ABSTRACT
There is a widespread, long-standing model of the nation-state that portrays it as the combined legal and institutional structures governing the people, economy, and political processes contained inside a recognized border. Within a now very large body of literature, scholars debate whether, or how, processes of globalization have affected the conventional nation-state model (see for instance W.I. Robinson 1998, Scholte 2000, Guillén 2001). For example, Martin Albrow (1997) sees the model as an outdated form of social and political organization; Susan Strange (1996) describes the ‘declining authority of states’ while Saskia Sassen (1996) asserts that economic globalization is leading to a fundamental redefinition of nation-state sovereignty and territoriality; Martin Carnoy and Manuel Castells (2001) depict a dramatic decline in the autonomy of nation-states and their growing dependence on globalized processes of production and trade, on other states, and on lower levels of the state. And in probing the concept of ‘cosmopolitanism’, a variety of authors – including Craig Calhoun, David Held, Ulrich Beck, Rainer Bauböck and Mary Kaldor (all in Vertovec and Cohen 2002) – describe how assorted inter-state, intra-state and ultra-state practices test the viability of a conventional model of the nation-state and the international system based around it.
