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The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics, by Walter C. Opello, Jr. and Stephen J. Rosow

 

12. Conclusion:
The Future of the State

 

The state is created and sovereignty instituted under specific conditions at specific times and places. We have traced the evolution of the state as it precipitated out after the collapse of the Roman Empire, as it emerged as a territorial state in early modern Europe, and as it forcefully divided the world into a system of sovereign states linked through global networks of political, economic, and cultural organization. In the previous chapter, we examined several challenges to the modern state by recent events and changes. We conclude by discussing the politics that flow from this condition.

 

The End of Modernity?

One of the central attributes of what is known as modernity is the historically created configuration of political space in the form of the sovereign territorial state. Modernity and the territorial state are synonymous. Remember that politics before the rise of the state was based on alternative ways of spatially organizing rule. Among the Germanic tribal peoples who filled in the geographical space of the collapsed Roman Empire, for example, the spatial dimension of rule was demarcated by nonterritorial ties of kinship. This was also the case in many places outside of Europe. In Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia a variety of complex political organizations existed, from empires to federal and protodemocratic forms, some based on kinship groups, some on tribe, some on geographical contiguity and diplomatic settlement, some on patriarchalism, or a combination of these. Remember also that in the feudal “states” that grew out of the Germanic kingdoms, rule was fragmented, personalized, and parcelized among a multiplicity of overlapping and competing jurisdictions. There were no clearly demarcated and mutually recognized boundaries between feudal “states,” only indistinct frontiers.

As we saw, during the Middle Ages the territorially indistinct feudal “state” began to be transformed into the territorially exclusive, centralized medieval state. During the Middle Ages the fragmented, decentralized, personalistic rule of the feudal state was remade into direct, territorially defined centralized rule over an exclusive geographical space. Political space came to be defined as it appeared from the perspective of an indivisible sovereign, and the rule of that space came to be about maintaining public order and territorial security. After the Peace of Westphalia, reciprocal territorial sovereignty became a fundamental principle of global order. Eventually, no space on the planet, except the open oceans, was left free from the control of a sovereign state, and even the oceans were regulated by international organizations created by sovereign states. The geopolitics of the modern age is grounded in relations among territorially exclusive states and has been powerfully reinforced by nationalism. The story of modernity’s triumph, viewed from the perspective of the territorial state, is less one of the victory of reason, science, individualism, law, and rationality (although it is that in part) and more one of conquest and imposition, of military force and coercion.

Modernity is, of course, a complex, multifarious order, and the state does not exhaust it. Moreover, the state participates in and has helped to foster aspects of modernity—developments of science, technology, and law—that have brought significant benefits. But the same developments have also had enormous negative effects.

Considerable debate has emerged in current social theory about whether modernity has come to an end and is being replaced by something called “postmodernity.” 1   Two overlapping questions have been asked in this regard: first, is modernity being replaced by a postmodern condition, and second, should modernity be replaced? In the case of the state, the question of modernity is not easily answered. State power has widened and increased in significant ways in the context of globalization, even as some of the state’s traditional functions and powers have appeared to weaken. The state remains powerful, and territorial identities, although no longer having quite the monopoly on political identity they once did, are still strong. Nevertheless, arguments about the decline of state power and sovereignty seem plausible. Underlying this paradox is the decline of territoriality as the spatiotemporal frame for politics. Having lost a relatively secure relation to territory, the state has ceased to be able readily to secure itself as a representation of a distinct people. In this concluding chapter we address two results that flow from this state of affairs: (1) the apparent turn throughout the current world order to a “new” type of neoliberal state, on the one hand; and (2) the emergence of a variety of deterritorialized political and social movements on the other.

 

The Neoliberal State?

During the 1970s Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government in Britain attacked basic presumptions of the Fordist class compromise and the welfare state. Thatcher argued that these were too expensive, too collectivist, and too paternalistic. The welfare state was responsible, so went the argument of her party (the Tories), for the combined stagnation, unemployment, and inflation that plagued Britain and much of the world economy at the time, as well as a decline in patriotism and, in general, the traditional moral values of the national community. The answer the Tories offered was a “revolution” that would install neoliberal economic policies, such as tight money to reduce budget deficits, an end to state subsidies or ownership of industry, and free trade, along with a neoconservative politico-moral agenda to restore traditional national values. The latter consisted of promoting individual self-reliance against welfare “handouts” by the state and of increasing its police powers. 2

The neoliberal agenda spread to the United States with the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980. To the Tory critiques of the welfare state, U.S. neoconservatives added their antipathy to the rise of the New Left, the anti–Vietnam War movement, the radicalization of the civil rights movement, and, later, the rise of a feminist movement within mainstream political organizations. According to American neoconservatives, these movements had added too much democracy to the political process by reforming the selection of candidates by major parties to give grass-roots members more influence than party professionals and elites, promoting too much equality by instituting affirmative action programs, and, in general, making people more willing to challenge authority in both public and private.

During the 1990s the neoliberal agenda has become widely accepted by major political parties in core European states and has spread to the world order itself. In so-called newly industrializing states such as Singapore, South Korea, and Chile, similar programs of neoliberal economics and often harsh and repressive neoconservative social agendas have been promoted as the way to develop the state economically. The economic success of the former and the appeal to “traditional cultures” and cultural autonomy of the latter have justified restrictions on and often harsh repression of worker and democracy movements. Neoliberal economic programs have been promoted more generally as a way for poorer states to get out from under their enormous debts to Western banks and the IMF. Neoliberalism as the hegemonic ideology in international managerial organizations gained credibility after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as did the acceptance of “shock therapy” to turn post-Soviet Russia and other Eastern European states quickly into advanced capitalist ones. 3

We do not here evaluate the validity or accuracy of the neoliberal assessment of the crisis of the 1970s. 4   We do, however, question whether the advent of neoliberalism marks a fundamental transformation of the state into a new form. We suggest that, in fact, neoliberalism retools the managerial state in response to the accelerating globalization of capitalism since the 1970s.

In our view, rather than fundamentally overturning the managerial state, as the proponents of deregulation argue, the neoliberal agenda, in fact, actually strengthens key aspects of state power. Most significant is the diffusion and deterritorialization of power. Neoliberalism delegates managerial functions to international organizations and privatizes “public” power to an even greater degree than did postwar Keynesian economic policies. The language of a strictly separate private and public realm is, in fact, reinvigorated by the neoliberal state, for its legitimacy rests on representing the economy as private (meaning outside of government regulation), and the family as private so that it can be deployed as the space in which individual responsibility, patriotism, and traditional “family” values can be nurtured. Let us take each of these points, the delegation of power to international organization and the world market and the diffusion of state power through privatization, in turn.

It is important to remember that international managerial organizations have been adjunct to the managerial state from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century. During much of the twentieth century, sovereignty was instituted by means of the sharp division between inside and outside. Economies were represented as national economies with national firms as basic units that operated largely within the confines of the sovereign territorial state. 5   The attempt to represent the state as economically sovereign within its territory, of course, has always included “international” aspects—international organizations, trade, foreign investment, currency exchange rate mechanisms, and so forth—but the state’s territorial sovereignty presented these as outside the state. Market theories of the economy supplemented this presentation by situating global aspects of the economy in a cosmopolitan future. As Adam Smith and others argued, the market was the result of a universal human nature, and when all peoples were brought into the system, realizing their basic nature so to speak, they would create a single, harmonious world order based on the universal principles of the market. The strategies used by states for containing the global and international dimensions of capitalism—externalizing them as being outside the primary national economy, and legitimizing them as representing a harmonious future—are no longer very successful. The markers of the outside increasingly appear inside, and what used to be inside increasingly appears outside. In this context, neoliberalism has flourished as an ideology able to reintegrate the modern managerial state into a condition of globalization that problematizes territoriality.

From the middle to late nineteenth century, the power of the state (its systems of rational management and its ability to monitor social problems and deploy expert knowledge) began to grow into a system of international unions and organizations designed to manage the expansion of the capitalist industrial system beyond the confines of the territorial state. The number of such organizations already existing by the turn of the nineteenth century is surprising, given the image of the nineteenth century as an age of realpolitik and the emergence of nationalism. One scholar of international organizations cites 33 such organizations operating in 1914. These covered such specific areas as infrastructure (e.g., the Universal Postal Union [1874] and the Universal Radiotelegraph Union [1906]); industrial standards (e.g., International Bureau of Weights and Measures [1875]); managing social conflicts (e.g., International Labor Office [1901]; International Council for the Study of the Sea [1901]); and public health (e.g., International Association of Public Baths and Cleanliness). 6

Connected with state sovereignty, then, were a set of international organizations that, while not part of any particular state, generalized discrete functions of the state in the global order in which nation-states existed. The distinction between international and domestic, then, was an effect of managerialism, or of the limits of managerialism: managerialism constituted politics as an attribute of functional organization and management, and those functions that could not be organized by the individual states, because of politics, technological limits of surveillance, and so forth, were spatially located outside, in a new space of international organization. This space was territorial because it was dominated by specific states that controlled its personnel, set its dominant ideology, and policed its norms of operation; it was at the same time deterritorialized because its organization depended on generating networks of forces and relations that could not be confined within any particular national space.

Neoliberalism presents the late modern condition as a deterritorialized world—as a natural system of absolute free trade in which state boundaries do not act as barriers to the flow of goods and services around the globe. 7   If they want to ensure prosperity, all states are constrained by “competitiveness” in the global capitalist economy. Perceiving the new technological revolution, TNCs, and international financial markets as inevitable givens of the late modern world system—rather than historical creations of power and the result of decisions by certain states—states must cede some of their sovereignty to international institutions and organizations (e.g., the European Union, the G-7) that will safeguard and manage the new global competitive capitalism efficiently. (The United Nations could be one such institution, but only if it is reorganized to be more efficient and managerial.) Sovereignty is hence reinstituted according to a regime of economic and technological necessity. Lost in this reconfiguration is the idea of popular sovereignty, the sense that the central political organs of the state represent a people to which it is accountable.

The ideology of neoliberalism, in which liberalism is reduced to market economics, 8   suggests that states are simply passive vehicles in a globalizing world economy whose momentum they are powerless to stop or control. Downward pressures on wages worldwide and the mobility of firms, which has created unemployment and depressed local economies, are the result of inevitable, natural market forces, so the argument goes. The best states can do is get out of the way.

What this picture hides, of course, are the ways that states supplement the global capitalist economy. This is impossible for neoliberals to see because their ideology focuses rhetorically on preserving the distinction between state and civil society and state and economy, which their own policies in practice deny. As we saw in Chapter 7, this ideological move was common to the managerial state that neoliberals argue they have supplanted. In many non-European states, such as Indonesia, South Korea, the Philippines, Mexico, and China, wages are kept low by state repression of labor organizations and by restrictions of democratic political activity. In richer European states, market and capital investments are actively promoted over productive capital investments by depressing wages through tight monetary policy as well as by state intervention in labor disputes to break unions or to limit their ability to strike or organize unorganized workers. European states continue to invest heavily in military industries, reinstituting military Keynesianism, although now with greater emphasis on military exports, which creates a false choice between either increasing state budget deficits or reducing spending on education, health care, and welfare programs.

The emerging model of global managerial politics organized through international organizations does not eliminate the power of bureaucracies, as those neoliberals who fulminate against “big government” would like, but, rather, privatizes bureaucratic power. It does this internationally, by delegating power to a network of international organizations; this insulates power from any form of popular sovereignty and generates the space for a liberalism (reduced to economic liberalism) to emerge and appear as legitimate. People, regardless of nationality or political identity, are subject to the discipline imposed by the World Trade Organization (WTO), IMF, IBRD, TNCs, and global financial markets, but they have only very restricted recourse through the political (i.e., electoral) process to hold these entities accountable. In the words of one scholar, “In the current global order Anglo-American ideological presumptions have been transcribed into formal rules of the game, to which individual states must commit themselves or risk becoming economic pariahs.” 9

The privatization of the social service responsibilities of the managerial state—health care and welfare most prominently—promotes the neoconservative social agenda, which attempts to reinscribe national sovereignty by means of promoting traditional values.

Witness, for example, recent programs in the United States for retooling welfare programs that replace grants-in-aid with “workfare.” Although workfare programs in the United States vary somewhat by state, they involve grants or subsidies to private employers who then hire low-skilled workers, most often at below minimum wage, from the welfare rolls. Benefits are limited to a maximum of five years during a person’s lifetime and are given under the condition that recipients work. Work is seen as “its own reward.” In other words, the jobs are not stable jobs that will give recipients a living wage but are training grounds of the soul; that is, their aim is to make recipients into moral, self-disciplined, and acquisitive subjects who will make their way independently in the new competitive economies. Recipients are subjected to a regime of work (rather than to direct regulation by state agencies and officials) that aims to make them into “productive” members of society. The state is still involved and responsible for the overall regulation of these programs, and without subsidies to employers and administrative rules and laws that permit the payment of wages below the minimum wage, these programs would not work. Although the practices and institutions that do the work of reforming welfare recipients are no longer state agencies, state employees still strictly surveille welfare recipients by monitoring their presence at work.

 

The Politics of Disaffection

One result of the neoliberal ascendancy in the managerial state is a politics of disaffection. The neoliberal view of the relation of territoriality to the “new reality” of global competition, which we have seen renders traditional liberal politics more or less obsolete, has led to widespread disaffection. For many people, it no longer appears feasible and effective to use the electoral system to further and protect their interests because the state appears more responsive to the forces of global capitalism, by presenting itself to the people as having no choice but to make sacrifices to the global reality.

Some have sought to save an element of political liberalism at the edges of neoliberalism by promoting “communitarianism,” which argues that individual interests are always framed by shared values. Communitarianism argues that the traditional managerial state has mistakenly overemphasized individualism at the expense of the community. 10   The technocratic and consumer orientation of citizens is seen as a product of a decline in moral values, which are understood as the cement of communities, and states are taken as communities writ large. Revive traditional values, especially traditional family values, whatever these might be, and citizenship will again flourish as it is assumed that it did in some idealized past. Liberal political values for communitarians are depoliticized; that is, they have become shared values that are to be taught by parents to children in a national setting, and promoted primarily through voluntary acts rather than through political organization and struggle.

Whether communitarianism can successfully revive citizenship in the managerial state remains to be seen. What is clear is that an alternative response, equally depoliticizing, has taken hold. What little political liberalism the managerial state retains has been the primary victim of the deterritorialized politics of the late twentieth century. As we have seen, managerial states limited political liberalism and democracy through the industrialization and consumerization of the citizen, that is, the transformation of the citizen into a consumer whose normal stance toward the political world is as passive observer, not active participant. Neoliberalism has extended and deepened this transformation by shifting the domain of the political from the electoral system to the privatized bureaucratic systems of the global economy. This shift does not eliminate bureaucratic and managerial power, however. It only insulates that power from any system of political accountability to the people who are its subjects.

In the managerial state that dominates the late-twentieth-century states system, and in the global system of deterritorialized transnational organizations, politics has become increasingly trivial. That is, there has been a reduction of the significance of the electoral process as a means of deciding public policy and holding the state’s decisionmakers accountable. 11

We saw in Chapter 7 that the evolution of the European state toward greater degrees of rationality has produced the managerial state, which, through its administrative apparatus, dominates and regulates an ever-widening number of aspects of social life. In such states, the bureaucratic sphere has increasingly become the site where real political struggles take place and the political sphere less so. At the same time, the political sphere has increasingly become an arena in which political struggles are represented as consumables for a passive, spectator citizenry. The various ministries, departments, bureaus, and regulatory agencies of the managerial state’s administrative apparatus have become “self-regarding and self-referential.” They are staffed by a self-confident body of bureaucrats who have tenure, pensions, and autonomy of professional judgment in deciding matters of public significance. For the knowledge to make policy, they are dependent on the private lobbyists with the financial and organizational ability to control the information presented as relevant to policy debates. 12   Thus, the linkage between the political sphere and actual policymaking has been greatly weakened, if not broken. Shifts in the electoral support of opposing parties and changes in office holders only marginally modify the regulatory activities of the managerial state.

As the site of real political struggles has shifted to the administrative arena—much of which is now situated transnationally, not within particular territories, as discussed in Chapter 11—political parties have lost much of their original reason for being. Political parties have become weak and less capable of presenting to the voters coherent policy alternatives. The traditional dichotomy between “left” and “right,” which in the past reflected different ideological views about distributive justice and the role of the state, is disappearing. Old parties of the left and right are being swept away or have adopted policy positions that are scarcely distinguishable. Because political parties are no longer seen as relevant to actual political struggles, the electorate is increasingly turning away from them and declaring its independence. Party loyalty and identification have declined dramatically in most managerial states. Voters are more and more supporting one party over another not because of its policy stance but, rather, because through it they can obtain some personal benefit—a government job, a position on the board of a public entity, a more favorable disposition of an application for a subsidy, tax breaks, or a positive decision about regulation by a high-ranking government official. Access to such a privatized government—but one not necessarily smaller or less regulatory—is reserved to primarily wealthy organizations and individuals who can buy the information and skills necessary to organize it into self-serving representations.

Mostly, citizens in managerial states are bored and disaffected from a political process in which the state continues to organize their political identity but in which real decisions are taken in the bureaucracies of the state and through the transnational managerial networks of global capitalism. Turnout in elections has declined markedly in all managerial states, and the number of voters who identify strongly with a political party has fallen. People are turning away from politics to entertainment, and to representations of political struggles as forms of entertainment, such as the 1996 conventions of the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States, in order to relieve the boredom that results from the triviality of politics in the managerial state.

Such disaffection, however, feeds the very forces of privatization and the decline of public accountability against which it reacts.

 

Deterritorialized Politics

The politics of disaffection is countered by various political movements both within and across neoliberal managerial states. In some areas, defined not only as states but subcommunities within states, nationalism continues to appeal, currently most notably in the former Yugoslavia, among Palestinians and Israelis, among the Tamils and the Kurds, and among some fundamentalist Christians in the United States. Significantly, each of these nationalistic movements contains undercurrents or supplements of internationalism within them. Fundamentalist Christians, for example, also seek to spread their religious beliefs to Latin America, Africa, and Asia. But these are not the only responses to trivalized politics, or even the primary ones. Disaffection and revivals of nationalism are increasingly contested by forms of cosmopolitanism and deterritorialized politics.

It is not surprising in the current context of globalization that renewed interest in cosmopolitanism has emerged. Cosmopolitanism (from the ancient Greek kosmopolites, “citizen of the cosmos,” or world) arose among European liberal intellectuals of the eighteenth century who traveled widely and developed relationships with intellectuals in other states. 13   They considered their rationalist and scientific orientation as a general creed of life, defining their allegiances to universal principles and humanistic solidarities against the parochial allegiances, especially of nationality and religion, which they held responsible for ignorance, prejudice, violence, and war. They considered human beings, or at least men, to be individuals first, with a universal psychological and moral makeup, which created a basis of solidarity, and even community, prior to the division of the human world into states. Therefore, cosmopolitan intellectuals considered themselves citizens of the world first and citizens of particular states second.

Liberal cosmopolitanism was not necessarily antithetical to the principle of state sovereignty. In fact, it developed as an argument against more exclusionist versions of state sovereignty. It did not attempt to reconstruct the political world without sovereignty. It was not interested in engaging in political activity and organization in order to directly create a global or universal society. For example, in what has become the most famous statement of a cosmopolitan politics, Immanuel Kant’s essay Perpetual Peace (1795), Kant proposed a system in which all states would adopt republican constitutions based on the rule of law. Peace would then follow as these states worked out cooperative, juridical, and diplomatic relations among themselves. He did not propose a world government that would supersede the authority of particular nation-states, although he did enumerate universal principles that he believed engender world peace. Other proponents of cosmopolitanism, such as Charles Louis Montesquieu (1689–1755) in L’Esprit des Lois (1748), promoted various models of federalism among states. For the early cosmopolitans, universal principles were realized in states, and the state took on an ethical character.

There has been in the current world a revival of liberal cosmopolitanism of various forms. There are a range of “new federalists” and an interesting variety of proposals for “cosmopolitan democracy” in which principles of liberal representative democracy are transferred from the context of European nation-states to transnational and global institutions. 14   In addition, there has been a revival of neo-Kantian “democratic peace” arguments, that is, arguments that democratic states are less likely to make war on other democratic states, which means that the universalization of principles of liberal representative democracy will produce a peaceful world order. 15

Perhaps the most striking recent development has been the revival of a liberal cosmopolitanism among business elites, technocrats in international organizations, legal professionals, and advocates of global capitalism. As we described in Chapter 11, these elites regularly travel and function in a global context, creating personal and professional friendships and solidarity networks. They consider themselves members of a global community composed of others of their class or profession regardless of their state of origin or residence. Imbued with a vision of an unrestricted global capitalism, these cosmopolitans act politically to secure government policies favorable to their own global economic projects. Indeed, many such cosmopolitans provide crucial support, both financial and ideological, for neoliberalism.

None of these revivals of liberal cosmopolitanism fundamentally challenge the principles of state sovereignty, however. Even if an undercurrent of antistatism runs through the economic cosmopolitanism of the global capitalist business class, its understanding of politics does not challenge the political organization of the world around nation-states, even as its ideology presents the nation-state as more or less irrelevant to global capitalism.

It is important to remember that in spite of the tremendous increase in the movement of people across borders, ordinary people continue to be members of their state of origin, which continues to determine their identities. Moreover, when they do travel, most people do so as tourists, not for political or economic reasons. If, as we have argued in this book, the state is an ensemble of practices, institutions, and structures that includes the construction of identity, then the state will certainly continue to persist even as rival ways of organizing political space take hold.

However, more-global forms of politics have emerged among people whose presence in the community of the globalized world is of a different sort from that of the cosmopolitan business class. Political organizations, such as Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and Greenpeace, as well as more general social movements such as those concerned with the environment, women, and human rights, have emerged. These groups self-consciously adopt antistatist and global identities. Recent United Nations–sponsored conferences on the environment and women gave official status to a multitude of nongovernmental organizations composed of individuals rather than representatives of states and governments. For the most part, these organizations and movements are democratic in a deterritorialized sense; that is, the norms, institutions, and practices of the kind of global society they promote are seen to emerge out of the political activity of ordinary individuals in the course of struggles against particular acts of injustice, inequality, violence, and ecological deterioration. 16

A deterritorialized or postmodern democratic politics that might emerge out of the agglomeration of such organizations and activities—such a politics eschews blueprints of what a future world might look like—raises important questions: Does the alleviation of suffering and injustice, and the promotion of human rights and equality, including the defining of what these can mean in a multiculturally saturated environment, have to be tied to the territorial state? Is politics without sovereignty possible? Modernity’s answer has been that progressive possibilities can only be entertained under the watchful eye of the sovereign state: that a prosperous, valuable human life is only possible if people first and foremost form communities based on allegiances to a territorial state. This answer has not yet been rejected by most, but is being challenged by many others.

 

Endnotes

Note 1: There is now an enormous literature in a number of fields about the modernity/postmodernity debate. In politics, several useful introductions are Stephen White, Political Theory and Postmodernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Nick Rengger, Political Theory and Postmodernism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995); William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994) and Identity/Difference (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); and Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory (New York: The Guilford Press, 1991). Back.

Note 2: A journalistic account of the rise and “triumph” of neoliberalism is Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998). Back.

Note 3: On neoliberalism as shock therapy for the post-Soviet states, see Peter Gowan, “Analysing Shock Therapy,” New Left Review 213 (1995): 3-60. Back.

Note 4: A critical assessment of Thatcherism and Reaganism is Joel Krieger, Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Decline (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Back.

Note 5: David Beetham, “The Future of the Nation-State,” in Gregor McLennan, David Held, and Stuart Hall, eds., The Idea of the Modern State (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1984), 210. Back.

Note 6: Craig N. Murphy, International Organization and Industrial Change: Global Governance Since 1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 47-48. Back.

Note 7: This vision has captured business elites and the media, who speak of “globalization” in terms of the creation of an inevitable global economy in which global competitiveness dictates economic conditions and is beyond challenge. On this vision, see Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World (London and New York: Harper Collins, 1990). For a critical account see William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). Back.

Note 8: Stephen J. Rosow, “Echoes of Commercial Society: Liberal Political Theory in Mainstream IPE,” in Kurt Burch and Bob Denemark, eds., Constituting IPE (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997). Back.

Note 9: Peter B. Evans, “The Eclipse of the State? Reflections on Stateness in the Era of Globalization,” World Politics 50 (October 1997): 62-87. Back.

Note 10: The most influential popularizers of “communitarianism” in the United States have been William A. Galston, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda (New York: Crown, 1993). Etzioni’s philosophy of community has been influential in the Clinton administration. In political theory, the communitarians tend to be more thoughtful, although in our view insufficiently aware of the nationalistic and exclusionistic politics that flow, intentionally and unintentionally, from their theories. For a more sophisticated and politically progressive communitarianism, see Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), and Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Back.

Note 11: The discussion of the “trivialization” of politics is from Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1978), 131-144. See also Philip G. Cerny, The Changing Architecture of Politics (London, Newbury Park, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1990), 105. Back.

Note 12: On the implications of the role of professional lobbyists and the control of information, see Jean-Marie Guéhenno, The End of the Nation-State, trans. Victoria Elliott (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), chap. 2. Back.

Note 13: See Thomas J. Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977). Back.

Note 14: See the contributions to Daniele Archibugi and David Held, eds., Cosmopolitan Democracy: Agenda for a New World Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). Back.

Note 15: See especially Michael Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (1982): 3 Back.

Note 16: An eloquent argument for the deterritorialized, democratic character of these movements and organizations, written as a composite report of one such organization of scholars, activists, government officials, and academics (the Committee for a Just World Peace), is R. B. J. Walker, One World, Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1988). Back.

The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics