Globalisierung war zu keinem Zeitpunkt ohne staatliches Handeln möglich. Aber es macht für Demokratien einen Unterschied, ob der Staat versucht, in sozialen und ökologischen Fragen aktiv zu intervenieren - oder ob er, als illiberaler Staat, abseits der politischen Öffentlichkeit lediglich die Rahmenbedingungen für die Ausweitung globaler Märkte schafft. Die hier versammelten Beiträge richten einen historisch vergleichenden Blick auf die anhaltende, zentrale Rolle des US-amerikanischen Staats in der Smart Economy.

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Boris Vormann ist Professor für Politikwissenschaften am Bard College Berlin. Christian Lammert ist Professor für die politischen Systeme Nordamerikas an der FU Berlin.

Assembling the Smart Economy: A Typology of State Intervention Patterns Boris Vormann and Christian Lammert The era of liberal ascendance seems to have come to an abrupt end-and the notion of an imminent post-national age with it. The state is back. In fact, it never left. But the smart economy and its techno-scientific promises of big data, tracing technology and the internet, as we argue, obfuscate our view from the continuing importance of government politics. We contend that this invisibility of political agency has helped prepare the ground for the rise of illiberal states. This book seeks to salvage a richer understanding of state activity at a moment of renationalization and democratic crisis. It dissects the ways in which the context of the US state, presumed to be the most-liberal and least-interventionist possible, has in fact always been more than just a market fixer. This book fleshes out patterns of state intervention in globalization processes. It does so in historical perspective and with a planetary scope. While the smart economy for many seems on the horizon, we contend that the sanguine view of a post-statist order that it insinuates are premature. The essays collected here pull into view the active roles of governments that have been and still are necessary to make global flows of goods, people and capital across vast distances possible. While the post-Cold War era was dominated, both in academia and political practice, by the assumption of ever-integrating networks of trade and interaction that rendered the state unnecessary, this perspective was often more a normative and ideological wish than an empirical truth. As we contend, any vision of a Green New Deal or of a smart and truly sustainable economy needs to be based on an understanding of labor in global production and of the importance of the political. In a comparative perspective that includes Canada and Mexico, we trace the active role of the US state in facilitating global circulation along the logistical supply chains, communication channels and inter-urban travel itineraries of the smart economy and its antecedents. Ultimately, in pointing out the continuities and types of state intervention as a market enabler, shaper and developer across different temporal and national orders, this book helps to sketch out the contours of a political present in which the state is again increasingly seen as the key political actor. However, while earlier state formations incorporated certain social responsibilities of the state vis-à-vis its constituencies (such as the protection of political and social rights), the illiberal state is risking to revert back to its proto-liberal functions as a mere guarantor of economic rights and a facilitator of circulation. Liberalism in Crisis Until very recently, the expansion of markets seemed both inexorable and desirable. Binding societies together through networks of trade, markets have been regarded in liberal thought as emancipatory and pacifying for a long time. Why would rational actors do anything but maximize their value and interact peacefully? Smith, Ricardo and many others after them gave an unequivocal answer to this question: they would not. And yet, recent counter-movements to liberal globalization are forming in Western liberal democracies. What Syriza, Brexiteers, Podemos and Trumpists share, despite their radically different political positions, is a critique of these axiomatic assumptions. Not everybody is benefitting from globalization and global trade in similar ways. In fact, certain groups are clearly losing. This fundamental crisis of liberal democracies coincides with the rise of a new economic paradigm. New ways of amassing and analyzing data, geo-sensitive tracking technology and new means of communication and transportation are beginning to radically reshape the spatial and social division of labor. We use the term "smart economy" to denote those arrangements that emphasize the role of technological innovation and market solutions in the future of work. This umbrella term captures debates and narratives that fuse tropes of technological utopianism and economic determinism to create visions of what might appear as an impending, best of all possible worlds. Building on ideas of a postindustrial knowledge society, a flurry of new terms and concepts have been coined over recent years to capture different aspects of this emergent economic structure: the sharing economy (Sundararajan 2016; Albinsson and Perera 2018), the zero-marginal-cost society (Rifkin 2015), the green economy (Kenis and Lievens 2015), the digital platform economy (Huws 2014; Ng 2014; Dyer-Witheford 2015; Scholz 2016; Srnicek 2017), the gig economy (Mulcahy 2016; Tolley 2018), cognitive capitalism (Rindermann 2018), the second machine age (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014), the no collar economy (George and Buitrago 2017)-the list could easily be extended. What these terms share is a sense of novelty and a strong faith in the progressive tendencies of technological development. As the argument goes, by sharing goods and services, and by using them more efficiently through smarter allocation and re-use, we stand to develop more environmentally-friendly societies and to avert the worst effects of climate change. In a striking historical rebirth of the postindustrial society, technology- and market-driven developments are portrayed as inevitable, and ultimately beneficial to all. We do in part agree with those more optimistic discourses of the smart economy that tracing and tracking technology, in combination with other technological advances in communication and transportation have matured into an emergent technological paradigm that has already begun to revolutionize the spatial organization of work. E-commerce and the rise of the gig economy have emphasized the importance of speed to market. Coupled with a renationalization of economic discourses as witnessed after Brexit and the election of Trump, this might foreshadow a return of manufacturing to the North Atlantic. But while we share the assumption that technological innovation ushered in fundamental changes in the past-from the steam engine to the telegraph, the container to the internet-and might do so again, we are much more skeptical when it comes to notions of inexorable progress. We also disagree with the idea that processes of technological development and economic restructuring are external, overcoming us from the outside. In fact, they are highly political and the state remains a key actor on multiple scales-but oftentimes the enabling work it conducts is hard to trace. The articles united in this book look back at earlier historical formations and compare different cases to sketch how the smart economy is beginning to alter the social and spatial organization of work. But unlike many other treatments of this matter, this book puts a particular emphasis on the persistent role of the state in establishing and maintaining technological networks and new divisions of labor. Foregrounding the spatial politics of emergent economies of the future in such a manner, we seek to raise questions of political legitimacy and social justice. It might seem paradoxical to focus such an analysis of an impending economic paradigm and new state patterns on the United States. The US has typically been regarded as an exceptional case. This is the country where, at first glance, state intervention would seem most unlikely. The mythology of American exceptionalism is based on precisely that assumption of a reticent state apparatus. The land of the free was built as a contrast to the feudal absolutist states of Europe, its revolution led to government by the people-not central state power-as the key principle of societal organization (Hartz 1955; Lipset 1990). Freedom was often envisaged in these national mythologies as a correlate of markets and individual entrepreneurialism-a vision that social scient...