What are the distinctive features of the post-modern state in the advanced capitalist economies? Analyse. (2024, 15 Marks)
The idea draws on postmodernism, which Jean-François Lyotard (The Postmodern Condition, 1979) defined as incredulity towards grand narratives of truth and progress. Applied to the state, the classic formulation is the British diplomat Robert Cooper‘s (The Post-Modern State and the World Order, 1996; The Breaking of Nations, 2003): beside pre-modern (failed) and modern (Westphalian, sovereignty-jealous) states sits a post-modern group, chiefly in Western Europe, that has moved beyond territorial sovereignty and the balance of power.
Political and security features
- Sovereignty pooled, not guarded: EU members share authority over trade, money and competition, and accept a common court’s binding rulings.
- Domestic and foreign blur: mutual inspection of each other’s internal affairs is consented to, not resented.
- Force renounced among themselves: war between members becomes unthinkable; security rests on transparency and mutual vulnerability, not on an equilibrium of power.
- Borders lose meaning: the single market and Schengen dissolve economic and travel frontiers.
- Governance over government: following R. A. W. Rhodes, authority runs through networks of regulators and private bodies; Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks describe multi-level governance, power shifting up to Brussels and down to regions.
Social and economic features
- Identity and rights pluralism: recognition of cultural diversity, gender equality and minority rights, with strong human-rights adjudication; identity rivals class as the main cleavage.
- Post-Fordist economy: knowledge, services and innovation replace mass manufacturing; Bob Jessop calls the result a Schumpeterian workfare post-national regime, prizing competitiveness over full employment.
- Regulatory rather than productive role: the state steers through rules, such as the EU’s AI Act (2024) and Digital Markets Act.
- Ecological priority: climate targets enter core state purpose, as in the European Green Deal.
Analysing the features
The features reinforce each other: interdependence makes force irrational, transparency makes interdependence safe, and plural identities weaken nationalism. Yet the type has clear limits.
- It is European, not capitalist as such: the United States, the largest capitalist economy, remains “modern” in Cooper’s terms, wary of binding external adjudication and comfortable with force.
- Cooper himself conceded that post-modern states must deal with modern and pre-modern ones by older rules, a double standard the concept cannot resolve.
- Crises restore the modern state: border closures during COVID-19, the EU’s tighter Pact on Migration and Asylum (2024), and rearmament: the €800 billion ReArm Europe/Readiness 2030 plan and Germany’s March 2025 exemption of defence from its debt brake.
- A sovereigntist backlash contests it: Brexit (2020), the AfD’s 20.8% in February 2025, and US tariff protectionism since 2025.
- Developing states rarely share it: for India, whose sovereignty was won recently, strategic autonomy remains a guarded good, as S. Jaishankar‘s The India Way (2020) argues.
Conclusion
The post-modern state is best read as an unstable condition rather than a stage of history: less national in its economy, more pooled in its sovereignty, but increasingly nationalist in its politics. Its features are real within the EU, and their reversibility is the main lesson of the last decade.