Nowadays we often hear that in this era of globalisation the nation-state has lost much of its traditional role and relevance. This assertion rests primarily on three observations : (a) the massive growth of MNCs which operate across state boundaries, (b) the mind-boggling volume and speed of cross-border flows of finance capital, (c) the growing domination of multilateral institutions like the IMF, WB and WTO. However, on closer examination all three arguments fall apart.
The MNCs or TNCs are still heavily rooted in their home countries. Powerful corporations and their respective hove states serve each other in innumerable ways, with the latter engaging themselves very actively in business wars amongst MNCs based in different countries. We have seen how Washington pressured New Delhi for signing the nuclear deal and more recently, for waiving the liability clause, in the interests of US-based MNCs like General Election.several studies have pointed out that a great majority of the world’s largest corporations maintain more than half their asset-bases in their own countries and that the presence of foreign nationals on the boards of American MNCs in particular are absolutely miniscule. In sum, the rise of powerful MNCs betokens not the fading out of the nation state but, on one hand, a new mechanism of increased economic aggression and political intervention on the part of imperialist countries (lately, and to a much lesser extent, also of countries like China, Brazil and India) on weaker nations and, on the other hand, a new level of international consolidation of finance capital.
As regards the trans-national flow of finance, is this an IT marvel technologically beyond the control of individual states? Such an impression is sought to be created by the votaries of globalisation to pre-empt any possible attempt on the part of any country to check such flows in the national interest. The fact is, technologically it is quite possible to impose controls, just as it is to arrange all kinds of checks in the cases of online use of credit cards and the whole gamut of e-commerce. But the ruling classes are usually not willing, in their narrow selfish interests, to impose such restrictions on international financial transactions. So it is a matter of state policy — not an evidence of a general retreat of the state.
International bodies like the IMF and WB are nothing new. If in recent years these have become excessively domineering, that only expresses the hegemonic trends of certain member states like the US and its allies. In other words, globalisation has only served to further accentuate the old economic (as well as political and military) disparity between states, with a handful of them trying to dominate world affairs ever more blatantly in the name of the multilateral institutions.
In fact, like many other instances of asymmetric development of capitalism and its political institutions, here too we witness the aggressive advances of some states like the USA vis-à-vis the collapse of some states like the former soviet Union and the retreat of the states in Eastern Europe; and moreover in the case of one and the same state, hyper-activity in certain domains (like pushing forward the policies of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation) juxtaposed against withdrawal from certain others (e.g., employment generation, education, health). This is something the anarchists and right opportunists fail to appreciate. So in the name of fighting globalisation, they tend to downplay the all-important struggle against the real, active agents of globalisation: the domestic ruling classes and the state.
