ABSTRACT
Since the early 1980s development policy and research have focused on processes of economic and social restructuring in the industrialised nations, structural adjustment programmes in developing countries, and transitions to market economies in the former communist bloc (Hirst and Thompson 1996; Harvey 1995; Ould-Mey 1997; Swatuk and Show 1994; Gowen 1995). One of the salient features of all these processes is the redefinition of the role and scope of the state in the light of the increasing integration of the world economy (Holloway 1994; Jessop 1991). Another is the problematic nature of the state as both an instrument and a target for the various processes of restructuring, adjustment and transition. Within the context of developing countries, I refer to this redefinition of the role and scope of the state as a process of multilateralisation and denationalisation of the state (Ould-Mey 1996). In this process, multilateralisation and denationalisation occur as national economic policy is subjugated to the supervision of multilateral organisations. These twinned processes have received much attention in the recent restructuring of state socialist societies. In this chapter I draw on the specific case of Mauritania (Figure 17.1) and argue that such a restructuring of the state is essentially designed to make it more congruent with the growing power of multilateral institutions and more suitable to the fundamental shift from national to international forms of capital accumulation. The quantitative dimension of this shift has been summed up by the 1996 Annual Report of the World Trade Organisation when it noted that: (1) during the past two decades the annual value of merchandise exports multiplied eight and a half times and the annual foreign direct investment outflows multiplied more than twelve times, and (2) in 1995 sales by overseas Japanese manufacturers exceeded Japan’s total merchandise exports for the first time.
