Governance and the Nation-State in a Global Era

Abstract

Other chapters in this book focus on the role and changes in governance mechanisms at the regional level or within certain sectors of the economy. In this chapter we examine patterns of governance mechanisms at the national level in the advanced political economies. The national level is a central level of analysis in a political economy for several reasons. First, we are still in an era in which the nation-state is the most important unit in the political organization of human society. Second, national political borders are also traditionally economic borders in the sense that for much of the modern era economic activity has taken (and still does) place within nation-states. In other words, the ‘boundaries’ of economies coincided with the political boundaries of the state. The nation-state is also central because the institutions of economic governance were and (mostly) still are contained within national boundaries. Such governance institutions are also overwhelmingly the product of domestic political activity. None the less, the emergence of an increasingly global era raises challenges to our use of the nation-state as the fundamental level of analysis of political economy. In this chapter we examine analytical approaches developed to understand models of national economic governance or capitalism and how they have changed.