Review of International Studies (2009), 35, 421–449 Copyright  British International Studies Association

doi:10.1017/S0260210509008584

Multi-nodal politics: globalisation is what

actors make of it
PHILIP G. CERNY*

Abstract. What has been traditionally conceptualised as ‘the international’ has been
undergoing a fundamental transformation in recent decades, usually called ‘globalisation’.
Globalisation is a highly contested concept, and even among those who accept that some
sort of globalisation process is occurring, attempts to analyse it have focused on a range
of structural explanations: the expansion of economic transactions; the development of
transnational or global social bonds; and the emergence and consolidation of a range
of semi-international, semi-global political institutions. In all of these explanations, the role
of actors as agents strategically shaping change has been neglected. In this article I argue
that structural variables alone do not determine specific outcomes. Indeed, structural
changes are permissive and can be the source of a range of potential multiple equilibria. The
interaction of structural constraints and actors’ strategic and tactical choices involves a
process of ‘structuration’, leading to wider systemic outcomes. In understanding this process,
the concepts of ‘pluralism’ and ‘neopluralism’ as used in traditional ‘domestic’-level Political
Science can provide an insightful framework for analysis. This process, I argue, has
developed in five interrelated, overlapping stages that involve the interaction of a diverse
range of economic, social and political actors. Globalisation is still in the early stages of
development, and depending on actors’ choices in a dynamic process of structuration, a
range of alternative potential outcomes can be suggested.

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
(William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, IV.ii.269–276)

Introduction: Why Multi-nodal politics?

The nation state and the states system have constituted the dominant structured
field of action for both domestic and international politics ever since the transition
from feudalism nearly half a millennium ago. When the sovereign nation state
emerged the winner in the post-medieval struggle between competing alternative
institutional forms, it is said to have had considerable comparative structural

* Revised version of a plenary, the Annual Conference of the British International Studies Association,
University of Cork, Ireland, 21 December 2006.
421
422 Philip G. Cerny

advantages over its main rivals, the (mainly Germanic) city-league and the (mainly
Italian) city state.1 Those advantages were, firstly, that the state quickly became a
more efficient arena for the organisation of endogenous collective action than the
alternatives, especially with regard to integrating powerful new political and
economic interest groupings which were on the ascendancy during that era; and,
secondly, that states were relatively more efficient organisational vessels for the
negotiation and maintenance of credible commitments amongst the exogenous
universe of embryonic political units than the others, whether for threatening (and
making) war or for keeping the fragile peace that emerged in the Westphalia
settlement of 1648. It has been called the ‘Janus-faced state’, after the Roman God
with two faces whose image was put on the gates of ancient cities – one face
looking inwards to guard the welfare of domestic society, the other face looking
outwards to protect the city from attack. This dual, ‘inside/outside’ character of the
nation state would prove to be its great strength as an organisational form in a
world which was rapidly changing from one of multi-layered but still essentially
parochial economic (and political) relations to one of translocal trade, mercantile
capitalism, competing royal bureaucracies and the expansion of European empires
world-wide along with the emergence of new actors previously ‘subsumed’ in
medieval society but increasingly socialised into national culture societies and
market economies.2
Internally, states became the privileged arenas of politics. Control over territory
and increasingly well-delineated geographical boundaries defined the limits of each
mutually exclusive ‘political system’. When social and economic groups have
sought to pursue their interests in the public arena, they have done so by targeting
the institutions and processes of one overarching political order, the state in which
they happened to be physically located. When powerful individuals and groups
have sought to institutionalise their dominance, they have legitimised and
embedded their power in and through the political institutions of the state. When
broad-based, mass groups have claimed new rights, equality, prosperity and greater
security, they have done so by demanding democratic accountability and redis-
tributive public policies from and through national states. And when political
philosophers have defined normative social and political values such as justice, civic
virtue and the public good, they have expected these to be embodied in better,
fairer, or more just states.
Externally, states have not been mere mutual antagonists in an unorganised
world. In the first place, relations between and among states took on a systematic
character because powerful forces within each state, starting in Europe, recognised
their potential mutual vulnerability in a hostile world. Through expanding
diplomatic relations and standards of behaviour, through a desire to be free from
outside interference and yet have access to the benefits of cosmopolitan culture and
foreign material goods, and through a competitive interdependence which fostered
both interstate rivalry and a common Western hegemony over the rest of the
world, European and later other elites secured their power as much through
international (interstate) relations as through domestic consolidation. And they

1
Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
2
Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1965).
 Multi-nodal politics 423

drew middle-class and later working class groups into these national culture
societies by imposing national languages, taxation, military conscription, the
development of national markets and ultimately liberal democracy based in
national political institutions, all of which reinforced the capabilities of these
evolving units to act more effectively in their foreign relations too. Occasional
wars, revolutions and the changing balance of power further entrenched the
interstate character of the international system, while at the same time allowing it
to adjust to a fluctuating and evolving range of social, political and economic
pressures and structural changes, both old and new, inside and outside.
However, despite its long gestation and organisational durability, the modern
nation state as we have known it represents only one particular kind of governance
structure among many possibilities. In the broad sweep of history, many kinds of
societies and forms of political organisation have existed in the world, from
isolated village societies and more outward-looking city states, to traditional
empires and looser leagues and confederations, as well as to the more hierarchically
structured states of the modern world. Furthermore, only in the Second Industrial
Revolution did the high modern nation state begin to develop the range of
socio-economic functions we became accustomed to seeing in the 20th century,
when mass production and modern industrial enterprises, the Weberian bureau-
cratic revolution in both public and private sectors, and mass politics brought
together a range of structural elements conducive to the development of the welfare
state. Today a number of factors including ethnic and religious ties, multicultur-
alism, transnational communities, and the internationalisation of production,
consumption and finance have fostered the emergence of a vast range of alternative
sources of economic advantage, political influence and social identity.3 Of course,
states will not become entirely redundant or disappear. Nevertheless, they are
increasingly caught up in webs of power that limit or transform their activities by
altering the context within which they exist and operate.
These varied processes of change are usually brought together under the label
of globalisation. The concept of globalisation has been critiqued in a range of
ways; however even its critics usually accept that a range of processes are at work
that are transforming world politics and society in crucial ways.4 As I have argued
elsewhere, globalisation should not be seen as an all encompassing, seamless
process of ‘level shift’ but as the result of the addition and interaction of a complex
set of intertwined processes on a range of diverse, intersecting and overlapping, and
often quite uneven levels and playing fields. These processes include the develop-
ment of denser relations among states (usually called ‘internationalisation’),5
growing below-the-border dealings cutting across states (‘transnationalisation’),
denser interactions among localities and regions (‘translocalisation’ or ‘glocalisa-
tion’), and the transformation of social, economic and political relations and

3
Philip G. Cerny, ‘Globalization and the Changing Logic of Collective Action’, International
Organization, 49:4 (Autumn 1995), pp. 595–625, and Cerny, ‘The New Security Dilemma:
Divisibility, Defection and Disorder in the Global Era’, Review of International Studies, 26:4
(October 2000), pp. 623–46.
4
Randall Germain (ed.), Globalization and Its Critics (London: Macmillan, 2000).
5
The argument that globalisation is a misnomer for what is really a process of ‘inter-nationalisation’
is developed in Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question? The International
Economy and the Possibilities of Governance (Oxford: Polity Press, 1996).
424 Philip G. Cerny

processes at the domestic and local levels themselves6 – the macrocosm within
the microcosm.7 More important than any one of these levels, however, are the
interaction effects among them. It is these interaction effects that destabilise the
structural equilibrium underpinning the levels of analysis distinction, thereby
undermining the path dependency of the international system as we have known
it, and lay the foundations for ongoing and future developments. This overall
process of transformation, I suggest, has three main interlocking dimensions.
The first and most obvious dimension involves a change in the character of the
state’s domestic tasks, roles and activities. This basically involves the way so-called
‘public goods’ are perceived, pursued and provided.8 In particular, the aim of social
justice through redistribution has been challenged and profoundly undermined by
the marketisation of the state’s economic activities (and of the state itself) and by
a new embedded financial orthodoxy.9 These changes not only constrain the state
in its economic policies but also alter people’s understanding of what politics is for
and thereby challenge the political effectiveness of the national liberal democratic
political systems which are supposed to represent what the people want. The
second dimension involves a fundamental reorientation of how states interact
economically with each other. State actors are increasingly concerned with
promoting the competitive advantages of particular production and service sectors
in a more open and integrated world economy – what I have called the
‘competition state’ and what Sheehan calls the ‘civilian state’10 – not only in order
to produce collective economic gains, but also to build new socio-political
coalitions and expand the scope and reach of own their power and influence. In
pursuing international competitiveness, state agencies closely linked with those
economic sectors most closely integrated into the world economy accept and indeed
embrace those complex interdependencies and transnational linkages thought to be
the most promising sources of profitability and economic prosperity in a rapidly
globalising world.
The final dimension concerns the relationship between structure and agency –
in other words people – between constraints embedded in existing structural and
institutional rules, existing patterns of the distribution of resources and power, and
existing practices and ways of doing things, on the one hand, and the individuals
and groups who make tactical and strategic, day to day or long term, decisions
that can alter or break those rules, patterns and practices, directly or indirectly,
intentionally or unintentionally, on the other. In other words, rather than
6
Philip G. Cerny, ‘Reconstructing the Political in a Globalizing World: States, Institutions, Agency
and Governance’, in Frans Buelens (ed.), Globalization and the Nation-State (Cheltenham, Glos. and
Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 1999), pp. 89–137.
7
On this last point, see especially Saskia Sassen (ed.), Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and
Subjects (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).
8
Philip G. Cerny, ‘Globalization, Governance and Complexity’, in Aseem Prakash and Jeffrey A.
Hart, (eds), Globalization and Governance (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 184–208.
9
Philip G. Cerny, The Changing Architecture of Politics: Structure, Agency and the Future of the State
(London and Newbury Park, Cal.: Sage Publications, 1990), and Cerny, ‘The Infrastructure of the
Infrastructure? Towards Embedded Financial Orthodoxy in the International Political Economy’, in
Ronen P. Palan and Barry Gills (eds), Transcending the State-Global Divide: A Neostructuralist
Agenda in International Relations (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 1994), pp. 223–49.
10
Philip G. Cerny, ‘Restructuring the Political Arena: Globalization and the Paradoxes of the
Competition State’, in Randall Germain (ed.), Globalization and its Critics (London: Macmillan,
2000), pp. 117–38; James J. Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of
Modern Europe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
 Multi-nodal politics 425

continuing path dependency, these effects generate multiple equilibria, creating the
possibility of new ‘branching points’, thus opening the way to potential path
modification and reconstruction of the system itself. It is crucial to identify these
structural fault lines and explore the potential constraints and opportunities that
actors may face in attempts to manipulate and reshape the structure of the system.
This does not merely concern those global ideologists in business studies,
important as they are, who declare that we live in a ‘borderless world’, nor just the
rapid growth of transnational cause pressure groups like Greenpeace who focus on
the problems of ‘the planet’. It also involves strategic action across both public and
private domains not only for more concrete competitive advantages in the world
marketplace but also for reshaping social and political processes and institutions to
reflect new distributions of power and resources (‘distributional changes’) and new
ways of looking at the world (‘social epistemologies’).11 In this process, for
example, the focus of the economic mission of the state has shifted considerably
from its traditional concern with production and producer groups to one involving
market structures and consumer groups, and from its understanding of the state in
general as a ‘decommodifying agent’ to one as a ‘commodifying agent’. In this
context, not only have state actors found their roles changing as the state itself has
become more ‘splintered’ and ‘disaggregated’12 but the density and complexity of
their interactions of state actors with other political, social and economic actors
has also increased together with those of the objects of their concerns – the
dramatic expansion of transnational socio-economic interpenetration, the imme-
diacy of global economic, social, environmental and security challenges, the
evolution of transnational communication and norms, and the limits of traditional
forms of national power projection.
These three dimensions, I suggest, add up to a profound challenge to the
traditional structures both of the domestic nation state and of the interstate system,
undermining key aspects of the previously symbiotic relationship between the two.
Thus we should not expect the nation state to wither away; indeed, in some ways
it will continue to expand and develop its tasks, roles and activities. The crucial
point, however, is that those tasks, roles and activities will not just be different, but
will lose much of the overarching, macro-political and holistic philosophical
character traditionally ascribed to the effective state, the good state or the just
state, all of which concepts have assumed a level and quality of internal coherence
and of difference from the external ‘other’ that the state’s most essential – and most
ideologically and culturally legitimate – task has been to protect. Future structural
developments will be the product of an increasingly transnational, cross-cutting
structure of micro- and meso-interdependencies, partially mediated through the
state but with their own autonomous dynamics too. The state can attempt to
manipulate and influence these but cannot fundamentally change them. In the long

11
On ‘distributional changes’ and ‘social epistemologies’, see John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and
Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations’, International Organization, 47:1
(Winter 1993), pp. 139–74, and Ronald J. Deibert, Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia:
Communication in World Order Transformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp.
31–7.
12
On the ‘splintered state’, see Howard Machin and Vincent Wright (eds), Economic Policy and
Policy-making Under the Mitterrand Presidency, 1981–1984 (London: Frances Pinter, 1985); on the
‘disaggregated state’, see Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2004).
426 Philip G. Cerny

run, state actors must adapt their own strategies to perceived global realities, while
other kinds of actors, economic and social, will play key roles too in restructuring
the political arena.

Restructuring the political arena: the process of structuration

Theories of globalisation have privileged structural explanations of change. The

prevalent image is that of a shrinking world. In this context, changes in exogenous
conditions are seen in turn to alter human behaviour in ways that are broadly
predictable because their patterns are determined by the material or ideational
morphology of those exogenous conditions per se. Exogenous structural variables
include the infrastructure of travel and transportation, competitive imperatives
facing the multinational corporation, the abstract and all-pervading character of
international finance, the flexibility of post-Fordist production techniques, the
innovation and spread of information and communications technology, a general
speeding up of the tempo of life and consciousness, the cultural ‘global village’, or
the indivisible ecology of ‘the planet’. Nevertheless, attempts to extrapolate future
world orders from such structural changes always border on science fiction. They
never really capture the range of possibilities, possibilities which are shaped by
actors.
At the same time, most agency-centred approaches, particularly constructivism,
have shied away from grappling with the structural or material aspects of
globalisation. They go too far in the other direction. Constructivists’ overemphasis
on the potential autonomy of ideas and institutions has paradoxically turned the
attention of scholars away from broad paradigmatic change and focused discussion
on limited debates about the ideational character of existing institutions, incre-
mental changes within the existing states system, and/or the possibilities for
resistance within the current world order. Much of today’s constructivism in
International Relations, far from reflecting the transformational epistemological
vision of Berger and Luckmann’s critique of functionalist social theory,13 seems
content to challenge the hard structuralist character of neorealism with a soft
classical realism of a more historical and ideational type14 – although allowing
national actors greater scope for international regime-building within that con-
text.15 In addition, postmodernism and post-positivism, while taking a more critical
stance, have nevertheless had little to say about the globalisation process except as
a potential negation of modernism and positivism.
In contrast to both the determinism of structuralism and the indeterminacy of
constructivism, this article starts from the structurationist view that structure and
agency are mutually constituted in an ongoing process that simultaneously both (a)
consolidates and yet fractures structures and (b) constrains and yet empowers

13
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the
Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1966).
14
Alexander Wendt, ‘Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics’,
International Organization, 46:2 (Spring 1992), pp. 391–425.
15
Martha Finnemore, National Interests and International Society (Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 1996).
 Multi-nodal politics 427

STRUCTURAL COHERENCE
ACTOR ORIENTATION TIGHT LOOSE
STRUCTURE-BOUND Type 1: Routine Adjustment Type 2: Incremental
Adaptation
TRANSFORMATIONAL Type 3: Punctuated Type 4: Articulated
Equilibrium Restructuring
Table 1. Structuration processes

agents, in a reciprocal, interactive process over time.16 The concept of structuration

has been interpreted in various ways, and critics tend to see it as breaking down
when operationalised. In other words, structuration based approaches usually end
up privileging either structures or agents, or indeed reifying the process of
interaction between them. However, these critiques do not in my opinion
undermine the heuristic value of using structuration as a hypothetical starting point
for identifying and tracking key variables in a structure/agency analysis, and that
is how I am applying it here. In this context, agents are conceived of –
hypothetically – as acting within (unevenly) structured sets of constraints and
opportunities – Crozier and Friedberg’s concept of ‘structured fields of action’17 –
while at the same time those sets of constraints and opportunities are conceived of
hypothetically as the cumulative products of agency in an ongoing interactive
process.
In order to construct a preliminary simplified representation of the structura-
tion process, then, it is necessary to make some typological distinctions. Structures,
whether static or changing, can be characterised as either uneven and loosely
held together, on the one hand, or homogeneous and tightly interwoven, on the
other. Agents, in turn, can act either in structure-bound or merely adaptive ways,
on the one hand, or in entrepreneurial and potentially transformational ways, on
the other. In this sense, I would suggest a stylised heuristic typology of ideal-
type or polar-type structuration processes, represented in the above 22 matrix
(Table 1).
In the upper left hand quadrant, where structure-bound actors are situated
within a tightly woven structural context (Type 1), the interaction between
structure and agency would tend to be of a fairly static, routine kind, predomi-
nantly leading to passive adjustment to exogenous structural changes; such change
should be robustly predictable from knowledge of its exogenous sources. In the
upper right hand quadrant, where structure-bound actors are situated within a
loosely articulated structure (Type 2), a form of incremental adaptation analogous
to certain kinds of traditional Darwinian random selection might be anticipated;
however, actors would be likely to have some limited opportunities (‘wiggle room’)
for creative adaptation and institutional bricolage. In the lower left-hand quadrant,

16
For a theoretical analysis of structuration focusing primarily on language, see Anthony Giddens,
Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (London:
Macmillan, 1979).
17
Michel Crozier and and Erhard Friedberg, L’acteur et le système: les contraintes de l’action collective
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977).
428 Philip G. Cerny

where change-oriented or transformational actors – those whose understandings,

visions and knowledge enable them to transcend existing structural constraints in
developing their strategies and tactics – are situated within a tightly woven
structure (Type 3), one might expect an uneven structuration process where both
exogenous and endogenous pressures for change would build up over time and lead
to punctuated equilibria – for example, to unpredictable conjunctural upheavals the
outcomes of which can take a variety of different forms from re-equilibration to
structural degradation to revolutionary change. Stanley Hoffmann has referred to
this process as ‘homeorhetic change’;18 such conjunctural upheavals can also be
seen as ‘Black Swans’ or ‘grey swans’, in the framework developed by Taleb.19 And
in the lower right hand quadrant, where change-oriented actors are situated within
a loosely held together structure (Type 4), possibilities for actor-orchestrated
articulated restructuring would be greater – accompanied, however, by increased
uncertainty about how controllable different component parts of the structure
might be (especially under strong exogenous structural pressures). With the partial
exception of Type 1 structuration, therefore, even the tightest exogenously-led
processes of structural change generate multiple equilibria that actors can to some
extent manipulate or reshape. In this context, globalisation entails permissive
conditions for change, not restrictive ones, despite (or rather because of!) increasing
uncertainty.

The five stages of structuration

To put this approach into perspective, I will first outline a five-stage model of
change, adapted from a format originally developed by Spruyt in the context of the
European transition from feudalism to the sovereign nation state. (Spruyt identified
three stages of transition, which I expand to five; see below.) He calls this process
one of ‘institutional selection’, the core of which is the identification of multiple
equilibria – in other words, the existence of multiple alternative potential future
developmental pathways generated by the decline of the feudal system.20 He
identifies three of these alternative pathways: the city state on the Venetian model;
the city-league, based on the Hanseatic League in Northern Europe; and the
sovereign nation state, based on the Bourbon monarchy in France. Had the early,
relatively centralised French state not been as bureaucratically and economically
strong as it was in the 14th to 17th centuries as the result of factors unique to its
previous historical development, the other models might have proved more
resilient, leading to either the coexistence of different post-feudal succession models
in Europe or to the dominance of one of the other models. But the dual capacity
of the French state on the one hand as an arena of collective action domestically

18
Stanley Hoffmann, Decline or Renewal? France Since the 1930s (New York: Viking Press).
19
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random
House, 2007).
20
Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, op. cit. Spruyt’s analysis has been challenged as an
accurate representation of the real historical transition from feudalism to the nation state. However,
I believe the heuristic utility of the (necessarily oversimplified) model of change he develops is
particularly useful as adapted here for understanding and explaining how the various processes
added together in my definition of globalisation (above) intersect and interact.
 Multi-nodal politics 429

and a source of credible commitments – that is, as the result of its ability to pursue
a coherent and unified foreign and security policy and to make reliable and durable
contractual arrangements, both formal and informal, with other actors inter-
nationally – on the other, led to a process of emulation by dominant groups in
other proto-states in order to ensure their survival and political power. Thus the
nation state as an institutional construct was reproduced and imitated by actors
seeking to defend and promote their own interests and values in a fluid, unsettled
and complex set of historical circumstances – a process identifiable with hindsight
but relatively open and unpredictable within the ebb and flow of events and choices
at the time – until, at a later stage, the states system emerged in Europe and was
spread outwards through empire and further imitation.
This developmental route did not, of course, emerge and crystallise in a
vacuum. Previous elements of the old feudal system remained, although their
position was altered, often for the worse, but sometimes finding new sources of
power and influence – for example the Roman Catholic Church and the
aristocracy.21 And many new trends were already in place, such as: urbanisation
and the migration of former serfs from the countryside; the development of new
productive technologies; the growth of social organisations such as guilds rooted
in those emerging forms of production, along with local corporatist governments;
the development of consumer demand – and demand for more influence on the
political and social front – from more affluent nobles to the growing urban middle
classes and lumpen proletariat to more independent sectors of the peasantry to
merchants involved in burgeoning long-distance trade (what Spruyt calls ‘translocal
trade’ to indicate that it was not yet fully ‘inter-national’); the development of
Common Law in England and the rediscovery of Roman Law on the European
continent; and of course new forms of warfare, more efficiently organised and
controlled from the top down, first in France and then in Prussia on land and in
the Netherlands and England on the sea. Indeed, the transition from feudalism to
the nation state laid the groundwork for a first phase of globalisation led by the
most powerful states themselves through their later frustration at the territorial
carve-up of Europe and consequent quest for overseas empire.
In this process, five stylised stages can be distinguished. Of course, these phases
do not succeed each other neatly; they are uneven, overlapping, often largely
concurrent and inextricably intertwined with each other. The first involves what
Spruyt calls ‘exogenous independent variables’ – although these, too, can be traced
back to earlier, analogous developments in the prior emergence and consolidation
of European feudalism itself from tribal societies and empires, as well as its decline.
In this case, typical exogenous independent variables were the emergence of artisan
manufacture, the growing monetisation of labour, new forms of transport,
technological developments such as early mechanics, the expansion of translocal
trade, the rapid growth of food production in the late feudal era before its decline
and economic crisis, and the development of long distance financial relationships.
In other words, European feudalism itself underwent accelerating and increasingly
dramatic changes analogous to globalisation today, as the political structures and

21
On the ability of aristocracies to convert their power and influence in the context of democratisation,
industrialisation and the like, see Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the
Great War (London: Croom Helm, 1981).
430 Philip G. Cerny

institutions of medieval society were overtaken by the transformation of the

socio-economic infrastructure.22 Patterns of production, trade, finance and labour
– what today are often taken for proxy variables for economic globalisation, and
sometimes globalisation tout court – were changing across Europe, pointing to the
emergence of what would prove to be a set of permissive preconditions for the
fundamental social, political and economic transitions that were beginning to take
place.
The second stage, linking Spruyt’s first stage, above and the third stage, below
(that is, Spruyt’s second stage), is the result of the first. The structural changes
represented by Spruyt’s exogenous independent variables lead to, and are
inextricably intertwined with, changing distributions of resources and therefore of
power and influence during the period of transition – and shaping yet more
distributional changes further down the line. Two sorts of distributional changes
can be identified, although they are again often intertwined in practice. The first
concerns the partial, but highly significant, ways that the amount and distribution
of power and material resources commanded previously by actors embedded in the
old system are converted by those actors into new forms of power and influence
both in the period of transition and in the succeeding phase of development,
whether the nation state in the post-feudal period or the emerging global (dis)order
of the 21st century. In the former, nobles and churches increasingly bureaucratised
and monetised their holdings, especially through the development of private
property rights in land and the marketisation of their products. The leading nobles
sought to increase and entrench their power through the development of
centralised monarchies and through more highly organised forms of taxation and
warfare. And peasants sought greater control over their work and rewards from
their labour, whether in the fields or through migration to the newly expanding
cities.
Secondly, of course, ‘new’ groups emerged and sought innovative ways to
increase their wealth and power. Urban entrepreneurs and international merchants
were able to control the rapidly growing productive sectors of the economy, to
obtain greater profits and to invest in new forms of production, distribution and
exchange. Bankers and financiers became increasingly crucial to the translocalisa-
tion of production, trade and consumption. Urban labourers, although usually at
the sharp end of any direct confrontations, became increasingly able to use new
skills and the capacity to vote with their feet to live better, at least better than they
had done as serfs, and to seek upward social mobility. And a ‘petty bourgeoisie’
of shopkeepers, clerks, supervisors, bureaucrats and what would later be called the
‘intelligentsia’ became more and more central to social change and economic
development. But most important were the political consequences, as these groups
in transition sought more influence over entrenched feudal elites and over the
outcomes of political and legal processes – the expansion of private property rights,
regulatory backing and protection from market failure, the opening of overseas
markets, and, most importantly – the source of the British, French and American
Revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, not to mention the many more since
– more ‘voice’ in governmental processes.

22
Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: New Left Books, 1974) and
Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979).
 Multi-nodal politics 431

Absolutist monarchies lasted only as long as they promoted and reinforced

these trends and were eventually overthrown when they were seen not to by large
enough coalitions. This was not democracy yet, but it was a new embryonic
pluralism. It is this second stage that I argue constitutes the closest analogy to
globalisation today, rooted in corresponding distributional changes at the transna-
tional level. In particular, the shift from traditional forms of political and economic
hegemony of sectors of society that made their living from the land to those who
increasingly made it through industrial production and translocal trade is not
dissimilar to today’s shift from the hegemony of those groups whose power and
influence derived from their domestic dominance, whether national level corpora-
tions, national bureaucracies or national trade union organisations, to those whose
political and economic clout and muscle derive from the transnational scale and
scope of their activities and networks, whether multinational producers, consumers
or, increasingly, workers. Nevertheless, elements of the third, fourth and fifth
stages are not far behind.
The third stage, deriving from the second, is what Spruyt calls the ‘rearticu-
lation of social and political coalitions’. This represents the heart of the pluralist
political process itself, as the fluid and volatile distributional changes described
above lead actors to seek new ways of pursuing their interests and furthering their
values through shifting alliances and seeking new forms of influence in both public
and private arenas. In the transition from feudalism to the nation state and the
states system in Europe, this process concerned in particular the ability of the rising
urban classes to challenge the monopoly of power of the aristocracy; of various
sections of the aristocracy both old and new to forge alliances with sections of the
bourgeoisie in order to convert their previous power resources into ones more
relevant to changes in the economy, the bureaucracy and emerging nation
state-based practices of diplomacy, warfare and imperialism; of monarchies to
convert their power base from personal, feudal ties into bureaucratic hierarchies
and to seek support sometimes from sectors of the aristocracy, sometimes from the
new middle classes and sometimes even from the emerging masses through
patriotism, religion or national defence; and of value groups, whether religious,
liberal or revolutionary with (and against) each other and a range of diverse
competitors and collaborators. As the newspaper editor Charles Dudley Warner
famously said in 1850 (following Shakespeare): ‘Politics makes strange bedfellows’
– especially true in times of transition and change. It is this process of the
rearticulation of social and political coalitions that lies at the heart of Barrington
Moore Jr.’s magisterial Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy and Theda
Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions, chronicling how diverse groups competed
for control and influence in the consolidating nation states of the 17th to 19th
centuries.23 Today, analogous alliances among diverse transnationally linked
groups, in and between both private and public sectors, involving both sectional
groups pursuing common material interests and/or value groups often referred to

23
Barringon Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Landlord and Peasant in the
Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Theda Skocpol, States and Social
Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979).
432 Philip G. Cerny

collectively as ‘global civil society’, are increasingly driving the globalisation

process.24
The fourth stage, again inextricably linked and overlapping with the third,
involves a shift from the emergence of new reactive new forms of competition and
coalition-building in the context of structural change to new strategic and
substantive forms. This stage is characterised by the uneven but sometimes rapid
and increasingly imperative search for the stabilisation of more successful
experiments in resource and influence building, for more regularised control of
reconfigured policymaking processes and for new, more systematic policy agendas.
In particular, during the long transition to the nation state and the states system,
European political, economic and social actors experimented with new ways to
promote economic growth and ultimately industrialisation, to entrench property
rights, to regulate trade and finance, to develop new police powers to control
urbanisation and protest, to resolve conflicts through more elaborate and
autonomous legal mechanisms, to deal with growing problems of mass society
through labour regulation and embryonic forms of welfare, and to pursue
economic and social as well as security goals in the new, highly competitive
international system of state consolidation and imperial expansion.25 Crucial to all
of these was innovation in different forms of government intervention in the
economy. Today, political competition over – once again – economic growth (and
decline) not only of the system as a whole but also of particular sectors and
regions, over regulation of trade, finance, labour and migration, and over the
nature of political bonds themselves is bringing into question basic assumptions of
social belonging, legitimacy and, of course, the distribution of resources, power and
influence in a rapidly globalising world.
The fifth stage – Spruyt’s third stage – is what he calls ‘institutional selection’.
It is not enough to rearticulate social and political coalitions or to develop new
policy agendas in the context of such far-reaching change. It is necessary to rethink
and reconfigure the very institutional superstructure of society and politics. In the
transition from feudalism to the modern nation state, and in the development of
the modern state itself, this meant building a more centralised (or centripetal) state,
reflecting Waltz’s distinction between the ‘anarchy’ of the international arena and
the ‘hierarchy’ of the domestic state.26 These two dimensions were mutually
reinforcing. For example, in order to make credible commitments, pursue national
interests and project state power on the international stage, it was necessary to
develop central military command and control systems, industrial production,
infrastructure for transportation, communications and weapons production, more
efficient taxation and national banking systems to provide funding, and in many
ways most importantly in terms of creating an expanding base for new forms of

24
Philip G. Cerny, ‘Political Agency in a Globalizing World’: Toward a Structurational Approach’,
European Journal of International Relations 6:4 (December) pp. 435–64. The distinction between
‘sectional’ and ‘value’ groups is central to traditional Political Science based pluralist theory; see
V.O. Key, Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1953).
25
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978,
Michel Sennelart (ed.), translated by Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2007).
26
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
 Multi-nodal politics 433

warfare, mass military conscription.27 All of these developments went alongside a

redefinition of citizenship, the promotion of patriotism and loyalty to central
institutions – not merely personal fealty to the monarch or nobility – and,
eventually, the expansion of popular forms of legitimacy through parliamentary
representation and ultimately the mass franchise. Crucial to all of these were the
development of constitutionalism, of mechanisms of state economic intervention
and the institutionalisation of legal systems and the rule of law.
Today, of course, we are in a relatively provisional stage of the development of
international institutions and regimes, one in which different regimes and agencies
are often set up for distinct issue areas – there is no overarching institution except
the United Nations, which is often hobbled by its highly intergovernmental
structure – leading to both what is called ‘venue shopping’ or ‘forum shopping’ on
the one hand and what Lake has called the ‘privatisation of governance’ on the
other.28 International, transnational and global institutions are in the midst of a
process of institutional bricolage – that is, a combination of ad hoc experimentation
in a fluid institutional context and in particular conjunctural circumstances on the
one hand with a combination of pragmatic adjustment and strategic action on the
other. This institutional bricolage is similar to what I have elsewhere called,
following Foucault, ‘governmentalisation’.29 This fifth stage, the process of
institutional selection, is bound up with the previous four – sometimes manifest,
sometimes latent – is at the core of the development of what is often called ‘global
governance’. Governance is itself a contested concept, originally consisting of
informal practices, networks and power structures; however, in the context of
international institutions and regimes, ‘global’ governance has been redefined to
include more formal institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the
World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and a range of others, although
usually restricted to particular issue areas. However, the coherence, capacity and
control span of global governance institutions and processes are seen to be
tentative, uneven and open to a wide range of multiple equilibria over the coming
decades. On another level, international and transnational institutional selection is
also at the heart of the transformation of the state itself into a competition state.

Transforming the ‘public’ arena

The process of structuration in a globalising world is therefore a complex one in

which different kinds of existing structures and institutions interact with an
expanding and increasingly diverse set of actors seeking to pursue their interests

27
Sandra Halperin, War and Social Change in Modern Europe: The Great Transformation Revisited
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
28
David A. Lake, ‘Global Governance: A Relational Contracting Approach’, in Aseem Prakash and
Jeffrey A. Hart (eds), Globalization and Governance (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 31–53, and Miles
Kahler and David A. Lake, ‘Economic Integration and Global Governance: Why So Little
Supranationalism?’, paper presented at the annual convention of the International Studies
Association, San Francisco, California (26–29 March 2008).
29
Philip G. Cerny, ‘The Governmentalization of World Politics’, in Elinore Kofman and Gillian
Youngs (eds), Globalization: Theory and Practice (London: Continuum, 3rd edition 2008), pp.
221–36.
434 Philip G. Cerny

and values. I will first briefly look at some of the main structural shifts
characterising the current era of globalisation, after which I will consider the role
of pluralist and neopluralist political theory as a way of conceptualising how
structuration works in practice. There are two fundamental structural shifts which
will be considered here. In the first place, the state has traditionally been perceived
to be inextricably intertwined, even coterminous, with the concept of the ‘public’,
in terms of both the classical notion of the ‘public interest’ and the contemporary
quasi-economic concept of ‘public goods’. I argue that the very constitution of the
public is being transformed in the context of political (as well as economic and
social) globalising trends. Secondly, I will address the institutional framework and
the changing roles of the state. I will not deal directly with the issue of institutional
selection – that is, the fifth stage of the broader process – in any detail, as the
development of global governance is as yet embryonic, fragmentary and contested.
Broadly speaking, however, the power structure of a globalising world inevitably
becomes more complex and diffuse, diffracted through a ‘prismatic’ structure of
socio-economic forces and levels of governance30 – from the global interaction of
transnational social movements and interest/pressure groupings, multinational
corporations, financial markets, and the like, on the one hand, to the re-emergence
of subnational and cross-national ethnic, religious and policy-oriented coalitions
and conflicts of the type familiar in domestic-level political sociology, on the other.
World politics – that is, both domestic politics and international relations, taken
together – is being transformed into a ‘polycentric’ or ‘multinucleated’ global
political system operating within an increasingly continuous geographical space
and/or set of overlapping spaces. In these conditions, it becomes harder to
maintain the boundaries that are necessary for the efficient ‘packaging’ of public or
collective goods. Indeed, it becomes harder to determine what collective goods are
demanded or required in the first place – that is, even to measure what is the
‘preferred state of affairs’.31
State actors themselves – although they continue to have a range of significant
economic, financial, political and bureaucratic resources at their disposal and are
still crucial actors in regulating particular economic and social activities –
paradoxically act in routine fashion to undermine the holistic and hierarchical
character of traditional state sovereignty, authority or potestas – a ‘hollowing out
of the state’. The result is a growing ‘privatisation of the public sphere’, not only
by selling off or contracting out public services and functions, but in the deeper
sense of reducing society itself to competing ‘associations of consumers’ in which
administrators are little more than buyers in competing corporations.32 This
combination of structural trends triggers a reassessment of the conception of public
or collective goods in a globalising world. Collective goods in theory are those (a)
which are difficult to divide up into marketisable commodities because of the
structural characteristics of their production, that is, their physical requirements
and/or technological economies of scale, requiring centralised managerial control

30
The concept of ‘prismatic politics’ was first developed in Fred W. Riggs, Administration in Developing
Countries: The Theory of Prismatic Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964).
31
Vincent Ostrom, C.M. Tiebout, and R. Warren, ‘The Organization of Government in Metropolitan
Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry,’ American Political Science Review, 55:3 (September 1961), pp. 831–42,
832–5.
32
Ibid., p. 839.
 Multi-nodal politics 435

and the funding of their provision through authoritative means like fees and taxes
rather than the price mechanism and (b) from the enjoyment or use of which those
who live within the territory cannot be excluded, thus requiring authoritative
mechanisms – rather than markets – not only for determining what and how much
is produced, but also who gets what, when and how and excluding non-paying
users (‘free riders’).33 In other words, true public goods are characterised by
indivisibilities of both production and distribution. The provision of public goods
has thus been a classic task of hierarchical governments (states).34
For example, many of what were thought to constitute collective goods at the
time of the Second Industrial Revolution are either no longer controllable by the
state because they have become transnational in structure or constitute private
goods in a wider world marketplace (or both). Today, oligopolistic and mass
production industrial sectors that have been incorporated into state-led and/or
‘neocorporatist’ structures must become internationally competitive to survive;
technological changes diffuse quickly across borders; defence industries and other
‘strategic’ sectors are no longer immune from foreign competition; macroeconomic
policy is increasingly vulnerable to cross-border shifts in demand, supply and
financial flows; small businesses and the service sector increasingly have to
compete; even the welfare state and employment policy can no longer be insulated
from external economic pressures for marketisation and restructuring in the name
of greater efficiency and ‘choice’.
Thus the nature of the political debate is also changing in fundamental ways.
In theoretical terms, the idea of what is ‘public’ is essentially normative. In the
economic theory of collective goods, the main issue is indivisibility: only what is
most efficiently organised and run publicly in economic terms (that is, that which
provides the best possible product at the lowest possible cost when organised
according to the definition set out below) ought to be so organised and run. In a
globalising world, however, such calculations become more complex. In some
industries, goods that once may have been most efficiently produced on a collective
basis, especially on a national scale, may nowadays be more efficiently organised
along lines which imply larger, transnational optimal economies of scale, making
traditional ‘public’ provision unacceptably costly and uncompetitive; whereas in
other cases, technological change and/or flexible production may actually reduce
optimal economies of scale, turning such goods effectively into private goods,
which also are increasingly produced and traded in a global rather than a national
marketplace. At the same time, in a globalising world it has become increasingly
difficult to exclude ‘foreign’ free riders from outside national boundaries from
benefiting from nationally-provided collective goods in ways that are unacceptably
costly in terms of domestic politics and public policy, as today’s debate over
different kinds of free trade agreement demonstrates. Thus with regard to both
production and consumption, it is becoming more and more difficult to maintain
the sort of public or collective boundaries necessary for efficient and/or exclusive
state provision of public or collective goods.

33
Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1950).
34
Idem; Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom, ‘Public Goods and Public Choices’, in E.S. Savas, (ed.),
Alternatives for Delivering Public Services: Toward Improved Performance (Boulder: Westview, 1977),
pp. 7–49; Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1965); Cerny, ‘Globalization and the Changing Logic of Collective Action’, op. cit.
436 Philip G. Cerny

The heart of political debate today is therefore increasingly about choosing

among competing conceptions of what should be treated as public and what should
not. In the first place, in a world of relatively open trade, systems of financial
regulation and the increasing impact of information technology, property rights
and other basic rules are increasingly complex for states to establish and maintain.
In this context, the ability of firms, market actors, and competing parts of the
national state apparatus itself to defend and expand their economic and political
turf through activities such as transnational policy networking and regulatory
arbitrage has both undermined the control span of the state from without and
fragmented it from within. Furthermore, the advent of flexible manufacturing
systems and competing low-cost sources of supply – especially from firms operating
multi-nationally – has been particularly important in undermining state-owned and
parapublic firms. International competitiveness counts for far more than does
maintaining an autonomous, self-sufficient national economy, in both the devel-
oped and developing worlds. The same can be said for more traditional forms of
industrial policy, such as state subsidies to industry, public procurement of
nationally produced goods and services, or trade protectionism.
In addition, basic public services and functions such as the provision of public
health, education, garbage collection, police protection, certain kinds of transport
or energy infrastructure, etc., which have been at the bureaucratic heart of the
modern welfare state, are being disaggregated and commodified in a range of ways
through the ‘New Public Management’ and ‘reinventing government’.35 Employ-
ment policies are under challenge everywhere in the face of international pressures
for cross-border wage restraint, labour competitiveness and flexible working
practices, while there has also been a significant transformation of the welfare state,
from the maintenance of free-standing social and public services to the provision
of conditional unemployment compensation and other ‘entitlement’ programs, and
from maintaining public bureaucracies to devolving and privatising their delivery
and sometimes their production.36 Finally, environmental protection is particularly
transnational in character; pollution and the rape of natural resources do not
respect borders. These changes not only increase actors’ options but also prioritise
strategic and tactical flexibility, increasing overall openness to change.
In terms of the transformation of public policy and policymaking, therefore,
several types and levels of state activity are significantly affected and even
transformed by the globalisation process, opening new avenues for actors to
reshape and even transform political and policymaking processes and their
outcomes. The interaction of transnationalisation, internationalisation and
domestic restructuring has pushed four specific types of policy change to the top
of the political agenda: (1) a shift from macroeconomic to microeconomic
interventionism, as reflected in both regulatory change and industrial policy; (2) a
shift in the focus of that interventionism from the development and maintenance

35
Patrick Dunleavy, ‘The Globalization of Public Services Production: Can Government Be “Best in
World”?’, Public Policy and Administration, 9:2 (Summer 1994), pp. 36–64; David Osborne and Ted
Gaebler, Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector,
from Schoolhouse to Statehouse, City Hall to the Pentagon (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1992).
36
Richard Clayton and Jonas Pontusson, ‘Welfare State Retrenchment Revisited: Entitlement Cuts,
Public Sector Restructuring, and Inegalitarian Trends in Advanced Capitalist Societies’, World
Politics, 51:1 (October 1998), pp. 67–98.
 Multi-nodal politics 437

of a range of ‘strategic’ or ‘basic’ economic activities (in order to retain minimal

economic self-sufficiency in key sectors) to one of flexible response to competitive
conditions in a range of diversified and rapidly evolving international marketplaces,
that is, the pursuit of dynamic ‘competitive advantage’ as distinct from the more
static ‘comparative advantage’;37 (3) an emphasis on control of inflation and
neoliberal monetarism – supposedly translating into non-inflationary growth – as
the touchstone of state economic management and interventionism; and (4) a shift
in the focal point of party and governmental politics away from general
maximisation of welfare within a nation (full employment, redistributive transfer
payments and social service provision) to the promotion of enterprise, innovation
and profitability in both private and public sectors. In this context, there have been
some striking similarities as well as major differences among both developed and
developing countries.38 Trade policy, monetary and fiscal policy, industrial policy
and regulatory policy are all changing to a more differentiated repertoire of state
responses to the imperatives of growth and competitiveness – what has been called
‘embedded neoliberalism’, with all its complex emerging varieties.39
Underlying all these changes is the uneven transnationalisation of issue areas,
a question we will return to below. State actors and their different agencies are
increasingly intertwined not only with ‘transgovernmental networks’ – systematic
linkages between state actors and agencies overseeing particular jurisdictions and
sectors, but cutting across different countries and including a heterogeneous
collection of private actors and groups in interlocking policy communities,
especially those involving regulators, legislators and the legal system40 – but also
with transnationally linked non-state actors in complex networks such as ‘epistemic
communities’ of experts and policymakers in a range of technical issue-areas.41
Complex globalisation has therefore to be seen as a process involving (at least)
three-level games, with third-level – transnational – games including not only
‘firm-firm diplomacy’ but also transgovernmental networks, transnational policy
communities, internationalised market structures, transnational pressure and inter-
est groups (of both the ‘sectional’ and ‘cause’ varieties) and many other linked and
interpenetrated markets, hierarchies and networks.42 These changes increase the
opportunities actors face in reacting to such changes, including manipulating the
possibilities inherent in the multiple equilibria that result, deconstructing and
reconstructing coalitions, developing wider strategies for change, and transforming

37
The distinction between ‘comparative advantage’ and ‘competitive advantage’ is best developed in
the introduction and conclusion to John Zysman and Laura Tyson (eds), American Industry in
International Competition: Government Policies and Corporate Strategies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1983).
38
Susanne Soederberg, George Menz and Philip G. Cerny (eds), Internalizing Globalization: The Rise
of Neoliberalism and the Erosion of National Varieties of Capitalism (London and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
39
Philip G. Cerny, ‘Embedding Neoliberalism: The Evolution of a Hegemonic Paradigm’, Journal of
International Trade and Diplomacy, 2:1 (Spring 2008), pp. 1–46; Soederberg, Menz and Cerny,
Internalizing Globalization, op. cit.
40
Slaughter, op. cit.
41
Peter M. Haas, ‘Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination’,
International Organization, 46:1 (Winter 1992), pp. 187–224; Diane Stone, Capturing the Political
Imagination: Think Tanks and the Policy Process (London: Frank Cass, 1996).
42
Philip G. Cerny, ‘Globalization and Other Stories: Paradigmatic Selection in International Politics’,
in Axel Hülsemeyer, (ed), Globalization in the 21st Century: Convergence and Divergence (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 51–66.
438 Philip G. Cerny

institutional structures – engaging in institutional bricolage – to reshape longer-

lasting power configurations. In particular, contrary to the popular image of
‘deregulation’, the growth of competing authorities with overlapping jurisdictions
does not reduce interventionism. Rather, it expands the range of possibilities for
splintered governments and competing groups of actors to challenge old fiefdoms
and attempt to develop new patterns of influence and power both domestically and
transnationally. Indeed, the return of regulation to the forefront of policymaking
and both economic and political debate at the time of writing as the result of the
financial ‘meltdown’ of September-October 2008 demonstrates how globalisation
not only requires actors to engage across borders at multiple levels but also enables
a range of transnational and international policy innovations to be experimented
with alongside more traditional neo-Keynesian approaches at the domestic level.

Pluralism and neopluralism

It is not enough, however, just to say that International Relations, the international
system, world politics, or whatever, is being made more ‘complex’ in the globalisa-
tion or structuration process. It is also necessary to provide an analytical framework
and set of hypotheses about how that complexity emerges and develops. In this
context, I argue here that it is primarily the capacity of a wider range of actors to
manipulate and reshape the distribution of power and resources, to alter the rules of
the game, to transform political practices and to redefine the concept of the public
and the public interest that will determine the evolutionary pathway and shape of
the globalisation process. In the context of the structural shifts outlined above, this
capacity privileges those actors whose interests and values allow them to build
transnational coalitions in particular issue areas, spilling over into a broader process
of system transformation. I have elsewhere gone into more detail with regard how
one might classify specific categories of actors within this process – in particular,
how highly stylised types of economic, political and social actors might hypotheti-
cally interact with systemic constraints and attempt to alter those constraints in
ways that affect the wider evolution of the system.43 I will not go into such detail
here. My purpose here is to characterise the wider processes within which these
actors operate. In doing so, my main aim is to adapt the analytical frameworks of
pluralism and neopluralism to the global/transnational arena and to argue that
‘multi-nodal politics’ can provide the analyst with a useful and insightful tool to
investigate, explain and understand what is going on in a globalising world.
In developing this argument, it is necessary to point out that there is a key
distinction between how the term ‘pluralism’ is used in mainstream International
Relations theory and the way it has been used in Political Science. This article
focuses on importing the latter into the former, and in doing so it must be clear
what is entailed in terms of specifying the theoretical and analytical issues involved.
In mainstream International Relations theory, the English School in particular, not
only is each state normatively entitled to possess its own internal moral, ethical and
socio-economic system, but each is also for historical and logistical reasons

43
Cerny, ‘Political Agency in a Globalizing World’, op. cit.
 Multi-nodal politics 439

fundamentally distinct from all the others in size, resources, capabilities, culture
and political system – that is, its unique developmental pathway. These differences
imply that a ‘pluralistic’ international system not only will be characterised by a
plurality of significantly differentiated sovereign states, but also that a key part of
the dynamics and structure of the system will involving bringing those diverse
states together while at the same time recognising their essential autonomy and
right to protect that autonomy – although the extent of that autonomy is
historically variable. Indeed, in this context, those whom one might call moral
realists have argued paradoxically that peace could only be promoted through
non-interference and mutual recognition of the ultimate sovereignty of states to
determine their own priorities and national interests. The existence of a plurality
of different kinds of states with different values and interests can therefore be seen
to be a guarantee of a kind of state-based pluralism rooted in the mutual
recognition of those differences, almost a kind of vertically containerised inter-
national multiculturalism.44
In contrast, the pluralism I am talking about here does not mean vertical
containerisation but rather horizontal social, political and economic stratification
among social categories, interest groups, political parties, business sectors and
socio-economic classes. In other words, pluralism of this kind implies not only
horizontal stratification within particular nation states, as has been the case with
traditional Political Science approaches, but also potential and real – or, to use
Truman’s venerable distinction, ‘latent’ and ‘manifest’ – linkages and common
action bases cutting across states, regions and, with regard to some issue areas, the
world more generally.45
I am using two distinct but interrelated labels here, ‘pluralism’ and ‘neoplu-
ralism’ (the latter sometimes seen as a separate category, sometimes a subcategory
of pluralism), but I will first outline the basic tenets of pluralist theory proper.
Pluralism is an approach to political sociology that can be either normative or
empirical (positivist), or both. It is rooted in the following propositions. Firstly, the
key independent variable in explaining the operation and outcomes of political
processes is the role of the actor or agent. Structures are important in they
constitute the ‘playing field’ on which actors operate, but, as argued above, such
playing fields are not set in stone. They of course constrain actors’ behaviour in
key ways, but under certain circumstances – see the discussion of structuration
above – they are complex and often somewhat or even highly fragmented,
manipulable, vulnerable to structural crisis under particular conditions, and, most
importantly, open to the production of multiple equilibria or alternative out-
comes.46 Therefore the capacity of particular actors to manipulate, dominate,
ignore, break out of, transcend, reshape and/or reconstruct those patterns of

44
Andrew Hurrell, On Global Order: Power, Values and the Constitution of International Society
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
45
David B. Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951). For an extended
discussion of pluralist theory in this context, see Philip G. Cerny, ‘Plurality, Pluralism, and Power:
Elements of Pluralist Analysis in an Age of Globalization’, in Rainer Eisfeld (ed.), Pluralism:
Developments in the Theory and Practice of Democracy (Opladen and Farmington Hills: Barbara
Budrich Publishers, on behalf of the International Political Science Association, Research Committee
No. 16 [Socio-Political Pluralism], 2006), pp. 81–111.
46
These conditions are discussed in more depth in Cerny, The Changing Architecture of Politics, op.
cit., especially, ch. 1.
440 Philip G. Cerny

structural constraints and opportunities is highly variable – indeed, the key

independent variable in determining how those structures ‘behave’ in practice. The
goals and the capacities (or lack of capacity) of different actors to ‘work’ or
transform the institutions will determine the substance of political outcomes, as to
whether they are institution-or-structure-bound, on the one hand, or whether they
are reconstructing and/or transformative, on the other.
Secondly, actors may be individuals, and individuals may be reactive or pro-
active, mixed-motive or strategic ‘political (or institutional) entrepreneurs’. But most
of the time, actors normally cluster in collective action units, traditionally called
‘groups’. Groups are said to represent ‘interests’,47 and, as noted above, those
interests reflect either (or both) common material self-interests – sectional groups –
and/or common social, ideological or philosophical values – value groups – or both.
Groups, in pursuing their interests, seek to gain influence and power through
bargaining, competition and/or coalition-building among themselves and with rel-
evant state actors. In this context, it is crucial for there to be alternative possible
outcomes – multiple equilibria, again – depending upon the state of the bargaining,
competition and coalition-building processes involved – that is, the balance of power,
resources and influence among those groups themselves. In this situation, state actors
such as bureaucrats and officials either may act as surrogates for particular groups
(‘capture theory’) or may maintain a certain – debatable – level of ‘relative
autonomy’ where they represent either their own personal interests (as usually
posited in rational choice theory) or what they see as the wider or higher interests of
‘the state’ as a collective actor or institutional structure.48 Therefore state actors may
also constitute a distinct interest group or set of interest groups. Groups are not
monolithic but are themselves composed of competing sub-groups and factions.
‘Who rules’ is a relatively fluid process – never fully closed, static or hierarchical.49
Thirdly, however, the concept of pluralism has been widely criticised as both
normatively and empirically deficient. In modern liberal societies, the recognition
of the legitimacy of plural claims on the political and social system is seen not only
by Marxists and radicals but also by domestic as well as international realists and
conservatives as overly optimistic, intentionally misleading or even suffering from
false consciousness – that is, as apt to obscure the real, harder power structures of
state, violence and/or class that determine the most crucial outcomes. As the result
of these criticisms and of a range of empirical investigations over time, the kind of
mid-20th century pluralism reflected in the ‘end of ideology’ and, more recently,
‘end of history’ literatures has been to a large extent supplanted by ‘neoplural-
ism’.50 Neopluralist approaches emphasise more than their pluralist predecessors
the fact that some actors and groups are, over time, more able to marshal
resources, make and interpret rules and embed practices in ways that privilege their

47
Arthur F. Bentley, The Process of Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1908); Key,
Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, op. cit.
48
See Eric Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1981).
49
The fluidity of the group process is at the core of Bentley’s seminal work on political processes and
interests, The Process of Government, op. cit., usually regarded as prolegomenon of pluralist analysis
– and celebrating its centenary, of course, at the time of writing in 2008.
50
Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1977); for a more ambitious
and wide-ranging attempt to develop this concept, see Andrew S. McFarland, Neopluralism: The
Evolution of Political Process Theory (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2004).
 Multi-nodal politics 441

own interests over others. In other words, to paraphrase Orwell, all groups in the
traditional pluralist universe are sort of equal, but from the neopluralist perspective
some are far more equal than others. There are three caveats to this claim,
however, that are crucial to maintaining the distinction between traditional elite
theory and class analysis on the one hand neopluralism on the other. The first is
that relatively powerful and influential groups often have conflicting interests and
therefore will clash over outcomes, so no permanent hegemonic coalition will be
possible. Second, therefore, powerful groups must rely on coalitions with less
powerful groups, which therefore have at least some power and influence over
outcomes. And finally, the configuration or balance of power among a variety of
groups will depend to a large extent on the kinds of issue areas in play – and, of
course, complex historical circumstances. Different groups may well have conflict-
ing interests in different issue areas and therefore must make a range of partly
complementary, partly conflicting coalitions and bargains over time and across the
political system as a whole. Whether there is a ruling class than can rule in a
coherent fashion is highly questionable in this context – a debate that has also
characterised the development of neo-Marxist theory in recent decades.51
McFarland takes on board both the early neopluralist approaches of Lindblom
and Dahl and contemporaneous debates on the relative autonomy of the state and
places them in the context of an evolving ‘research sequence’, leading from
pluralism to neopluralism.52 He identifies three main – familiar – categories of
actors: producer groups (similar to Key’s sectional groups); social movements
(similar to value or cause groups, but with a wider ‘movement’ dimension); and
institutional actors and officeholders. In identifying the basic dynamic of the
political process as a pluralist one, he, like Lindblom, denies that any one coalition
analogous to a social class in Marxist class analysis has the coherence and muscle
to monopolise rule within the system. As noted above, however, the key to
understanding how neopluralism works in practice is the way the power dynamics
vary from issue area to issue area. In some cases, oligopolistic economic sectoral
interests are allied with prominent legislators and key bureaucrats in what have
been called ‘iron triangles’ – a key instance of which was traditionally the Second
Industrial Revolution steel industry, thus the label – whereas in other issue areas
outcomes are more open and bargains more uncertain, in which case there are
likely to be a range of competing groups (both sectional and value), alternative
points of access to relevant policymaking processes, conflicts among state actors
themselves in different institutional branches and agencies, and multiple potential
policy agendas and instruments that can be competed and bargained over.

Multi-nodal politics: towards transnational neopluralism

Pluralism and neopluralism, in the ‘domestic’ Political Science sense used here,
have overwhelmingly been subordinated in International Relations theory to the

51
John Holloway and Sol Picciotto (eds), State and Capital: A Marxist Debate (London : Edward
Arnold, 1978).
52
McFarland, Neopluralism, op. cit.; Lindblom, Politics and Markets, op. cit.; Robert A. Dahl,
Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989).
442 Philip G. Cerny

distinctions among sovereign states, whether seen as ‘like units’53 or as a pluralistic

diversity of states.54 However, I argue that globalisation, in a way analogous to the
transition from feudalism to the nation state, entails a fundamental transformation
of world politics. This transformation – seen as a process of structuration working
through the five stages elaborated earlier in this article – increasingly enables
interests to organise across borders and enmeshes states as well as interests in a
transnational political process characterised by neopluralism. Therefore the central
hypothesis entailed by the multi-nodal politics approach is that those actors (a)
who possess the most transnationally interconnected resources, power and influ-
ence in a globalising world will be those who perceive and define their goals,
interests and values in international, transnational and translocal context – what
might be called the ideational matrix – (b) who are able to build cross-border
networks, coalitions and power bases among a range of potential allies and
adversaries – the political-sociological matrix – and (c) who are able to coordinate
and organise their strategic action on a range of international, transnational and
translocal scales in such a way as to pursue transnational policy agendas and
institutional bricolage – the institutional matrix. Globalisation in this sense not
only constitutes a set of permissive conditions for the development of transnational
pluralism and neopluralism, it is also itself increasingly constituted by the political
processes identified here. Globalisation in effect is transnational neopluralism,
manipulating and shaping the multiple equilibria of world politics and the
international political economy. The processes of globalisation and pluralisation
are thus inextricably intertwined, and globalisation, as the process unfolds, is
increasingly what actors make of it. Jessop calls this aspect of political life
‘strategic selectivity’.55 The strategies and tactics adopted by actors to cope with,
control (including damage control), manage, and restructure political institutions,
processes, and practices that determine what sort of globalisation we get. These
strategies and tactics unfold at three levels.
The first, the base, concerns such factors as: the distribution of resources in
society; the kind of processes of production, distribution and exchange prevalent
therein; the state of consciousness or the perception of interests, values and
possibilities of the various individual and group actors; and the sorts of basic
solidarities and alliances of a more political nature that emerge from all of these
taken together. The second concerns what de Tocqueville called the character of
‘intermediaries’, or the openness or closure of political processes and coalitions that
transform the raw material of the base into more specific political and economic
resources within a narrower political process – sometimes called the power
structure. How open or closed are elites? Do interests interact systematically with
politicians, bureaucrats, etc., in a corporatist or neo-corporatist fashion? What
embedded alliances have evolved over time, and how open or flexible are they? Is
public policy made by iron triangles, closed policy communities, wider policy
networks, or transparent, competitive, pluralistic processes? And the third concerns
the structure of the institutional playing fields themselves, whether concentrated or
diffused, unitary or fragmented, and the sorts of rules and practices that have

53
Waltz, Theory of International Politics, op. cit.
54
Hurrell, On Global Order, op. cit.
55
Bob Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).
 Multi-nodal politics 443

evolved to coordinate different levels and/or pillars of the political system.

Although some writers talk about the emergence of a global ‘public sphere’,56 the
main thrust of the literature on globalisation is that globalisation makes such
publicness more problematic – creating a need for a new politics of reshaping
multi-level governance around various ‘new architectures’ that will recreate the
‘public’ either at a higher level or through a more complex network structure. At
the same time, however, as noted earlier, globalisation also involves the uneven
multiplication of points of access and control, which, allied with plurality,
pluralistic practices, and pluralism-promoting strategic actors, entail the evolution
of a new kind of transnational neopluralism, however uneven.
Do such changes support genuine competitive pluralisation, or do they merely
entrench new forms of political oligopoly or monopoly at a transnational and/or
global level? In the global economy, shifting patterns with regard to economies of
scale and scope do not provide conclusive evidence either way. Of course,
multinational corporations hold a ‘privileged position’, as do financial market
actors in an integrated, 24-hour global financial marketplace. But small and
medium-sized enterprises also increasingly operate on a transnational scale, and it
is even argued that globalisation is leading to a long-term Ricardian process of the
equalisation of wages across the world.57 Only where particular industries such as
commercial aircraft possess overwhelmingly global economies of scale are oligopoly
and monopoly clearly dominant (usually with state support), whereas in nearly
every other industry new entrants have been proliferating. Of course, ‘old groups’
have in many cases been able to parlay their existing resources into new profits by
developing new investment strategies, restructuring and ‘flexibilising’ enterprises,
etc. Perhaps more important, however, has been the emergence of ‘new’ groups of
entrepreneurs, both economic and socio-political, whether in countries that have
traditionally supported such groups like the US or in those that have in the past
suppressed or inhibited their activities, like China and India.58 The power of
‘latent’ or potential groups or categories has been growing as well. Perhaps the
most important of these is consumers, whose role in the allocation of resources has
dramatically increased in contrast with that of more traditional producer groups.59
Of course, new categories of losers have been created as well, although in some
cases these are groups that have long been disenfranchised, suppressed, or
subsumed in pre-existing authoritarian social hierarchies such as tribes and ethnic
groups, agrarian bureaucracies or fascistic capitalist societies. Nevertheless, existing
hierarchies are everywhere being challenged by new coalitions, whether coalitions
seeking greater participation in global capitalism and economic growth or those
seeking to resist change such as traditional kinship hierarchies, anti-capitalist
movements, or religious fundamentalists.

56
Randall Germain, ‘Global Financial Governance and the Problem of Inclusion’, Global Governance,
7:4 (November 2001), pp. 411–26.
57
Gavin Kitching, Seeking Social Justice Through Globalization: Escaping a Nationalist Perspective
(University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2001).
58
William J. Baumol, Robert E. Litan and Carl J. Schramm, Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the
Economics of Growth and Prosperity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007).
59
I argue elsewhere that economic ‘value’ is created primarily by consumers rather than by producers:
Philip G. Cerny, ‘Restructuring the State in a Globalizing World: Capital Accumulation, Tangled
Hierarchies and the Search for a New Spatio-Temporal Fix’, review article, Review of International
Political Economy, 13:4 (October 2006), pp. 679–95.
444 Philip G. Cerny

A dialectic of fractionalisation and reorganisation is therefore taking place that

is analogous to the ‘rearticulation of socio-political coalitions’ that Spruyt
identified with regard to the earlier transition from feudalism to the nation state.
The control of politics by pre-existing iron triangles, corporatist blocs, or domestic
policy coalitions is everywhere being challenged by different coalitions at different
levels of aggregation and organisation. Perhaps the most important change in
developed countries has been the growing predominance in economic policymaking
of transnationally linked interest and value groups and the decline of nationally-
based, protectionist politics. While it is always possible for geographically
concentrated groups whose position is worsened by economic globalisation, such as
workers displaced by import competition or by outsourcing, to organise resistance
up to a point – and often to receive media attention for doing so, as in the US in
the run-up to the 2008 presidential election – the increasing imbrication of both
small and large businesses in international markets, production chains and strategic
alliances has tended to diffuse such effects more widely across the economy.
Together with the combination of deskilling and re-skilling of the workforce, along
with the flexibilisation of production methods and the long-term decline of trade
unions, it is becoming more and more difficult to organise politically effective
resistance to globalisation as such. Meanwhile the restructuring of financial
markets has drawn more sectors of the population into marketised finance, whether
directly or indirectly through institutional investors such as pension funds, while
traditional banking institutions have themselves become more marketised. Indeed,
policy responses to the current financial crisis have been directed to ‘saving
(transnational) capitalism from the capitalists’ through bailing out international
financial capital at multiple levels, not to seeking alternative ‘decommodifying’
approaches. In other words, the socio-political balance between what were once
called ‘national capital’ and ‘international capital’ has both blurred and shifted.
There is hardly any purely national capital left.
The blurring of these traditional lines between what once formed the basis for
the left-right divide at national level has switched the focus of group politics
toward other kinds of linkages, whether the translocal restructuring of influence
around multiculturalism and/or mutually exclusive but cross-border religious and
ethnic identities, diaspora communities, world cities, and the like, on the one hand,
or the transnational/global reorganising of businesses and market structures around
more extended networks, the development of epistemic communities of scientists
and experts, and the rapid growth of transnational advocacy coalitions and
networks (NGOs, civil society, environmentalism, etc.), on the other. Some
dimensions of public and economic policy have increasingly become embedded and
over-determined – the reduction of barriers to trade and cross-border finance, the
shift of government policy away from direct intervention toward so-called
‘arms’-length’ regulation, the transformation of the state from the welfare state to
the competition state, the expansion of mixed governance and the outsourcing of
traditional governmental functions to private and/or mixed public/private provid-
ers, the flexibilisation of labour markets, etc. These constitute a new ‘embedded
neoliberalism’.60 And across borders, more and more policy issue areas are
debated, competed over and re-regulated in various mixed arenas of international

60
Cerny, ‘Embedding Neoliberalism’, op. cit.
 Multi-nodal politics 445

regimes, global governance and transnational groups of private sector actors. As

noted earlier, actors must themselves be able to operate on the basis of flexible
response, shifting coalition-building, and variable geometry in terms of both
choosing short-term and/or long-term allies and developing policy strategies that
involve the coordination of policymaking across borders. Long-term left/right blocs
are giving way to mixed, complex, and shifting coalitions. Indeed, this process is
running well ahead of consciousness of the implications of such changes, leading
to political cognitive dissonance and, at times, to strange alliances that distort
preferences rather than effectively pursuing them, as with the rise of ‘social
conservatism’ in the US from the mid-1970s to its apogee in the George W. Bush
Administration (2001–2009).61
As stated before, this kind of political transformation has led to a range of new
debates, and not a few confusions, concerning the nature of the superstructural
complex that is evolving and being continually shaped and reshaped by actors.
Pluralism is particularly relevant to a context where institutional parameters are in
flux; it is, after all, as Bentley contended, itself a ‘great moving process’.62 Probably
the central debate has been about the role of the state. Despite all of the debate
about the ‘hollowing out of the state’, for example, it is still clear that the nation
state remains the most durable and strongly organised institutional structure in the
world. Little can be achieved politically without the nation state. But in many
ways, the state by itself can do less63 – or at least state actors are increasingly led
to do things quite differently. Their role is being transformed as different demands
are made and different outcomes are seen to be relevant. For example, in the
making of economic policy, treasuries are more limited by what they can do in an
era of tax cuts and increasing international capital flows, while central banks, with
their relative independence from ‘political’ control and their close links to
international financial markets, are increasingly the source of the most important
decisions not only for the domestic economy but also for the global economy.
Of course, their pre-existing clout is crucial in a time of crisis, but it too is only
significant in the context of international and transnational cooperation, multi-level
bargaining and multi-nodal politicking. The shift of the core of policymaking and
policy outputs from redistribution to regulation, in particular, has, paradoxically,
meant the construction and imposition of increasingly restrictive and hierarchical
regulatory regimes, regimes whose role is being both reinforced and restructured in
the context of the financial crisis.64 The ‘agencification’ of national, subnational/
regional, and local governance has created new spaces for special interests to
inhabit and capture. But control of the state no longer means the unfettered
control of policy outcomes, as the multiplication of levels of governance leads not
so much to a more effective division of labour among decision makers and decision
implementers as to a multiplication of sites of conflict, competition and coalition-
building. This kind of institutional schizophrenia makes it more difficult for groups

61
Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How the Conservatives Won the Heart of America
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).
62
Bentley, The Process of Government, op. cit.
63
Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996).
64
Michael Moran, The British Regulatory State: High Modernism and Hyper-Innovation (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003).
446 Philip G. Cerny

to act strategically, as they must be continually rethinking and reorganising their

strategies and tactics – not to mention their internal organisations and external
alliances. Nevertheless, this involves a learning curve, and the literatures on global
civil society and global governance essentially focus on that learning curve, even if
mainly from an institutional-determinist perspective rather than from an actor-
oriented one. The development of multi-nodal politics is both an existing reality
and a pluralist project in the making.
Pluralism and neopluralism are plastic; furthermore, they are not static. The
changing constellation of actors in a globalising world plus the increasing
complexity of the structured field of action creates opportunities for reactively
and/or proactively restructuring that playing field itself as particular problems and
issues are confronted in practice, at all levels – micro, meso and macro. New
patterns of influence and control are generated – not merely fractionalisation, but
also new hierarchies, control mechanisms and unequal power structures. Globali-
sation in its ideal type end state form is fragile and unrealisable, because it is never
achieved in practice and depends upon political practices and institutional rules of
the game for its stabilisation and continuity. At the same time, however,
globalisation as a political process is inherently dynamic, and the very plurality of
groups in a changing structural context gives it a critical fungibility in a world in
flux. In this context, actors are the link that makes plurality pluralistic – or
constrains it from being so. Just as Adam Smith argued that getting two or three
businessmen together in the same room is likely to lead to a conspiracy against the
public interest, it is of course only to be predicted that political actors are likely
to engage in monopolistic behaviour much, if not all, of the time. But pluralism
is also normatively necessary for the pursuit of wider interests, for the pursuit of
political stability, economic growth, and social development – what de Tocqueville
called ‘enlightened self-interest’. These processes of change will not be smooth or
self-regulating; there will be the development of new inequalities, conflicts and
destabilising events, interacting with old inequalities, conflicts and destabilising
events in a heady brew represented in its more extreme form by cross-border ethnic
and religious conflicts and terrorism.65

Conclusion: scenarios of change

This article has focused on both sides of the global structuration process. A key
part of the argument here is that the sorts of outcomes that might be hypothesised
with regard to any ongoing process of transnational structuration, given the
increasing openness of the system to pressures for paradigm shift, will depend on
the way strategically situated agents of all kinds consciously or unwittingly shape
that process in pursuit of their increasingly transnationalised interests. The final
question must then be: ‘What sorts of outcomes can be anticipated in the case of
particular groups of entrepreneurs shaping the structuration process in specific
ways?’ Let us look at some alternative scenarios.

65
Philip G. Cerny, ‘Terrorism and the New Security Dilemma’, Naval War College Review, 58:1
(Winter 2005), pp. 11–33.
 Multi-nodal politics 447

A first scenario might suggest that the structural developments outlined above
do not entail a paradigm shift in the international system. From this perspective,
globalising pressures merely trigger a range of adaptive behaviours on the part of
the most significant strategically situated actors, who are still significantly
constrained by existing state structures and the states system, in their attempts to
form effective transformative transnational networks and coalitions. In such
circumstances, it is likely that the key to understanding structural change (however
limited) is most likely to rest with traditional political agents and ‘state actors’.
Such agents, enmeshed in deeply embedded nation states and the states system,
would react to pressures for change and the operation of endogenous structural
tensions by increasing the adaptive capacity of, for example, traditional forms of
international cooperation, especially intergovernmental regimes, along with press-
ure on domestic actors to adapt as well.66 This characterises the first reaction by
governments to the current financial crisis.
A second alternative scenario might be based on the predominance of
transnational social movements and liberal globalisers and their ability to shape the
agendas of other actors both within and cutting across states. Two linked
hypotheses can be raised again here: on the one hand, the development of a ‘global
civil society,’ based on common transnational norms and values; and on the other,
the emergence of a cross-cutting pluralism. Held, for example, has suggested some
mixture of analogous developments might well lead to the emergence of a
transnational ‘cosmopolitan democracy’ based on convergence around pluralistic,
liberal legal norms.67 It might especially be the case that, should transnational
social movements prove to be the predominant institutional entrepreneurs of the
transnational structuration process – these are the core what is often called ‘global
civil society’ – then a more complex, supranational process of ‘mainstreaming’
might well provide the glue for some form of de facto democratisation-without-
the-state. However, this remains a ‘rosy scenario’, an idealised state of affairs which
it might be unwise to expect.
Nevertheless, the dominant image of transnationalisation and globalisation
today, as suggested earlier, is still that of economic and business globalisation.
Economic agents, through the transnational expansion of both markets and
hierarchical (firm) structures and institutions, increasingly shape a range of key
outcomes in terms of the allocation of both resources and values. Neoliberal
ideology presents such developments as inevitable; in Mrs. Thatcher’s famous
phrase: ‘There is no alternative’ (TINA). Without a world government or set of
effective ‘inter-national’ (cooperative-political) governance mechanisms, private
economic regimes such as internationalised financial markets and associations of
transnationally active firms, large and small, are likely to shape the international
system through their ability to channel investment flows and set cross-border prices
for both capital and physical assets as well. However, capitalists are concerned first
and foremost with competing with each other, not with policing the system (which
can eat up profits); and there is no collective mechanism, no ‘ideal collective
capitalist’ to regulate the system in the interests of capital as a whole, other than

66
Hirst and Thompson, Globalization in Question?, op. cit.
67
David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Democratic Governance
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).
448 Philip G. Cerny

the state.68 Nevertheless, indirect forms of control may be more important than the
state per se. Gill, for example, sees the Trilateral Commission, the World Economic
Forum (Davos) and other formal and informal networks among transnationally-
linked businessmen and their social and political allies as bearers of such hegemony
– what he calls the ‘new constitutionalism’.69 Private sector dominated mechanisms
of control at a transnational level may indeed replace the state as a ‘committee of
the whole bourgeoisie’, for example in the form of a ‘transnational capitalist
class’.70 However, the crystallisation of other structural forms of international
capital can also be envisaged, reflecting an unequal distribution of power or
representation, for example among different economic sectors. For example, in the
1970s what essentially were cartels of multinational corporations were thought by
many on both sides of the political divide to be the form that international capital
would take in the future. And in the 1990s’ world of dramatic international capital
movements, it is more often the financial markets which might be seen as exercising
a ‘sectoral hegemony’ over the international system.71
A third scenario, which I have explored elsewhere,72 is that exogenous pressures
on the nation state/states system, interacting with and exacerbating the tensions
within that system, will cause that system to erode and weaken in key ways, but
without providing enough in the way of structural resources to any category of
agents (or combination of categories) to effectively shape the overall transnational
structuration process. Institutional selection would stall; no group or group of
groups will be at the steering wheel of change in the international system, and
competition between different groups will in turn undermine the capacity of any
one of them to exercise such control. In such circumstances, the outcome might be
what has been called ‘neomedievalism’ – a fluid, multi-layered structure of
overlapping and competing institutions, cultural flux (postmodernism?), multiple
and shifting identities and loyalties, with different ‘niches’ at different levels (social
issues, economic sectors, etc.) for groups to focus their energies on.73 There is no
reason in principle, after all, why ‘governance’ in this broad sense has to be tidy
and logically coherent. The nation state as such, and in particular the national
Industrial Welfare State of the Second Industrial Revolution, may well be caught
up in such wider, more complex webs, leading to increased uncertainty and
possible disorder. At the same time, however, crosscutting networks of economic,

68
Holloway and Picciotto, State and Capital, op. cit.
69
Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990); Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003).
70
Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
71
Philip G. Cerny, ‘Power, Markets and Authority: The Development of Multi-Level Governance in
International Finance,’ in Andrew Baker, Alan Hudson and Richard Woodward, (eds), Governing
Financial Globalization: International Political Economy and Multi-Level Governance (London:
Routledge, 2005), pp. 24–48.
72
Philip G. Cerny, ‘Neomedievalism, Civil War and the New Security Dilemma: Globalisation as
Durable Disorder,’ Civil Wars, 1:1 (Spring 1998), pp. 36–64.
73
Some of those niches may indeed exhibit certain democratic characteristics, especially where in
particular sectors or issue areas elements of democratic accountability can be established, for
example in specific economic industries where workers and trade unions can devise quasi-corporatist
mechanisms, as in the Nicaraguan garment industry: Kate Macdonald, ‘Global Democracy for a
Partially Joined-Up World: Toward a Multi-Level System of Power, Allegiance and Democratic
Governance?’, unpublished paper, London School of Economics, October 2008. However, the
translation of these processes to a more overarching level of ‘global democracy’ is still problematic.
 Multi-nodal politics 449

political and social agents would still lead to an increase in the influence and power
wielded by transnationally-linked institutional entrepreneurs, some of whom would
certainly attempt to transcend the limits of adaptive behaviour and develop new
institutional strategies to for transforming and reconstructing the political in this
fluid, globalising world.
In each of these scenarios, nevertheless, we can see either an incremental or a
much more rapid feedback process, based on actors’ evolving strategies, behaviours
and discourses, leading to a ratcheting up of the globalisation process itself. In the
final analysis, the shape that process takes will differ depending on which actors –
and coalitions of actors – develop the most influence and power to manipulate and
mould particular outcomes within and across a range of critical issue areas. The
evolution of globalisation, unlike Darwinist evolution, is not a random process of
natural selection. In terms of the philosophy of science, it is more Lamarckian. It
involves conscious actors, whether individuals or groups, who can interpret
structural changes, multiple equilibria and opportunities creatively; change and
refine their strategies; negotiate, bargain, build coalitions, and mobilise their power
resources in ongoing interactions with other actors; and – both in winning losing
– affect and shape medium-term and long-term outcomes. Multi-nodal politics is a
complex phenomenon that must be analysed and understood in its full historical,
structural and conjunctural complexity. I believe that we are currently somewhere
in the late second or early third stage of the structuration process as outlined
earlier, at a critical moment when alternative avenues of transformation –
combining the old and the new – are opening up. The globalisation process will
continue to develop and grow, but it will be shaped more and more by the
interaction of an expanding, pluralistic constellation of actors operating across
increasingly diverse, ‘multinucleated’ transnational spaces, opening up a range of
alternative outcomes and multiple equilibria.