Embedding the global in the national : Implications for the role of the state

One role of the state vis-a-vis today’s global economy has been to negotiate the intersection of national law and foreign actors—whether firms, markets, or supranational organizations. This condition makes the current phase distinctive. We have, on the one hand, an enormously elaborate body of law that secures the exclusive territoriality of national states to an extent not before seen and, on the other, the considerable institutionalizing of the “rights” of non-national firms, crossborder transactions, and supranational organizations. The conditions bring with them an almost necessary engagement of national states in the process of globalization. We generally use terms such as deregulation, financial and trade liberalization, and privatization to describe the outcome of this negotiation. Unfortunately, however, such terms only capture the withdrawal of the state from regulating its economy. They do not register all the ways in which the state participates in setting up the new frameworks that encourage globalization; nor do they capture the associated transformations inside the state. Some scholarship treats the relationship between national states and the world economy in a way that transcends the proposition that the state simply withdraws from the economic sphere. The world-system literature has made major contributions toward developing analytic categories that allow us to understand the operation of international dynamics inside the national territories of less developed countries. An emerging body of scholarship shows that, to a large extent, global processes materialize in national territories, including those of the highly developed countries. I have long argued that many transactions