Reluctant state capitalism: Antipathy, accommodation and hybridity in Irish telecommunications

The state capitalism literature emphasizes the new roles played by states in global politics and domestic economies through heightened intervention and ownership of key resources and sectors. In Ireland, we instead find a reluctant state capitalism evinced by antipathy towards state ownership, the accommodation of private sector failures and embrace of hybrid governance. Rather than something new and unprecedented, the Irish state has been a long-standing feature of domestic market development and an important institution supporting private enterprise today as in the past. Urging a more academically robust conceptualization of state capitalism, this paper relinquishes innate assumptions of obvious boundaries dividing liberalized capitalism from state capitalism in favour of engaging the domestic state and sectoral developments on their own terms and within their proper historical context. We find reluctant state capitalism in Ireland’s telecommunications sector through a continuum of state–market involvement in four phases: commercial, devolving, evolving and partnership state capitalism. By identifying temporal phases of state capitalism, we move beyond the here-and-now of more contemporary ‘new’ state capitalism analyses that suggest rupture with an idealized, liberalized past.