ABSTRACT
The progressive intensification of globalizing tendencies in recent years has exacerbated the difficulties of managing global financial affairs. This has spawned a vast and perpetually expanding literature on the causes and consequences of financial globalization and the possibilities of governance (see Introduction, this volume). Traditional approaches to IPE have assumed the provision and maintenance of the basic infrastructure pertaining to the governance of financial activity to be the responsibility of the state and state-based international organizations. However, the popular view of globalization, informed by what Held et al. (1999:3-5) refer to as the ‘hyperglobalization thesis’, suggests we now inhabit a ‘borderless world’ (Ohmae 1990) where social, economic and political processes are organized on a global scale and in which the power and authority of states are diffused to regional, global, market and private actors. Under these circumstances the state’s propensity to define and deliver the requisite functions of financial and monetary governance are curtailed or eliminated (Ohmae 1995; Strange 1996a; Greider 1997; Friedman 2000). This extreme version of globalization is now widely regarded, at least in academic circles, as epistemologically and empirically suspect. From a methodological standpoint the claims of the hyperglobalizers rest upon false dichotomies of the social realm, in particular between the state and ‘the global’ (Amoore et al. 1997; Brenner 1998, 1999; Clark 1999). That is to say the state and the global are conceived as fundamentally opposed forms of social and political organization, leading to the misguided conclusion that the consolidation of globalizing tendencies must necessarily have a negative impact upon the state’s capacity to govern those tendencies. Equally, at the empirical level, reports of the demise of the nation-state have been greatly exaggerated (see Herz 1957, 1976). Indeed under conditions of contemporary globalization the nation-state has flourished with over 100 new sovereign states coming into existence over the past 40 years.
