ABSTRACT
The waning of the high modernist era of national development in the 1970s is grounded in the shifts in the global political economy of the Cold War and the emergence of the US-led globalization project.1 However, the consolidation of the globalization project in the 1980s coincided with the revival of the Cold War, which meant that the long-term significance of the changes to the global political economy and to the nation-state system in this period remained partially obscured by the continued centrality of the US-Soviet rivalry to international relations.2 With the end of the Cold War the shift from state-mediated national development (in its various capitalist and socialist forms) to the US-led globalization project was dramatically strengthened. By the 1990s the globalization project was being pursued at multiple sites, but remained centered on US power. It is an unfinished, and unfinishable project of political, social and cultural transformation that, in the context of dramatic technological changes, is profoundly conditioned, but not determined, by processes of financial deregulation, trade liberalization and privatization in which nation-states and the nation-state system play an increasingly important globalizing, rather than their earlier ostensibly national developmental, role. By the end of the Cold War there was a clear overall pattern, with considerable historical variation, of a sustained, but uneven, transformation of state-mediated national development projects (of all politico ideological types) into neo-liberal states. This was reinforced by increasingly uneven economic development within and between nation-states and within and between regions against the backdrop of the transformation of the nation-state system and the elaboration of the globalization project.
