ABSTRACT
Commonly viewed as the acme of left-wing political achievement, the welfare state has been so poorly defended that the very word welfare is now widely accepted as a derogatory term. Many commentators now doubt the continued existence of national economies leaving, in effect, nothing to manage in the state. The state as a social container is being battered from the right and left of the political spectrum. The threat to the state comes not from the cause of globalization, an economic one world, but the consequence, the destruction of the environmental one world. It is not only the fact that pollution is no respecter of boundaries: the whole structure of the world-system is predicated on economic expansion which is ultimately unsustainable. Expectations of politicians as leaders of development states have to be scaled down rapidly by both the politicians themselves and their publics.
