The State and Globalization: Denationalized Participation

The effort in this paper is to recover the ways in which the state participates in governing the global economy in a context increasingly dominated by deregulation, privatization, and the growing authority of non-state actors. A key organizing proposition, derived from my previous work on global cities’ is the embeddedness of much of globalization in national territory, that is to say, in a geographic terrain that has been encased in an elaborate set of national laws and administrative capacities. The embeddedness of the global requires at least a partial lifting of these national encasements and hence signals a necessary participation by the state, even when it concerns the state’s own withdrawal from regulating the economy.