The nation-state and the challenge of global capitalism

With the end of the Cold War, economic policies (grounded in romantic conceptions of laissez-faire and validated by neoclassical economics) and political prescriptions (based on the idealisation of representative democracy and legitimated by liberal political science) have emerged as crucial elements in a powerful global discourse on development and modernity. This introductory article argues that a central weakness of the dominant development discourse that emerged after 1945 was the way in which (in the context of decolonisation and the consolidation of the nation-state system), the nation-state was enshrined as the key unit of analysis and praxis. Between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s the dominant development discourse was grounded in the assumption that nation-states were homogenous and natural units of a wider international politico-economic order and that state-mediated national development could, should and would lead to economic, and eventually even political, outcomes beneficial to, or at least in the best interests of, virtually all citizens. In the post-1945 era the nation-state was presented as a constitutive element of capitalist (and socialist) modernity. However, in the late 1970s and early 1980s the emergent globalisation project reconfigured the role of the state and transformed the dominant idea of development. The state-guided national development projects that emerged, or were consolidated, between the 1940s and the 1970s were deeply contradictory even at their zenith, but they have now been increasingly challenged and/or dismantled in the context of the rise of the globalisation project. The article concludes, however, that globalisation also brings with it the promise that a growing array of progressive organisations can build, or are starting to build, the networks that will allow them to move beyond the limitations of the nation-state and the nation-state system, and to pursue democracy and development in the increasingly globalised political terrain of the post-cold war era.