ABSTRACT
The emergence of globalization as a topic of debate for political science has forged a link between global environmental issues on the one hand and on the other more traditional supranational issues relating to social and economic globalization (the migration of people and money (Barry and Goodin 1992), the North–South divide, the globalization of enterprise, etc.). At least in politics, however, globalization is not the only discernible form of ‘regrouping’. There are also processes that can be understood as attempts to perhaps adapt to, perhaps control, perhaps even check, globalization: international regimes, more structured forms of regional cooperation or European unification. Other developments that apparently gnaw at the roots of the once ‘natural’ basic unit of international politics, the nation-state, point in the direction of a disintegration of states: cross-border regional co-operation, increased autonomy for national minorities, the de-nationalization of the welfare state, and so on. To describe these and similar developments I shall use the term political pluralization.
