Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the Edge of Chaos ...

Prefiguration and emergence 37
military force against significant perceived threats to democracy. Combined
with state building and the assertion of inviolable basic values this represents
a claim of primacy as the benchmark for human civilisation.
Global regulatory reach: deterritorialisation
By combining Giddens’s (1987) notion of administrative reach and Shiva’s
(1992) notion of global reach, Welsh (1996, 2000) developed the term global
regulatory reach as a generic term for scientific and technical regulatory
regimes introduced in the post-war era. The term applies equally well to the
extension of economic and financial regulatory regimes of the WB and IMF,
some of which are tied to technical aid programmes. Global regulatory reach
is characterised by the need to establish global regulatory standards across
both space and time in order to achieve the intended benefits of a programme.
Whilst such regimes typically leave some leeway in terms of how they are
implemented to accommodate cultural differences, they are primarily shaped
by Western forms or rationality through expert communities. The proliferation
of global regulatory regimes exercising such reach represents key instruments
for the creation of what Hardt and Negri (2004) term smooth space.
Global regulatory reach assumes that the substantive rationality underpinning
a particular programme can be realised irrespective of the cultural
and social composition and traditions of recipient states. Further, there is an
implicit assumption that the citizens of Western ‘donor’ states will accept
both the products of such regimes and the necessary life style adjustments.
The increasing attention given to ‘governance’ issues and ‘civil society
questions’ reflect the increasing resistance of actors in both South and
North to such exercises in global regulatory reach.
In this process States become increasingly torn between competing
externalities as they attempt to simultaneously align themselves with the
smoothing and striating forces of capital, science, technology and citizen
demands. The clear-cut notion of states as guarantors of national capital(s) –
the executive committee model of the state – becomes decisively fractured.
The modern state is increasingly fragmented as different departments of
state, align themselves differentially in relation to the range of external and
internal pressures. The classic functions of the state interact with the global
institutional nexus with the security state, finance state and political state
both constituting and becoming subject to top-down regimes. These lines of
fracture are reflected within the global institutional nexus as part of the
struggle to de- and reterritorialise global agendas. Hardt and Negri approach
this nexus as an integrated Empire; however we argue that this results in an
over-hegemonic depiction of the prevailing power relations. There are in
effect competing Empires as different fractions align in the pursuit of
competing agendas. The interpretation of these fault lines and the alignment
of ‘domestic policy’ within particular nation states produces increasing
fragmentation of the ‘national’.