The Nation-State in Question

The Nation-State in Question, T.V. Paul, G. John Ilkenberry and John A. Hall, eds., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, pp. x, 384

The matter of globalization and state retreat has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. A phase of globalist europhoria or alarm, depending on the writer's political tendency, was followed by a series of works debunking the idea as ‘globalony’ and assuring us that the nation-state was alive and well. This book belongs to a third wave of writing that seriously tries to understand and measure the changes that states are experiencing, without committing itself in advance to sensationalist conclusions. The chapters come in four sections, on national identities, state security, state autonomy and state capacity. They are generally empirically grounded, historically informed and balanced in their conclusions. Some are broad comparative reviews and others are case studies, but all of them deploy theoretical arguments capable of wider application and testing.