Contours of the Illiberal State

Assembling the Smart Economy: A Typology of State Intervention Patterns Boris Vormann and Christian Lammert The era of liberal ascendance seems to have come to an abrupt end-and the notion of an imminent post-national age with it. The state is back. In fact, it never left. But the smart economy and its techno-scientific promises of big data, tracing technology and the internet, as we argue, obfuscate our view from the continuing importance of government politics. We contend that this invisibility of political agency has helped prepare the ground for the rise of illiberal states. This book seeks to salvage a richer understanding of state activity at a moment of renationalization and democratic crisis. It dissects the ways in which the context of the US state, presumed to be the most-liberal and least-interventionist possible, has in fact always been more than just a market fixer. This book fleshes out patterns of state intervention in globalization processes. It does so in historical perspective and with a planetary scope. While the smart economy for many seems on the horizon, we contend that the sanguine view of a post-statist order that it insinuates are premature. The essays collected here pull into view the active roles of governments that have been and still are necessary to make global flows of goods, people and capital across vast distances possible. While the post-Cold War era was dominated, both in academia and political practice, by the assumption of ever-integrating networks of trade and interaction that rendered the state unnecessary, this perspective was often more a normative and ideological wish than an empirical truth. As we contend, any vision of a Green New Deal or of a smart and truly sustainable economy needs to be based on an understanding of labor in global production and of the importance of the political. In a comparative perspective that includes Canada and Mexico, we trace the active role of the US state in facilitating global circulation

ContentsPreface 7PrologueAssembling the Smart Economy: A Typology of State Intervention Patterns 11Boris Vormann and Christian LammertI. Infrastructural Statecraft: Logistics, Power and CirculationLogistics of Settlement: Rethinking the Political Economic Geography of Canadian Colonial Expansion 39Patrick DeDauwGuaranteeing the Flow: How State Politics Shaped Global Logistics Systems 67Christian GüseCirculation Needs, State Selectivities and Technostructures: The Case of NAFTA 93Tommaso BurdetII. The Smart City: Grounding the Economy of the FutureThe Myth of the Green City: Mapping the Uneven Geographies of E-Mobility 119Tobias KaltDisrupting Regulation? State Capacities in the Digital Platform Economy 147Jonas PentzienFear and Loathing on the High Line: Notes from the Spatial Frontline of Spectacle Techno-Capitalism 177Jeremy WilliamsIII. Labor, Technological Utopias and Emancipatory PotentialsInfrastructures of Digital Capitalism: On Automation and Labor 199Astrid ZimmermannA Second Gilded Age? Organized Labor in Changing Geographies of Work 219Dave BraneckCeteris Paribus Ideology: The Green Economy, Technology and the Future of Work 245Lasse ThieleEpilogueProspects of a Rural Renaissance: Will the Smart Economy Compress Regional Disparities? 275Julia PüschelNotes on Contributors 291

Boris Vormann ist Professor für Politikwissenschaften am Bard College Berlin. Christian Lammert ist Professor für die politischen Systeme Nordamerikas an der FU Berlin.