Beyond the state?

A final challenge to the theory of the state has come from a rather unexpected source - the challenge to the state itself. In recent years the value of state theory has come under attack from those who reject neither its sophistication nor the significance of the insights it has generated.

are now increasingly projected on an international or global stage and too clumsy to deal with the small problems which are increasingly displaced to the local level. It is difficult to deny the appeal of such an argument. Yet it is important to treat some of the often heroic claims made about the contemporary crisis of the nation-state with a degree of caution and some scepticism. First, globalization is not a particularly novel phenomenon. Indeed it can be traced at least as far back as the imperial age. The mode of globalization has certainly changed with time, but the mere presence of globalizing forces need not herald the demise of the state form. It is certainly true that financial integration, heightened capital mobility, the emergence of regional trading blocs and the proliferation of supra-national regulatory bodies significantly alter the context (economic and political) within which states operate, and may indeed be reflected in the changing form and function of the state. Yet this is in no sense to pronounce the death of the state. In all likelihood people will continue to live, as they do now, in territorially-bounded communities governed primarily by state institutions on which they continue to confer legitimacy, and which they continue to regard as responsible in the first instance for the social and economic context in which they find themselves. As this suggests, global­ization may well pose a challenge to the nation-state, but it is a challenge that it has not thus far proved incapable of responding to. The nature of that response, not as yet associated with any significant scaling back or retrenchment of its activities, defines the contemporary agenda for state theorists. On all the available evidence, then, rumours of the death of the state and of the demise of state theory would, thankfully, seem greatly exaggerated.