Rescaling Global Governance: Imagining the Demise of the Nation-State

Much has been written recently about the supposed decline in the sovereign power of nation-states due to global economic processes and the emergence of supranational governing institutions like the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, NAFTA, the EU, etc. This has posed what some consider a problem for still largely nation-state-centric social theory in terms of making sense of what appears to be a major transformation in global governance patterns and institutions. This article argues that the apparent transformation in global governance is less historically revolutionary than evolutionary with the key being a shift in power relations among capitalist class factions at all levels of governance. Toward substantiating this claim, the article focuses on what some argue to be the (re)-emerging global political-economic significance of subnational city-regions as a result of the apparent geographic rescaling of global governance downward from dominant inter-nation-state relations. Of importance is that this apparent (re) emergence of sovereign actors at the subnational city-region scale is largely the result of this contemporary new regionalist discourse essentially rendering itself a reality. It is therefore a highly contested, and contestable, phenomenon, even in the overwhelmingly neoliberal context of the United States.