The State and Economic Globalization: Any Implications for International Law?

States today confront a new geography of power.' The associated changes in the condition of the state are often described as an overall decline in the state's significance, especially the decline in its regulatory capacities. Economic globalization, for one, has brought with it strong pressures for the deregulation of a broad range of markets, economic sectors and national borders, and for the privatization of public sector firms and operations. But in my reading of the evidence, this new geography of power confronting states entails a far more differentiated process than notions of an overall decline in the significance of the state suggest. And it entails a more transformative process of the state than is indicated by the notion of a simple loss of power.

These transformations inside the state and in the state's positioning are partial and incipient but strategic.