ABSTRACT
When future historians look back at the twentieth century, they will no doubt view the decades from the 1940s to the 1970s as the high period of the nation-state system. It was in these decades that the nation-state system was universalized and the idea that the nation-state was the primary, if not the exclusive vehicle for achieving progress was consolidated worldwide. In fact many of the big questions about the changing role of the nation-state in the global political economy of the early twenty-first century, and important debates about the significance of influential contemporary theories of development, are best understood against the backdrop of the world-historical shift towards decolonization and the rise and transformation of the nation-state system during the Cold War.1 In particular the limitations of the dominant theories of progress, as they emerged in the Cold War era, and as they have been continuously revised into the post-Cold War era, can be traced to the way in which they routinized the nation-state as their key unit, or sub-unit, of analysis. Between the 1940s and the 1970s a growing array of theories and policies of development (capitalist and socialist) were outlined and implemented on the assumption that nation-states could be treated as natural units of a wider international order. Despite both the complex history of nationstate formation and consolidation following decolonization and the onset of the Cold War, and the significant changes associated with the reorientation of the global political economy since the 1970s, the routinization of the nation-state has remained central to the dominant narratives of progress at the start of the twentyfirst century
Between the 1940s and the 1970s virtually all the main theories of development assumed that the “state” had a central and legitimate role to play in the process of development and, at least in theory, development involved some form of state-mediated, if not state-directed, national redistribution and even restructuring that sought to incorporate the poorer and disenfranchised citizens into a national development project. However, in the 1980s and then into the post-Cold War era, the profit-maximizing consumption-oriented individual was increasingly enshrined as the universal subject of development and the idea of state-mediated national development as the key to prosperity was increasingly challenged by the rise of neo-liberalism.2 A rising neoliberalism was central to the emergence of the US-led globalization project.3 Despite this shift,
national leaders have continued to mobilize the citizens of many nation-states in the name of nationalism and the “national interest”, while dismantling many of the public institutions and state-owned enterprises that, at least in theory, had underpinned the social and economic cohesion and developmental initiatives of these nation-states in an earlier era. And many economists and other social scientists continue to treat nations as the unproblematic beneficiaries of globalization. Meanwhile, most intellectuals and politicians who seek to challenge the globalization project still do so primarily at the level of the nationstate or via the promotion of an alliance of nation-states. The fear of many is that the globalization project represents the demise of the nation-state. While nationstates in many parts of the world are in crisis, and in some cases have already failed, the globalization project as it emerged by the 1980s signalled the waning of state-mediated national development rather than the end of the nation-state in the foreseeable future. It needs to be emphasized that the globalization project is currently being constituted via the nation-state system at the same time as it is radically transforming both the character of that system and the trajectories of specific nation-states. Nation-states around the world have increasingly taken on the role of globalizers in contrast to an earlier emphasis on state-mediated national development. Thus, in many parts of the world the changes to the global order since the 1980s have resulted in the uneven reorientation of erstwhile statemediated national development projects into globalizing states. However, in other parts of the world, nation-states are not simply being reoriented from national development to globalization. In these cases the experience of state-mediated national development was either very attenuated or profoundly flawed and these polities are now in the throes of crises of the nation-state and are failing, or have already failed, as nation-states.4
