Page 117 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

Soviet Union to master information technology. This failure Castells puts
forward as the central reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
However, his attitude to the East Asian developmental state is quite dif-
ferent and it is interesting to note why this is so. According to Castells, the
‘project’ of the state in East Asia ‘took the form of the affirmation of
national identity, and national culture, building or rebuilding the nation as
a force in the world, in this case by means of economic competitiveness
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and socioeconomic improvement’. Thus, the developmental state is to be
lauded because it was an identity-affirming, identity-strengthening project –
in the sense not of local, but of national community, while the neo-liberal
minimalist and the totalitarian Soviet states are to be rejected because
both, in different ways, sideline and subordinate identity. One does too
little to affirm identity – indeed, corrupts identity with rationalistic self-
seeking; the other swallows up identity with its all-pervasive political and
police mechanisms, imposing ‘an exclusionary ideological identity’. 34
This approach to neo-liberalism and the primacy of identity necessar-
ily means that Castells also cannot accept the view of globalization which
sees it as nullifying the power of the nation–state. 35 Indeed, he goes to
some lengths to distinguish the nation from the state and, as one would
expect, to give primacy to the former over the latter. It is the nation – the
community writ large – which is his primary reality and the state is simply
an instrument which should be made to properly service this ‘project
identity’. From this viewpoint – a kind of communitarian nationalism –
Castells affirms the persistence of the power of states even where, on
other grounds, one may expect his position to be more localist, because
states serve the communitarian identity of the nation.
At the same time, he necessarily argues that for this and other reasons,
there are powerful ‘limits to globalization’. What could these limits be?
36
There are political and economic factors which establish these limits. The
political factors have to do with the role which the state plays in shaping
the architecture of global economic and other agreements – the very
framework in which globalization occurs. In addition, states also inter-
vene very directly to support the interest of particular transnational cor-
porations which originate in the home nation–state. The economic factors
include the fact that most transnational corporations maintain their decision-
making headquarters, main assets, key technological and financial opera-
tions in their home nation. Moreover, Castells points out that both trade
and investment penetration continue to be very uneven – with the pene-
tration of especially the Japanese market being very limited. The most
interesting factor, however, is the way in which Castells sees the ‘identity’
(my term) of transnational corporations. They are conceived of as cultural

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