The Politics of Transnational Economic Relations

These two statements—the first by a Canadian nationalist, the second by a former United States undersecretary of state—express a dominant theme of contemporary wrïtings on international relations. International society, we are told, is increasingly rent between its economic and its political organization. On the one hand, powerful economic and technical forces are creating a highly integrated transnational economy, blurring the traditional significance of national boundaries. On the other hand, the nationstate continues to command men's loyalties and to be the basic unit of political decision. As one writer has put the issue, “The conflict of our era is between ethnocentric nationalism and geocentric technology.”