To be published in Frans Buelens, ed., Globalization and the Nation-State (Cheltenham, Glos.: Edward Elgar, for the Belgian-Dutch Association for Institutional Economics)). RECONSTRUCTING THE POLITICAL IN A GLOBALIZING WORLD: STATES, INSTITUTIONS, ACTORS AND GOVERNANCE

Globalization is usually presented as a primarily socio-economic phenomenon; political variables are seen as dependent rather than independent. In contrast, this chapter surveys a range of political aspects of globalization and argues that they constitute independent variables promoting, accelerating and shaping globalization in ways exogenous social and economic variables cannot. In particular, the capacity of political actors to act as political and institutional entrepreneurs is crucial to the way complex structures of governance will be generated in the 21 st century. In Section I, globalization in situated the wider context of historical political change. Section II looks at a range of changes taking place in the underlying structure of the public/private goods equation and at how these changes are impacting on the patterns of constraints and opportunities faced by agents in the globalization process. Section III evaluates processes of change occurring within the single most important institutionalized structure of the modern era—the transformation of the state from the national Industrial Welfare State to the Competition State. Section IV focuses on strategically situated actors in the political globalization process. Given the increasing openness of the structure of world politics to pressures for a paradigm shift, the way such strategically situated agents shape the globalization process will constrain the range of potential outcomes that might eventually be locked into an increasingly globalized world.