The era of hyperglobalization once hailed as the ' end of history' was characterised by
boundless capitalist expansion. The neoliberal revolution gave rise to a politics of scale
aimed at the centralization and unification of states and state systems: the replacement of
national with global governance or in Europe of the nation-state with a supranational
superstate the European Union. The ' New World Order' proclaimed by the United States
in the wake of the Soviet collapse proved to be ungovernable by democratic means. Instead it
was ruled through a combination of technocracy and mercatocracy failing spectacularly to
provide for political stability social legitimacy and international peace. Marked by a series
of economic and institutional crises hyperglobalization gave rise to various kinds of
political countermovements that rebelled against and ultimately stopped the upward transfer of
state authority in its tracks. This book analyses the ongoing tug-of-war between the forces
of globalism and democracy of centralization and decentralization and unification and
differentiation of states and state systems and how they are tied to the advance of global
capitalism and the prospects for its social and democratic regulation. Exploring the
possibility for states and the societies they govern to take back control over their collective
fate the book is an attempt at a renewed theory of the state in political economy. Inspired by
the work of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes it discusses the potential outlines of a
state system allowing for democratic governance within and peaceful cooperation between
sovereign nation-states.
