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2.3. POLITICAL GLOBALISATION – the transformation of the political community

Contemporary globalization is associated with a transformation of state power as the roles and functions of states are re-articulated, reconstituted and re-embedded at the intersection of globalising and regionalising networks and systems. The metaphors of the loss, diminuition or erosion of state power can misrepresent this reconfiguration. Indeed, such a language involves a failure to conceptualise adequately the nature of power and its complex manifestations since it represents a crude zero-sum view of power. The latter conception is particularly unhelpful in attempting to understand the apparently contradictory position of states under conditions of contemporary globalization. For whilst globalization is engendering, for instance, a reconfiguration of state-market relations in the economic domain, states and international public authorities are deeply implicated in this very process. Economic globalization by no means necessarily translates into a diminution of state power; rather, it is transforming the conditions under which state power is exercised. Moreover, in other domains, such as the military, states have adopted a more activist posture whilst in the political domain they have been central to the explosive growth and institutionalization of regional and global governance. These are not developments which can be explained convincingly in the language of the decline, erosion or loss of state power per se. For such metaphors (mistakenly) presume that state power was much greater in previous epochs; and, as Mann reminds us, on almost every conceivable measure states, especially in the developed world, are far more powerful than their antecedents.

But so too are the demands placed upon them. The apparent simultaneous weakening and expansion in the power of states under conditions of contemporary globalization is symptomatic of an underlying structural transformation. This is nowhere so evident as in respect of state sovereignty and autonomy, which constitute the very ideological foundations of the modern state. There are many good reasons for doubting the theoretical and empirical basis of claims that states are being eclipsed by contemporary patterns of globalization. The position taken in this article is critical both of hyperglobalizers and sceptics. We would emphasize that while regional and global interaction networks are strengthening, they have multiple and variable impacts across diverse locales. Moreover, it is not part of our argument that national sovereignty today, even in regions with intensive overlapping and divided authority structures, has been wholly subverted - such a view would radically misstate our position. But it is part of our argument that there are significant areas and regions marked by crisscrossing loyalties, conflicting interpretations of human rights and duties, interconnected legal and authority structures, etc., which displace notions of sovereignty as an illimitable, indivisible and exclusive form of public power. Patterns of regional and global change are transforming the nature and context of political action, creating a system of multiple power centres and overlapping spheres of authority. Neither the sovereignty nor the autonomy of states are simply diminished by such processes. Indeed, any assessment of the cumulative impacts of globalization must acknowledge their highly differentiated character since particular types of impact - whether decisional, institutional, distributional or structural - are not experienced uniformly by all states. Globalization is by no means a homogenising force. The impact of globalization is mediated significantly by a state's position in global political, military and economic hierarchies; its domestic economic and political structures; the institutional pattern of domestic politics; and specific government as well as societal strategies for contesting, managing or ameliorating globalizing imperatives.

The on-going transformation of the Westphalian regime of sovereignty and autonomy has differential consequences for different states. Whilst for many hyperglobalizers contemporary globalization is associated with new limits to politics and the erosion of state power, the argument developed here is critical of such political fatalism. For contemporary globalization has not only triggered or reinforced the significant politicisation of a growing array of issue-areas, but has also been accompanied by an extraordinary growth of institutionalized arenas and networks of political mobilization, surveillance, decision-making and regulatory activity which transcend national political jurisdictions. This has expanded enormously the capacity for, and scope of, political activity and the exercise of political authority. In this respect, globalization is not, nor has it ever been, beyond regulation and control. Globalization does not prefigure the 'end of politics' so much as its continuation by new means. Yet, this is not to overlook the profound intellectual, institutional and normative challenges which it presents to the existing organization of political communities.

Political communities are in the process of being transformed. At the heart of this lies a growth in transborder political issues and problems which erode clear cut distinctions between domestic and foreign affairs, internal political issues and external question, the sovereign concerns of the nation-state and international considerations. In all major areas of government policy, the enmeshment of national political communities in regional and global processes involves them in intensive issues of transboundary co-ordination and control. Political space for the development and pursuit of effective government and the accountability of political power is no longer coterminous with a delimited national territory. The growth of transboundary problems creates what was earlier referred to as 'overlapping communities of fate'; that is, a state of affairs in which the fortune and prospects of individual political communities are increasingly bound together.

Political communities are locked into a diversity of processes and structures which range in and through them, linking and fragmenting them into complex constellations. Moreover, national communities themselves when they decide on such issues as the regulation of sexuality, health and the environment; national governments by no means simply determine what is right or appropriate exclusively for their own citizens. These issues are most apparent in Europe, where the development of the EU has created intensive discussion about the future of sovereignty and autonomy within individual nation-states. But the issues are important not just for Europe and the West, but for countries in other parts of the world, for example, Japan and South Korea. These countries must recognise new emerging problems, for instance, problems concerning AIDS, migration and new challenges to peace, security and economic prosperity, which spill over the boundaries of nation-states. In addition, the communities of East Asia are developing within the context of growing interconnectedness across the world's major regions. This interconnectedness is marked in a whole range of areas from the environment, human rights, trade and finance, to issues of international crime. There are emerging overlapping communities of fate generating common problems within and across the East Asian region. In other words, East Asia, as recent developments have demonstrated, is necessarily part of a more global order and is locked into a diversity of sites of power which shape and determine its collective fortunes. The idea of government or of the state, democratic or otherwise, can no longer be simply defended as an idea suitable to a particular closed political community or nation-state.

The system of national political communities persists of course; but it is articulated and rearticulated today with complex economic, organisational, administrative, legal and cultural processes and structures which limit and check its efficacy. If these processes and structures are not acknowledged and brought into the political process they will tend to bypass or circumvent the traditional mechanisms of political accountability and regulation. In other words, we must recognise that political power is being re-positioned, re-contextualised and, to a degree, transformed by the growing importance of other less territorially-based power systems. Political power is now sandwiched in more complex power systems which have become more salient over time relative to state power.

Political communities today are no longer discrete worlds . Growing enmeshment in regional and global orders and the proliferation of transborder problems has created a plurality of diverse and overlapping collectivities which span borders binding together directly and indirectly the fate of communities in different locations and regions of the globe. These transnational communities of fate overlay existing political communities thereby eroding the distinction between the domestic and the international as domestic affairs become internationalized and international affairs domesticated. In this context the articulation of the public good is prised away from its embeddness in the bounded political community : it is being re-configured in the context of global,regional and transnational orders .The contemporary world is no longer , as many would like to believe, ' a world of closed communities with mutually impenetrable ways of thought, selfsufficient economies and ideally sovereign states' (O'Neill, 1991, p. 282).This is not to assert that territorial political communities are becoming obsolete but rather to recognize that they are nested within global,regional and transnational communities of fate,identity,association,and solidarity .Political community today is being reconfigured to accord with a world of 'ruptured boundaries'.

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