ABSTRACT
At their broadest, supranational state apparatuses enact collective claims about how the world is and should be, claims to empowerment and claims about rights. Insofar as formal pursuance of such claims is globally enacted through membership in collective bodies, the administration of global formation is thus a corporatist endeavor. To leave it at this, however, would be woefully imprecise. After all, corporatism as a form of social organization can include both Benito Mussolini’s Italy and the now fraying social welfare states of Fennoscandia. Further, leaving it at this would be hopelessly naïve: some claims are heard more loudly and enacted more unreservedly than others. At present, the claims carrying the loudest voice and greatest weight are those made upon “national states to guarantee the domestic and global rights of capital” (Sassen 1999, 108-9). It is these claims, underpinned by appeals to a technical rationality of economic expertise, that are engendering the preeminent international regulatory institutions and, through them, the hegemony of plutocratic globality.
