Agriculture and the Changing Nation‐State: Implications for Policy and Political Economy: Discussion

Abstract

Today we face profound changes in the way we live, associate with others, and govern ourselves. It has become clear that we face not only the globalization of markets and related institutional and economic change but also change in the long-stable assumptions, value beliefs, and institutions that sustain our basic unit of governance: the nation-state. This in turn transforms the way in which nations and private interests pursue their political objectives both domestically and internationally. We present the case that economic and technological changes are transforming the political role of the nation-state. The integration of national economies on a global and a regional basis imposes new constraints on the capacity of the nation-state to fulfill its traditional policy roles. At the same time, technological changes are transforming national politics by fragmenting political interests along increasingly narrow lines, thereby diminishing the nation-state's capacity to define and defend the national interest in the face of the escalating demands of rapidly proliferating interest groups. The result is that: 1) the power of the nation-state is drifting upward toward increaisngly complex networks of international institutions and nongovernment organizations and downward to subnational levels of government; 2) the conflicting forces of global economic integration and proliferating interest group demands increase the transaction costs associated with any policy decision, creating obstacles to effective governance; and 3) these economic and political transformations of the nation-state, combined with the economic transformation of agriculture in the development process, impose new constraints and obligations on the agricultural policy decisions of national governments. We begin by briefly reviewing the literature on the putative 'end of the nation-state' and the forces of global integration causing a reallocation of roles in federal systems, such as those of Canada and the US. We then relate this knowledge to the changing nature of policy decisions and politics in national governments and examine the changing role of national governments in agriculture.