Globalisation and the State

Abstract

This essay suggests that those who want to install a "transnational democracy" in the wake of the nation state allegedly having been bypassed by globalisation simply misunderstand what the internationalisation of the state really is all about. Not only is the world still very much composed of states, but insofar as there is any effective democracy at all in relation to the power of capitalists and bureaucrats, it is still embedded in political structures which are national or subnational in scope. Those who advance the nebulous case for an "international civil society" to match the 'nebuleuse' that is global capitalist governance usually fail to appreciate that capitalism has not escaped the state but rather that the state has, as always, been a fundamental constitutive element in the very process of extension of capitalism in our time.