Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
By and large globalization theory has not been kind to the nation state.
The state's fixed borders appear as limitations, an indication of immobility
on a mobile globe, arbitrary barriers in a world that strives to be barrier-
free. The current neo-liberal regime with its elevation of free markets is
often portrayed as requiring a general rolling back of the power and reach
of the state. In migration research, as elsewhere, the nation state focus has
come under attack at a time when transnationalism has made every geo-
graphic border and many legal impediments disputable (Wimmer and Glick
Schiller 2002).Yet the nation state shows itself to be more enterprising than
it is often given credit for, and one of the theoretical aims of the study is to
challenge its eviscerated condition in much globalization theory. Its reach
extends beyond national borders, while rapidly evolving policy tries to
engage the gyrations of global economic and social processes. The state's
active participation in controversial trade liberalization or social policy
restructuring facilitated the globalization project from the start. Its sponsor-
ship of neo-liberal policies in the 1980s reinforced market disciplines, weak-
ened national borders, and consolidated a system of valuation emphasising
the price mechanism (Harvey 2005). As the welfare state withdrew its uni-
versal safety nets, so it prioritized the self-sufficient citizen who can go it
alone. In a market-saturated governance regime, consumption becomes the
major citizenship virtue, the act reproducing the system; the 2007-09 credit
crisis provided a devastating lesson of how the loss of purchasing
power
can
drive the system into recession and dysfunction.
Neo-liberalism is an abiding conceptual and empirical presence in the
account that follows, a force field in which subjects act (Peck and Tickell
2002; Mitchell 2004; Harvey 2005; Peck 2006). It is no accident that tran-
snationalism across the Pacific has arisen during the neo-liberal period that
has so powerfully directed Canada's Asia-Pacific strategy over the past
quarter-century. A transparent economism shaped the official construction
of the Pacific Rim in the North American imagination, naked boosterism
characterized government trade missions there in the 1980s and 1990s,
increasingly preferential treatment was offered immigrants with class advan-
tage and citizenship itself was commodified - all confirming the power of
the market as the unit of understanding and practice, and therefore as an
important component of the conceptual scaffolding of this study. But as the
literature on the governmentality of the modern state reveals, neo-liberalism
up close is as much an ambition as an achievement, and its policies
and procedures may have discursive cohesion in political declarations and
bureaucratic manuals but are far murkier and corrupted when it comes to
daily implementation. The calculations of the state are both more contin-
gent and less transparent than their pronouncements proclaim.
So the state while ultimately preoccupied by what lies within its borders, is
fully capable to reach beyond its borders and play if imperfectly the
