Servicing the global economy: reconfigured states and private agents

Economic globalisation represents a transformation in the territorial organisation of economic activity and of politico-economic power (Mittelman 1996a; Ruggie 1993; Jessop 1990; Hitz et al. 1995; Aman, Jr 1995). It contains the capacity to undo the particular form of the intersection of sovereignty and territory embedded in the modern state and the modern state-system. 2 But simply to posit, as is so often done, that economic globalisation has brought with it a declining significance of the national state tout court, misses some of the finer points about this transformation.