State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another by Joel S. Migdal (review)

462 Рецензии/Reviews Bram Mikhail CAPLAN Joel S. Migdal, State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). xi+291 pp. Bibliography, Index. ISBN: 0-52179706 -3. In the last chapter of this enlightening collection of essays and literature reviews, Joel Migdal notes that the modern state is “the mountain that all political scientists sooner or later must climb” (P. 231). Climbing this mountain, however, might well be a Sisyphean task. On the one hand, it is hard to imagine of CEE states. In her analysis of the transformation of Polish economic policy, Epstein asserts that it is the mechanism of rule-transfer that underwrites the EU’s ability to exact compliance with its rules. Lastly, The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe brings together the inferences of the different case studies in a perceptive evaluation by Adrianne Heather, who compares the suggestions of the external incentives model of Europeanization advanced by the contributors with the mainstream literature on the Europeanization of the EU member states (P. 199). Such assessment is useful both for illuminating the differences and exploring the similarities in the two dynamics. However, it is also well-timed in terms of theory-building and for suggesting potential analytical roadmaps for further research. In this respect, the volume edited by Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier presents a judicious and thorough analysis of the Europeanization problematique, in particular as it has been discussed in the context of EU conditionality toward CEE. It convincingly argues that the impact of Brussels-promoted rules and procedures has been the product of the size of the net benefits of EU accession to the candidate states and the credibility of the membership prospect (P. 226). In this respect the volume would be of benefit both to scholars and students of international affairs and, in particular, those interested in the EU’s role in external relations as well as its enlargement process. In effect, the framework and level of analysis exhibited by The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe makes it invaluable both for the purposes of teaching and theorizing the mechanisms of EU-enlargement. One only hopes that this volume will inspire research of the same superb caliber. 463 Ab Imperio, 1/2006 where political science – if not the social sciences writ large, or for that matter, all modern thought – would be without the state. As one recent book notes: “we simply seem to lack the intellectual resources necessary to conceive of a political order beyond or without the state.”1 On the other hand, the state’s very centrality has made it an especially elusive concept, as well as a contentious one. How should the state be defined? Do theories of the state refer to something “out there,” even if that something cannot be directly observed? Should the state be given ontological status? Or do scholars who conceptualize (and anthropomorphize ) states as unitary actors necessarily engage in reification, that lowliest of scholarly sins? While Migdal does not address these questions directly, State in Society is nonetheless a useful guide up the mountain. The book’s value, though, lies less in the model of the state that Migdal purports to offer – indeed, there is no identifiable model in the text, even in the second chapter “A Model of State-Society Relations ” – and more in the plethora of “little” methodological and practical insights found therein (those in search of “grand theory” will find little gratification). His call for an “anthropology of the state” – that is, for a research program in which the state is disaggregated rather than presented as a single “static, independent” variable (P. 24), and in which the focus is on “process” rather than on “structure” and “outcomes ” (P. 23) – is one that political science would do well to heed. Though the essays in State in Society discuss various themes – individual change and institutional change, modernization and development – the book is at its core a critique of the voluminous literature on the state. Of course, American political science from the late 1950s onward typically ignored the question of the state altogether – the work of Samuel P. Huntington, Migdal’s dissertation advisor (P. 7), being an important...