Environmental Engineering Reference
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now being renegotiated—not only those between the 'national' and
'international' spheres, but also those between global business and
the state, transnational civil society movements, supranational organiza-
tions and national governments and societies.” Not only, according to
Beck, are the actors in international politics constantly adopting new
strategies to maximize what they take to be their interests, but the rules
of the game itself are subject to constant (re)negotiation. Beck (2005,
7) argues that this creates a double contingency situation for states as
actors:
In the transition from one order to the next, politics is entering a peculiar twilight
zone, the twilight zone of
double contingency
. Nothing remains fi xed, neither
the old basic institutions and systems of rules nor the specifi c organizational
forms and actors; instead, they are disrupted, reformulated and renegotiated
during the course of the game itself. Just how far this will go is unclear since it
depends on contingent circumstances, like the goals and alternatives of politics
in general.
In such a circumstance the analyst might be forgiven for imagining that
international politics has now assumed the characteristics of the famous
croquet match in
Alice in Wonderland
in which both the rules of the
contest and the tools of the game (fl amingos for mallets and hedgehogs
for balls) were constantly moving and changing locations (Carroll 1982).
States doubtless still possess a variable measure of authority and
power to mediate strong globalization-related constraints and pressures,
but whatever the standing and reach of the nation involved, this capacity
is circumscribed by the reality that no state by itself can control global
capital fl ows or, indeed, secure itself and its population from the vagaries
of those movements. Nor can many countries stand alone against the
collective ire or combined pressure of other nations when these are
willing to press their claims in a unifi ed way. All of this said, Beck argues
states are now but one participant in an extremely complicated interna-
tional system and possess only limited capacity to overcome by them-
selves the realities of corporate power. As a result, any new form of
international politics that hopes to be democratic will have to include
ways and means to counter the growing power and infl uence of global
capital.
Beyond individual states and their efforts to secure collective action
and regulation of corporate action where appropriate, Beck looks to civil
society organizations, especially those that can operate transnationally,
to act along with states as counterweights to multinational fi rms when
these threaten to close plants or move economic activities to alternate
