ABSTRACT
Post-war developments in Europe have shown a number of contradictory trends, with increasing national closure alongside the emergence of transnational and multi-national forces. It is the latter tendency which has dominated academic debate, with emphasis commonly placed upon trans-national flows of ‘global’ capital,1 the development of global communications and the compression of time and space (Giddens, 1990; Smith, 1995). Also featured are the large population flows which have led to a growth in numbers of permanent foreign residents in host societies, together with an expanding recognition and enforcement of the rights of individuals over and above those rooted in membership of a particular nation state (Brubaker, 1989; Freeman, 1986; Soysal, 1994). Hence the view that ‘formerly independent states and nations are being bound by a complex web of interstate organisations and regulations into a truly international community’ (Smith, 1995:1). Taken together, it has been argued that these phenomena constitute a challenge to central features of the modern nation state, representing what Smith (1995:96) terms an external crisis of autonomy and an internal crisis of legitimacy.
