The Return of the Public Domain after the Triumph of Markets : Revisiting the Most Basic of Fundamentals

This prospective paper is about ‘after the triumph’, a short-hand for a much larger and more powerful idea, namely, the return, reconstitution and redeployment of the public domain in a post-Seattle and post-Washington consensus world order (Williamson 1990, 1999). The emergence of the global economy with its predilection for market fundamentals, tough zero-inflation bench-marking, an unstoppable political dynamic of one worldism and silence on the need for an expansive notion of the public sphere is unquestionably the watershed event of our times. The meta-narrative of globalization has no rivals as the last grand political discourse of the twentieth century and if we understand anything about the endless capacity of the globalization narrative to reinvent itself in a new guise when conditions demand it, today is one of those defining moments. A new kind of state is emerging with its own particular institutions, practices and innovative forms as theorized by Held (1995) and Castells (1996). Yet after the battle in Seattle and the 2008 global financial crisis, the future prospects of ‘market fundamentalism’ are increasingly troubled. A turning point has been reached in the debate over the rising costs and elusive benefits of globalization. The contemporary rebundling of identity and territory makes available policy space for the re-entry of the public domain. If there are to be clear sites of national authority and a stable international community, the re-emergence of the public domain, in which consensus, co-operation and public discourse figure predominately, has a compelling, if neglected, role to play as one of the co-ordinates that will rebundle ‘identity and territory’ in Ruggie’s evocative words. With material and institutional dimensions that are large and complex with overlapping aspects, the public domain should not be used interchangeably with the public sector, with which it is often confused. Nor should it be limited to the provision of public goods, a staple of modern economic liberalism. In the primary sense of the term, the public domain is about the resources carved out from the market that empower and transform both the state and non-state actors