The Decline of the Nation State in International Trade and Investment

For the past twenty-five years, commentators across a wide spectrum of ideologies and disciplines have been calling for, or predicting the death of, the nation state. The critics are numerous and forceful. Their caustic eulogies assert that the nation state is "just about through as an economic unit," a "nostalgic fiction," a "dysfunctional organizational unit," "remarkably inefficient engines of wealth distribution," and last but not least, "a political organism with cholesterol hardening the arteries of its economic bloodstream." To paraphrase Marc Antony, I do not wish to praise the nation state, nor to bury it. I will address the various would-be Cassandras, and their critiques, regarding international trade and investment.