ABSTRACT
Three key questions animate the contributions to this volume: does globalization challenge established patterns of territorially based governance (democratic or otherwise); do global issues and dynamics require effective governance at a supranational or transnational level; and is it either feasible or desirable for global governance to be based upon democratic principles and practices? Totally positive or negative answers are in their different ways unproblematic and uninteresting. ‘Strong’ or ‘hyperglobalists’ (for example, Ohmae 1995) reply in the affirmative to all three questions. They argue that the nation-state no longer offers liberal democracy’s best shell. Globalization has undermined the state’s capacity not only to forge a common identity and commitment to the public good, but also to provide its citizens with economic or physical security. Either we need and can have a cosmopolitan democracy that goes beyond the nationstate, or (in libertarian versions of this thesis) we can do without states altogether and rely on the beneficent effects of a global market. By contrast, rejectionists offer negative responses that leave us with the status quo. They contend that nothing has changed: trade, social relations, patterns of identity and systems of effective governance still focus on territorially based states. Difficulties only emerge among those offering more ambiguous replies. These weaker globalization positions (see Jones 1995a and Hirst and Thompson 1996) accept that some profound changes have taken place within the world system, but believe they have been uneven in both their incidence and their implication: in some areas, such as global finance, changes have been profound; in others, like the military-strategic system, traditional structures remain more-or-less intact. They acknowledge that globalization has enfeebled states without necessarily creating appropriate global institutions or communities to replace them.
