputs – material and ideological. The PRC
104 4 State-directed advocacy: the ‘drift’ phenomenon in the ‘free Tibet’ and global warming campaigns T here is yet a third model of advocacy arising from global engagement with China, one in which target state preferences not only shape the results of individual campaigns, but also their ideological core. I call this metamorphosis of principles ‘advocacy drift’. It is exemplified by the campaigns around global warming and Tibetan independence, their varied ‘results’ notwithstanding. As with the ‘natural cases’ explored in chapter two, these campaigns show
The image of Iran stretches back thousands of years to the time of Cyrus the Great and the Persian Empire. The vast empire covered lands from Asia Minor to Europe and Egypt, and was the largest of its kind until the last emperor was overthrown by Alexander the Great. Thus, the components feeding into Iranian state identity have been continually negotiated and (re)constructed over time. Iranian state identity under the Pahlavi shahs, from 1925 until the overthrow of the last shah in 1979, is often understood as completely distinct from the post