Beyond ‘Techno-globalism’ and ‘Techno-nationalism’: Rearticulating the Sites and Stakes of Technological Competitiveness in East Asia

Abstract

Faced with the alleged challenges of globalization, various scholars working within the IR and IPE traditions have been advancing competing alternative conceptions of the emerging global (dis)order. In doing so they seek to go beyond inherited approaches based on the familiar global-national distinction. Thus some IR theorists attempt to displace a state-centric interpretation of globalization, narrated mainly in terms of the ‘decline of the nation-state’ and the prospects for a world state. In its place they offer a more ambivalent but none the less carefully considered view of the political implications of globalization. They see the national state as seeking self-preservation through self-transformation: trapped within an extensive web of international interdependence and beset by transnational forces, it is resorting to new (or reinvigorated) forms of intergovernmental co-operation or coalitions and policies to enhance its own strategic capacities (Rosenau, 1990; Keohane and Milner, 1996).

This chapter was written while the author was Alec Horsley Research Fellow at the Political Economy Research Centre, University of Sheffield.