ABSTRACT
It is often said that in an age of globalization, national and local leaders and populations become increasingly subject to forces outside their domestic jurisdiction and popular control. The Westphalian tradition of territorially based and juridically autonomous states has supposedly come under the strain of a changing global economy and cultural shift. These changes challenge the capacity of national leaders to formulate and implement authoritative policy and that of people to hold them accountable for doing so. The massive and rapid exodus of speculative foreign capital was the proximate cause of the so-called Asian economic flu of the late 1990s. Adverse foreign reactions to domestic repression, whether in Tiananmen Square, Chechnya or Chiapas, illustrate possible constraints on domestic authoritarianism. Recent attempts by members of the European Union to influence the composition of Austria's coalition government (specifically to seek the exclusion of the Freedom Party with its neo-Nazi sympathies) furnish still another example of the putative influence of external political, economic, and cultural forces on domestic governance. World Trade Organization (WTO) regulations prohibit local communities from deciding to divest from countries that do not meet these communities' standards of democracy, wages and working conditions, or environmental protection.
