ABSTRACT
The basis of the globalization thesis is that the nation state is becoming marginalized by new economic forces. However, the argument that capital is now sufficiently organized to exercise increasingly unrestrained power and influence across the industrial world needs to be applied to particular national circumstances with a great deal of caution. In fact, the state remains a major force for change in the late twentieth century and this view, at the core of critical perspectives on transformations in economic relations, necessitates placing limits on the globalization thesis. We should not ignore ‘the extent to which today’s globalization both is authored by states and is primarily about reorganizing, rather than bypassing, states’ (Panitch 1994:63; emphasis added). The political economy of change in an industrialized country like Britain cannot be adequately explained without accounting for the key role of the state operating neo-liberal economic policy.
