How distant seems the year 1989, when historic and surprising events stirred many dreams of a new and more tranquil world order. The sudden end of the Cold War, as well as recent progress towards economic integration among countries in various regions, revolutionary advances in communications technologies, and the rapid emergence of myriad global social networks sparked a revival of idealistic thought. Europe was moving unexpectedly quickly from enlarging its common market to deepening monetary integration among the member-states of the European Union. These developments gave tangible expression to underlying processes that were widely deemed to have vast transformative potential....

The prevailing attitude among intellectuals today involves a kind of flight from a world situation so contorted that familiar instruments of theory, traditional expectations of the future, and classical means of politics cease to operate.¹ I have tried to address this situation with a research program on asecond modernity, orreflexive modernization, that requires not only new concepts but also a different social-scientific grammar in order to grasp and explain an explosive dynamic in a world that no longer corresponds to the image of actively self-reproducing its structures and system.² The theory ofworld risk society, developed in my...

Globalizing processes are challenging central concepts in the fields of international relations, political theory, and sociology. They have complicated such basic concepts as state, territoriality, and political authority, thus rendering problematic the analytical legitimacy of what is conventionally called the Westphalian or ‘international’ paradigm. International relations scholars, political theorists, and sociologists alike thus find themselves at a juncture where many of their fundamental ideas must be questioned, re-evaluated, and perhaps even jettisoned.

A most intriguing and stimulating development in contemporary social and political analysis, as noted in Chapter 1, is that this questioning of what has long been known as...

Governance is a very old concept, and an even older reality.¹ Societies have always required some form of collective steering and management. Variations in the political and economic order have produced different answers to the fundamental questions about how to provide that steering for society and how to cope with the range of challenges arising from the society. Some answer has been required and continues to be required. Governance is not a constant, but rather tends to change as needs and values change. The usual answer to the questions has been the ‘state,’ Yet, solutions that have been effective and...

States and other collective actors are seeking to reconstitute political authority in the twenty-first century, in part to regulate an ongoing series of globalizing processes. These processes are adding to the spread of globality, a consciousness that the world is one place. Such attempts to reconstitute authority require states to cooperate with one another in ever increasing ways, a process favouring what is called in this book the transnational cooperation state. The global scope of such cooperation, its regularity, level of institutionalization, and frequency have all contributed to the growth of densely networked transnational policy spaces on an unprecedented scale....

The opening chapter of this book hypothesizes the existence of a state rooted in transnational cooperation.¹ Such a state is ever more tightly networked into problem-solving structures that span traditional functional and territorial boundaries. As those structures become increasingly accepted as effective and legitimate, a transformation may begin to occur in the political practice, if not the formal legal doctrine, of state sovereignty. One indicator that such a process is indeed under way in our world might be predictably hostile reactions from traditional nationalists and political realists. Such reactions are clearly in evidence today. In Europe, they find expression in...

Regional integration in Europe has been one of the most significant developments in the recent transformation of political authority.¹ European integration has been distinct from other forms of regional integration, such as Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation or the North American Free Trade Agreement, not only because of its far-reaching transfer of legal competencies, functions, and activities from the national to the supranational level, but also because this process has been accompanied by the establishment of a comprehensive framework of supranational political institutions. The result is not just a larger space for (almost) unrestricted economic transactions, but a completely new system of...

Europe’s astonishing development of a unique form of regional political authority, in which transnational governance combined member state governments with players from the marketplace and the citizenry presents those trying to understand other regions with a conceptual conundrum.¹ Does the evolution of the European Union towards some kind of constitutionalized federation of states with its strong commission, its ambitious parliament, its asymmetry-reducing voting, and its effective judiciary provide the heuristic model for understanding changes, even if embryonic, in the political underpinnings of other regions?

During the past decade, such a question has informed much analysis of developments in the western...

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) as governance tools have a longstanding presence in the domestic affairs of highly industrialized states.¹ Corporatist arrangements, for instance, constitute one such form. It is only within the past few years, however, that the development and activities of PPPs beyond the nation-state, in the international context, have become interesting subjects for research. For decades, the study of international institutions has concentrated on interstate regimes aimed at solving collective action problems and providing common goods.² To the extent that non-state actors have been taken into consideration at all, they generally appeared either as actors shaping state interests through...

One of the most widely recognized aspects of the contemporary reconstitution of political authority is the changing role of the private sector in governance, a theme that is prominent in this volume. The widespread belief that the private sector is playing a greater role in governance is evident in popular discussions about deregulation, in which functions formerly carried out by the state are transferred to actors in the private sector. It is evident in discussions about global markets, in which the competitive pressures imposed by private sector actors, such as threats to flee to more lightly regulated jurisdictions, are seen...

Legitimate regulatory governance rests on a consensus regarding authoritative rule-making principles and institutions. Such a consensus is being challenged in the early twenty-first century by what Ulrich Beck describes, in this book and elsewhere, as the emergence of a risk society: a society as a whole, in which the risks of scientific and technological innovations to individuals, society, and the environment are perceived to have escaped the control of society, its institutions, and national boundaries.¹ From the perspective of a risk society, the industrial and technological developments that mark modernity are no longer equated with progress, as they once were....

The modern nation-state, which first emerged in Western Europe in the seventeenth century, is currently undergoing change that is of epic significance.¹ Despite this change, political theory and public opinion remain rooted in seventeenth-century assumptions. The change under way challenges the ‘container model’ of state politics, which is at the core of mainstream political theory, both in Western Europe and other parts of the world. This model of modern statehood defines the state as a hierarchically organized system of authority that is geographically circumscribed by clearly defined territorial borders. It further assumes that the ‘inside’ of the modern state is...

Whether contemplating their own research or making comparisons across the chapters of this book, none of the contributors makes the claim that state sovereignty has been superseded by contemporary changes in global order. None of the authors is predicting that integrative or disintegrative economic or social pressures will anytime soon render the nation-state form of governance obsolete. Nevertheless, together they have highlighted the problems with governance that are no longer readily soluble within the confines of a systemic architecture based exclusively on the nation-state. The protection of public welfare and of individual health, the preservation of the natural environment and...