Taking Back Control?: States and State Systems After Globalism

The era of hyperglobalization once hailed as the 'end of history' was characterised by boundless capitalist expansion.The neoliberal revolution gave rise to a politics of scale aimed at the centralization and unification of states and state systems: the replacement of national with global governance or, in Europe, of the nation-state with a supranational superstate, the European Union.The 'New World Order' proclaimed by the United States in the wake of the Soviet collapse proved to be ungovernable by democratic means.Instead, it was ruled through a combination of technocracy and mercatocracy, failing spectacularly to provide for political stability, social legitimacy and international peace.Marked by a series of economic and institutional crises, hyperglobalization gave rise to various kinds of political countermovements that rebelled against and ultimately stopped the upward transfer of state authority in its tracks.This book analyses the ongoing tug-of-war between the forces of globa