The Public and Its Problems

"Well, one might say quite reasonably that you know one when you see one. In many parts of the world failing states become not only a threat to the countries which surround them, but also to their own populations. And we’re not just talking about Iraq and Afghanistan , or Haiti and Somalia. I think the question of the degree of state functionality applies even to countries such as America and Britain and France and Germany which are struggling with questions of what a state does and what a state is. As we’ve learned painfully over the last few months, there are questions about the relation of a state to the market, and the relation of the state and the market to civil society in the 21st century. That’s a very interesting question. I think that the European Union has come up with a very useful concept, which is that of subsidiarity: this means that the citizens take decisions at the most local level. And that applies to the way that funds are organised and states are organised and the way that markets and also civil society is organised. It was John Dewey who said that the state is just a mechanism which does at any point what its citizens want it to do. And that’s my first book, John Dewey’s The Public and its Problems , which he wrote in 1927. Dewey is saying that the key is how to organise the type of public discussion which needs to take place so that the citizens can decide what they want the state to do. This really puts at the centre of this discussion the notion of the state as essentially a mechanism whose sole function is to serve its population. The state may need to dominate in that it needs to have a monopoly on the means to violence, or the legitimate means to violence, as Max Weber said. But beyond that, it is an instrument of collective power. It harnesses power in order to serve the population. It can be. It should be. But in many parts of the world today it is a predatory structure. Because it has become captive to interest groups who use it as an instrument to oppress the population. In different parts of the world, of course, we see different kinds of abuse of the state. What we’re understanding, for example, with the present collapse of the global markets is that we need to rethink the role of the state and particularly the relationship between the state and the market in every context. I was recently at a meeting of democratic senators and they were saying we need to rethink the role of the United States in the 21st century. And they were referring to state level governance in the western seaboard of the United States. I think they’re realising the force of globalisation, which means that a whole set of assumptions that applied in the last century do not apply in this one, which requires them to rethink how the states serve their citizens and how they interface with and regulate the market. And with the globalisation of the media and civil society and the market, we need to rethink our organisational paradigms in all areas of life."