Taking Back Control?:
States and State Systems After Globalism
By Wolfgang Streeck
Verso, 416 pages, $34.95

The most significant transformation in politics on both sides of the Atlantic in the last 20 years has been the left’s acceptance, even embrace, of globalization. In the 1990s, social movements against global sweatshops and ecological damage by irresponsible multinationals presciently warned that a system of constant capital mobility, backed by norms and rules codified by international bodies such as the World Trade Organization, would empower a new oligarchy immune to challenges from below.

By the mid-2010s, amid Brexit, Donald Trump’s first victory, and the backlash against Angela Merkel’s liberal migration policy, a new approach to globalization had become dominant on the left: one that equated skepticism about it with regressive chauvinism, and viewed a system of uniformly open economies as paramount to global human welfare. Only a dwindling minority of progressives maintained that nation-states, despite their flaws, still constitute the best means to inscribe democratic principles into economic life.

The disrepute that threatens the latter camp hasn’t stopped its intellectuals from speaking out. Among these, none has more stubbornly mounted a left-wing case for sovereignty than the influential German economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, former director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. At 78, Streeck—a one-time adviser to the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and an informal guide to the “left-conservative” politician Sahra Wagenknecht—owes his late-career prominence to several provocative essays and books published in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis.

More recently, he has fallen out of favor on the left for his idiosyncratic communitarianism and opposition to what he has called “uninvited immigration.” Nonetheless, an understanding of social democracy’s decline would be incomplete without his acerbic analysis of the consolidation of neoliberal governance in the face of popular unrest, the decay of economic security and traditional working-class political agency, and the undemocratic nature of the European Union and eurozone.

Taking Back Control?: States and State Systems After Globalism, Streeck’s latest book, is both a summation of those core themes and a new undertaking combining theories of international political economy and international relations. As the title suggests, Streeck is invested in imagining a path out of the policy straitjacket jointly imposed by the Washington Consensus and Brussels. He outlines a renewal of social citizenship through reclaimed sovereignty, buttressed by cooperative multipolarity. In other words, a world system that safeguards democratically determined production and distribution against an agglomeration of power by either a traditional hegemon or supranational institutions.

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