8 - Institutions of the Developmental Network State

Summary

NETWORK STRUCTURES AND STATE RATIONALITIES

Riven as it is by the politics of inequality, the Irish state has been nonetheless successful in many important respects – under challenging conditions of dependency, unequal exchange, and national indebtedness, a turnaround in the economy was fashioned in a process that was extensively sponsored by a variety of state agencies. But how, most observers ask, did this state know what to do? How could it be so rational? Most analysts assume, with Chalmers Johnson, that a successful state is one whose “plan rationality” is superior to the “market rationality” of decentralized exchange (Johnson, 1982). The plan-rational state must in turn be some version of the “high-modernist” state that James Scott lambasts for its inability to be sensitive to local context and circumstance (Scott, 1998). Bourdieu (1999) actually defined the state as the “bureaucratic field” – simultaneously ignoring the many other bureaucracies outside the state and the many varieties of state organizational form.

Typically, analysts also assume that the rational state is a national state. Ferguson and Gupta (2001) shed significant light on how state rationalities become nationalized. They argue that states are spatialized according to particular properties that they characterize as “vertical encompassment”:

“Verticality refers to the central and pervasive idea of the state as an institution somehow ‘above’ civil society, community, and family …. The second image is that of encompassment: here the state (conceptually fused with the nation) is located within an ever-widening series of circles that begins with family and local community and ends with the system of nation–states.[…]