The nature and characteristics of the state within the Third World

 The nature and characteristics of the state within the Third World

The nature and characteristics of the state within the Third World . Theories of 'the' state, especially 'the' Third World state, have fallen faraway from their erstwhile theoretical pre-eminence. trapped within the postulated dual 'impasse' of development theory' on the one hand, and of the state in diplomacy theory on the opposite , and eroded by a growing corpus of sub-state, and indeed extra-state theories, the idea of the Third World state has not fared well within the half of the neo-classical nineties. Nor has the discourse during which the Third World state has been framed.

If the mainstream development literature of the 1960s and 1970s presupposed a 'modernizing' or 'developmental' state and therefore the Marxist approaches of an equivalent period invoked the 'strong,' 'overdeveloped' and (relatively) 'autonomous' postcolonial state; and if the eighties produced rather more ambiguous concepts like the 'rentier state,' the 'peripheral state' or the 'bureaucratic-authoritarian state;' then within the nineties the imagery has turned relentlessly negative as expressed in such coinages as 'vassal state,' 'predator state,' 'vampire state,' 'receiver state,' 'prostrate state,' and even 'fictitious state,' 'show of state' or 'collapsed state.

State,' and even 'fictitious state,' 'show of state' or 'collapsed state.' The changing imagery of the Third World state reflects the new reality, particularly for states in Africa and enormous parts of Latin and Central American, Asia, and therefore the Middle East also as those Eastern European states that have now been downgraded from the Second to the Third World . This justifies the blanket term 'Third World;' and it's with this rapidly changing and evolving entity that this contribution cares .

 

The nature and characteristics of the state within the Third World

Globalization and Neo-liberalism

The hegemonic vision of world society for the Millennium has clearly emerged within the notion of globalization. In contrast to the still aggressively anticommunist 'New World Order' that opened the nineties, the 'kinder, gentler' - and more self-evidently hegemonic - 'globalization' of the dominant international discourse may be a 'postcommunist' and even 'postimperialist' statement of a world becoming more and more unified during a progressive neo-classical and neo-liberal system proclaiming free choice, market economy and free labour. The nature and characteristics of the state within the Third World, the top of the state-socialist challenge to hegemonic capitalism lends force to the powerful underlying myths of globalization - that it's desirable, that it's dynamic, that it's inevitable, and that, anyway, it's the sole game in town. From out of the surfeit of recent literature on globalization one central leitmotif clearly emerges: it's in its core profoundly and relentlessly antistate. The overinflated, centralized and bureaucratized state is that the universal villain within the neo-liberal world-view. At the state's doorstep is laid blame for the planet economic crises of the mid-seventies and early eighties. Its suffocating grip is claimed to possess held in restraint the various creative, entrepreneurial forces waiting to emerge.

 

Recommodification and Democratization

From the attitude of the Third World state, the phenomenon of globalization can, be usefully cast in terms of a primarily economic dimension, recommodification, and a really closely related, mainly political one, formal-liberal democratization. the previous concept, recommodification, The important analysis of the state which, a decade ago, he saw as threatened by the facility of capital because it had been implicated during a 'primary contradiction' from which it couldn't extricate itself: on the one hand, the capitalism , with the profits, revenues, etc. that it generates, was historically necessary to form the state add the primary place; but state intervention increased the scope of decommodification (or autonomous, unregulated spheres of social action). The nature and characteristics of the state within the Third World , However, decommodification, while it brought greater social peace and increased mass purchasing power, was within the long run also a limitation on capital's sphere of action, flexibility and profitability and hence a threat to its power. Capital's (logical) response was to recommodify, a process which 'seeks to decrease the scope and importance of decommodified political and administrative power by resuscitating 'market forces,'" mainly by means of wresting functions and powers from the state and 'privatizing' or abolishing them.

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