国家力量卷土重来 老式的外交仍发挥着主导作用

Is the state making a comeback? It can certainly look like it. Old-fashioned interstate conflicts are roiling the China Sea and Russia’s western borders. Inter-governmental meetings such as the last Apec conference and the Group of 20 leading economies in Sydney took on an unwonted urgency. More positively, it is old-fashioned diplomacy that is making the running on issues from Iran’s nuclear programme to global warming.

国家正在“卷土重来”？看起来可能就是如此。老式的国家间冲突正搅动着中国海(China Sea)和俄罗斯西部边境。政府间会议，比如刚结束的亚太经合组织(Apec)会议和20国集团(G20)悉尼峰会，都具备了一种少有的紧迫性。更能证明这一点的是，在从伊朗核计划到全球变暖等一系列问题上，老式的外交仍发挥着主导作用。

Yet the dominant view since the early 1990s has been that globalisation meant the transformation of the world through non-state actors. The end of the cold war ushered in an almost Marxist expectation that the state would wither away – overshadowed by free flows of money and goods, undermined by non-state actors of which terrorist groups were only the most obvious. It was an expectation shared right across the political spectrum.

然而，上世纪90年代初以来的主流观点一直是，全球化导致非国家力量成为世界变革的主导因素。冷战的结束催生了一种近乎马克思主义式的预期：在资本与货物自由流动的巨大阴影下，在非国家力量（恐怖组织只是其中最明显的一支力量）的削弱下，国家将逐渐消亡。各个政治派别都曾产生这种预期。

On the left, critics of market globalisation anticipated the rise of people power. Non-governmental organisations would supersede the supposedly worn out institutions of the nation state and create new, more vibrant forms of political activity. Technology would bring better solutions to old problems, bypassing stagnant state institutions.

在左翼阵营，市场全球化的批评者曾预期民众力量会崛起。非政府组织将取代应该已破败不堪的民族国家机构，并创立新的、更具活力的政治活动体制。科技将为老问题带来更有效的解决办法，绕开死气沉沉的国家机构。

The neoliberal right hailed the rise of global finance, the dismantling of capital controls and the deregulation of banking, not least because all of these weakened national governments’ capacity to control markets. In manufacturing and services, enormous new powers accrued to corporations able to take advantage of differing tax regimes and wage levels across the world.

新自由主义(Neoliberalism)右翼阵营则为全球金融的崛起、资本管制的解除和银行业的去监管叫好，其重要原因在于，这几个因素都弱化了民族国家政府对市场的管制能力。在制造业和服务业，巨大的新兴力量渐渐集中到那些能利用全球税制和工资水平差异牟利的企业手中。

Yet these hopes underestimated the sheer staying power – indeed the legitimacy – of the state and its institutions, and the extreme difficulty of creating new ones from scratch. NGOs remain on the sidelines: international organisations are vehicles for clusters and coalitions of national states to act in concert where they can. To that extent they are essentially derivative, reflecting the wishes of their most powerful members. The idea that they could be freed from the clutches of national governments was a pipe dream.

但是，这些预期低估了国家及国家机构的巨大耐久力（其实就是其合法性），以及从无到有创建新机构的极端困难性。非政府组织唱的仍然是配角：国际组织是民族国家为在可能领域采取一致行动而设立的抱团及联合平台。就此而言，它们本质上属于派生物，反映的是其最强大成员的意愿。有人认为它们能摆脱民族国家政府的控制，这种想法就是白日做梦。

And the neoliberal infatuation with unfettered markets has not fared much better. The era of globalisation was always one of instability and in Mexico, east Asia, and Russia, the costs of crisis were evident to those who cared throughout the 1990s. But it was only a decade later, when the failure of Lehman Brothers and its aftermath robbed Americans and Europeans of their faith in capitalism, that perceptions started to change where it counted.

新自由主义对自由市场的迷恋，导致的结果也没好到哪去。全球化时代一直伴随着动荡；整个20世纪90年代，在墨西哥、东亚和俄罗斯，危机带来的损失对那些关心这一切的人来说显而易见的。但自由市场经济体的民众观念开始发生转变是在10年之后，那一年，雷曼兄弟(Lehman Brothers)垮台及其余波导致欧美人丧失了对资本主义的信心。

Since then, power has shifted back towards the state on multiple fronts. It was, after all, taxpayers who bailed the banks out. It fell to central banks, in conjunction with finance ministries, to superintend the exit from crisis. Since 2010, the increasing inequality that has accompanied the recovery has fuelled an underlying swell of electoral anger not only against the banks but also against the light tax burdens enjoyed by many global corporations. The change in sentiment threatens further trade liberalisation and has propelled calls for the international harmonisation of corporation taxes up the political agenda. At the same time, Vladimir Putin’s muscle-flexing illustrates the continued indispensability of states in settling matters of war and peace.

自那以来，国家已在多个方面“卷土重来”。毕竟，是纳税人拯救了银行业。正是多国的央行和财政部携起手来，才引领世界脱离了危机。自2010年以来，与复苏相伴而来的是不平等的加剧，这可能已令选民对银行乃至对许多跨国企业享有的轻税负产生更大的愤慨。民众情绪的变化对进一步的贸易自由化构成了威胁，并引发了把制定国际统一公司税摆在政治议程更靠前位置的呼声。同时，弗拉基米尔•普京(Vladimir Putin)炫耀武力的行为表明，在解决战争与和平的问题时，国家一直是不可或缺的。

In reality, the state has been with us the whole time. Its fiscal imprint has hardly changed in decades: US government receipts, for instance, are much the same percentage of output today as in 1960. In the UK, public spending has fluctuated within a fairly narrow band throughout the same period. What happened over the past two or three decades was less a withering away of the state than a recalibration of official priorities. Abdicating strategic planning internally, the state become an arbiter of regulatory regimes. Externally, it transformed defence budgets, transferring resources from men to machines.

在现实中，国家由始至终没有离开过我们。几十年来，国家的财政印迹几乎没有发生变化：比如，如今的美国政府收入与经济产出之比，与1960年基本相同。同期，英国的公共支出一直在相当窄的范围内波动。过去二三十年发生的事，更多的是一种官方优先事项的重校，而不是国家力量的日渐衰落。对内，国家不再做战略规划，变身成为监管体制的仲裁者。对外，国家大幅调整了防务预算，把资源从人转到机器上。

The financial crisis has accelerated some of these trends and started to reverse others. States – or the politicians who lead them – are still reluctant to do what would have been done in the 1940s. They remain strikingly reluctant to impose tougher penalties on banks or to identify unemployment as a priority. But what is perhaps important is what the crisis has done globally: by discrediting the more mythical idealisations of the market, it has encouraged the restoration of state power as a goal in itself. This programme is easily harnessed by authoritarian leaders in the name of national sovereignty and democracy. Hungary and Russia exemplify the trend. We have heard a lot, this past 20 years, about the decline of the state. We will not be hearing much more.

金融危机加快了上述部分趋势，并开始逆转另一些趋势。国家——或者说领导国家的政治人士——仍不愿做原本在上世纪40年代就可做到的事情。他们仍极不愿意对银行处以更严厉的惩罚、或把解决失业作为优先任务。但重要的可能是金融危机在全球造成的后果：它让那些神乎其神的、把市场理想化的理论名誉扫地，从根本上促使人们把恢复国家的力量做为一项目标。这一进程容易被假托国家主权与民主之名的威权领导人利用。匈牙利和俄罗斯就是这一趋势的典型例子。过去二十年，我们听到了许多关于国家力量走下坡路的议论。未来，这种议论不会显著增多。