The new global network of corporate power and the decline of national self-determination

Abstract

The cold war years witnessed the steady deterioration of America's machine tool base and the start of the migration of U.S. production into Third World countries. Not merely America but also the very core of Western production was and still is going global. Quite recently a new development appears, namely, public and private sector corporations from once peripheral and semi-peripheral areas moving assembly plant production into North America and parts of Europe, and some of them have already purchased a number of American corporations which had not gone global. As the old center deteriorates, the once peripheral and semi-peripheral enterprises close in on it forming the present global corporate network — one which locks all national economies into the global economy and increasingly renders nations powerless to control their own socioeconomic destiny. In a very real sense, with the possible exception of nations that control giant public sector multinational firms, all nations are becoming peripheral, but peripheral to the new supranational network of corporate power. These complex processes which followed unerringly from corporate delinquencies of the cold war mean that the mainstream theories of global development as enunciated by Andre Gundar Frank, Samir Amin and Immanuel Wallerstein, for example, require overhauling. This paper expands this thesis and offers an alternative to contemporary global development theories.