The history and future of nation-building: Editor’s introduction
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852309365675 |
| Date | 01 June 2010 |
| Published date | 01 June 2010 |
| Author | Christopher Pollitt |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Christopher Pollitt is Editor-in-chief of IRAS and Research Professor in Public Management, Public
Management Institute, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.
© The authors, 2010. Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
Vol 76(2):195–196 [DOI:10.1177/0020852309365675]
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
The history and future of nation-building
Editor’s introduction
Christopher Pollitt
It was a pleasure to be in that handsome city, Helsinki , in July 2009, and it is an
equal pleasure now to be able to introduce this themed issue, based on papers and
presentations made at that conference. There can be few more important topics than
how states are built, maintained, improved and, sometimes, reconstructed. Apart from
cases of explicit state-building the programme also embraced papers on manage-
ment improvement and whole-of-government budgeting and financing. In choosing
this broad theme, the IIAS and its Finnish hosts were consciously going beyond the
usual public administration agenda to embrace wider questions of constitutional and
international law, political philosophy and the nature of civic society, in addition to the
more conventional matters of sound management.
Over the past decade or two there has been a thread in some of the academic
literature to the effect that nation states are of rapidly diminishing importance. Power
and influence, it has been argued, are draining out of the nation state, and are being
shifted both ‘upwards’ — to global networks — and ‘downwards’, to city regions. The
IIAS Conference confirmed the verdict of the most perceptive scholars (see, e.g. Brenner,
2004; Held, 2004) by showing how crucial nation states remain. The nation state and
global networks are not separate categories in a zero-sum game. Rather they are mutu-
ally influencing arenas in which the forces of governance play out. National govern-
ments shape global institutions with the intention of better achieving their purposes,
and these institutions, once they are in action, act back on national governments.
A number of the articles in this collection speak directly to the relationship between
national governments and the international arena. Our first two articles (which both
happened to begin life as speeches) each tackle the challenges to contemporary gov-
ernments in a fast-moving, increasingly globalized world. Usually this journal hesitates
to publish speeches, concentrating instead on scientific papers that are expected to
be both more durable and more deeply rooted in existing, cumulative scholarship.
But in this case the speeches had irresistible qualities. First, they tackled very broad
and fundamental issues in a bold way (scientific journals need at least a few articles
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