The State

The main contours of "the state debate" were fixed by the early 1990s, and there were few new developments in state theory as many scholars lost interest in the topic. The proliferation of state theories from 1968 onward resulted in an intellectual stalemate, where scholars retreated into their favored theoretical approach to conduct empirical and institutional research on political development and public policy. Postmodernist and poststructuralist theories of power claimed that power was not centered in the state, but diffused in a variety of everyday relationships and identities such as language, gender, race, ethnicity, mass media, medicine, family, work, and play. Many scholars shifted their attention to the analysis of these diffused forms of "micropower." Finally, the process of economic globalization, which became so evident in the 1990s, led others to conclude that the state was in crisis, retreat, or decline as its sovereign functions were lost or ceded to global markets and transnational corporations.

However, the latter trend also witnessed the emergence of new supranational institutions (for example, the European Union and the World Trade Organization) and the strengthening of preexisting international organizations (for example, the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund). This development stimulated renewed interest in state theory at the turn of the century, while shifting its analytic focus toward the new forms of global governance and their relation to the nation-state. A variety of theoretical positions quickly appeared, which are distinguished mainly by their analysis of the American state within this global system and their claims about the role of the nation-state within the world economy.

The proponents of the American superstate thesis argue that the collapse of the Soviet Union has left the United States with no serious rivals in the economic, political, or military realms, and thus economic globalization and its auxiliary institutions are viewed as a projection of the American state's power on a global scale. Thus, globalization is not viewed as a development external to the nation-state, because it is nation-states, particularly the United States and its allies, that have played the leading role in creating a new global economy, while remaining the primary actors within the new supranational institutions.

A major theoretical challenge to this thesis is Martin Shaw's argument that an internationally legitimate "global-Western state" has integrated its member nation-state's functions as an organizer of legitimate violence and authoritative rule maker into larger bloc structures. While the United States played a leading role in constructing the Western state's supranational military and economic organizations, Shaw insists that "the idea of American hegemony is too simple to characterize relations within the Western state." Instead, Shaw claims that the global-Western state is "an integrated authoritative organization of violence" that should be considered "a new type of state, rather than an alliance or a complex set of alliances of states" (pp. 240–242).

Finally, a thesis proposed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri seems to mark a new phase in the abandonment of the state concept. Hardt and Negri seek to replace the state with a concept of empire. Their main hypothesis is that globalization is transforming governance to such an extent that "sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule" (p. xii). The global form of sovereignty is called empire. Hardt and Negri argue that "Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open expanding frontiers" (p. xii). Hardt and Negri concede that the United States enjoys a privileged position in empire, and they attribute the origins of its logic to the United States Constitution, but they view empire as a supranational logic "that effectively encompasses the spatial totality … that rules over the entire 'civilized' world." Empire is an "order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity" and thus marks the end of history or the final phase of world political development (p. xiv).