Both Globalization and Sovereignty:
Reimagining the Political

Policy Brief: Centre for Global Studies
by R.B.J. Walker

The most challenging political problems of our time arise from a need to re-imagine what we mean by politics.

I make this claim not to deny the pressing importance of other and somehow more tangible political problems, many of them matters of life and death for millions of people. I make it to insist that questions about what is to be done about many of these apparently more tangible problems demand serious rethinking about the agencies and authorities that are empowered to act, and the conditions under which their actions carry some legitimacy. While there is obviously no shortage of agencies claiming authority, neither their capacities to act nor their capacities to sustain the legitimacy of their actions are as clear-cut as they would have us believe. More crucially, it is becoming less and less clear what a capacity to act, or a capacity to sustain a claim to legitimate authority could or should mean under contemporary conditions.

This point has often been made in relation to speculations about the declining significance of state sovereignty as the primary principle guiding our prevailing sense of what we mean by power and authority. It has been made with increasing frequency in relation to claims about the significance of what is so awkwardly and promiscuously referred to as globalization. These claims are usually vague and highly contentious. None of us has sufficient historical perspective or epistemological expertise to offer much more than very partially substantiated judgements in this context. But if they do indeed carry some credibility as indicators of ways in which cultures, economies and societies have been shifted and shaken by the modernities and capitalisms of the twentieth century, then some sense of the need to re-imagine what and where we take politics to be is simply inescapable.

Aristotle was right to insist that we are all political beings. Latter-day Aristoteleans are also right to insist that much of what we are now encouraged to call politics, whether in the name of representation, the market, or rational choice, has been profoundly de-politicized. Politics is not reducible to the administration of things, nor to a rational calculus of individual self-interest. On the contrary, the rationalization of modern capitalism and the hegemony of utilitarianism only make it more difficult to identify what and where politics now occurs. Still, Aristotle’s world is increasingly unfamiliar to us. Whether reworked as a theory of states or of republics, whether reclaimed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx or Leo Strauss, Aristotle now names a nostalgia for worlds we think we knew. These are the worlds that grant a certain coherence and plausibility to our sense of knowing what we mean when we talk about politics.

Most of us do indeed still think we know what we are talking about when we speak about politics. Even now, remarkably few political theorists have qualms about replaying the old categories again and again like organ grinders in the street. Politics, we know, has something to do with powers and politicians, with governance and constitutions, with economies, identities and violence. It is not always a pretty sight. We know it when we see it, however, precisely because we assume it has a site, a location within which it occurs, or beyond which it can occur only in the most attenuated forms.

Aristotle invoked the polis. We invoke the state. Without the inheritance of the polis or the achievements of the state we would certainly not speak about politics the way we do now. We might refer to crude indices of power. We might still refer to economies, governance and the rest, and defer to generalized logics of power and utility. But the most crucial puzzles of politics, we also know, rest less on logics of power and utility than on the possibilities of legitimate authority. It is in this context that the problems of contemporary politics, and not least about the potentialities of democratization, have become most intense. It is in relation to questions about legitimate authority that the difficulties of speaking about and reimagining the possibilities of politics have become most perplexing. In some respects, in fact, we both think we know what we are talking about when we speak about politics but have also lost much of our capacity to speak about politics precisely because we so readily assume that all questions about legitimate authority are sufficiently answered by reference to the achievements of the state, by the place where politics is supposed to be. It is this assumption that allows us to speak so easily about politics, to take for granted all our received answers to all the hard questions about the sources and agencies of authority, but also to do so in ways that seem increasingly at odds with contemporary articulations of power.

Knowing where we are, we persuade ourselves that pressing problems of public policy can be dealt with by this or that authority here or there representing this or that political community. Then we read the business pages and strategic analysts. We marvel at the flows of trade and capital, the flexible locations of production, the circulations of information, the Groups of Seven or Eight, the mysteries of the European Community, NAFTA or ASEAN. We try to decipher who makes what decisions where, and under what conditions. We try not to think too much about the massive debt burdens that shrivel the lives of the world’s poorest peoples. We find scholars talking about human security, global ecologies, or distinctions between an international and a global political economy. We find international lawyers speaking as though states are not the only subjects of international law. We find interdependences and neo-colonialisms, functional regimes, resurgent religious and ethnic communities and overlapping citizenships. We find local activists acting globally, global cities fusing transnational cultural identities, and the claims of humanitarian intervention conflicting ever more unsatisfactorily with the claims of domestic jurisdiction. Our prevalent maps are elegant, highly detailed, and generally sufficient to forestall vertigo among the more privileged, but the dragons of the unknown world are no longer just decorous motifs on the margin. The nationalist rhetorics of the commentators and scholars may be difficult to ignore, but the narratives they relate increasingly suggest that it is becoming as futile to look for politics where it is supposed to be as it is to look for power down the barrel of a gun.

II

There are many ways to characterize contemporary struggles to re-imagine politics. Most of them are animated by some sense of a profound historical shift away from a world of more or less sovereign states to a world that is somehow global. Theoretical orientations and the selection and interpretation of empirical trends vary enormously in this context. It may well be that the broad brush and the rhetorical flourish prevail at the expense of close detail and fine distinctions. There is almost certainly an unfortunate tendency to exaggerate the novelty of many contemporary trends. States, nations, great powers and arms races remain with us, though not as they once may have been. But crucial structures seem to have shifted. Longstanding dynamics have been transformed. It is quite probable that what appear to us to be sharp disjunctions may well come to look to later generations like gradual transitions, like yet another ripple among great transformations that were already well under way over a century ago. But it is now very difficult indeed to avoid concluding that however we characterize the historical and structural transformations that are so casually invoked in references to globalization, they present significant challenges to the primary categories of modern politics, especially as these were laid out in early-modern Europe.

It was in early-modern Europe, of course, that politics came to be reframed, against the prevailing hierarchies of feudalism, empire and theology, in relation to the spatial terrain of the modern state, to the polis reborn in an age of modernizing capitalism and global imperialism. This was the context in which the modern world worked out its conceptions of sovereignty, identity, community, subjectivity, obligation and interest. These were the achievements that permitted subsequent generations to develop practices of nationalism, liberalism, socialism, democracy and the rest. If the most challenging political problems of our time involve re-imagining what we mean by politics, it is necessary to do so especially in relation to our now almost automatic reversion to the categories and rhetorics of that era. Much of the difficulty with prevailing literatures analyzing contemporary challenges to state sovereignty, for example, is that these literatures so easily revert to the early-modern philosophical categories that are themselves part of the practices through which state sovereignty was articulated in the first place. And much of the difficulty with prevailing accounts of globalization as a form of political economy is that they are so easily fractured into, on the one hand, an economic analysis that is explicitly designed to avoid questions about politics entirely and, on the other, a political analysis that also easily reverts to images of politics contained within a sovereign territorial state. Much the same problem has bedeviled attempts to think more creatively about politics in the past, especially under banners proclaiming emancipation and radical change. Even the great nineteenth century prophets of historical transformation remained entranced by the political wisdom of an earlier age in this respect.

We all now know where we are supposed to be. This is what allows us to persuade ourselves that we know what politics must be as well. Our normative commitments have even been able to masquerade as the necessities of political realism, that account of what must happen when the normative ideals of the modern state reach their territorial limit. Whether the politics of our contemporary situations or our possible futures can be adequately grasped on the basis of normative commitments of this kind, however, remains an open question, though one that is increasingly difficult to answer in the affirmative. But it is also very difficult to answer in any way at all because the terms in which questions about emerging forms of politics continue to be framed are themselves constituted through the very concepts of politics that seem so at odds with so many contemporary circumstances.

III

It is especially striking that contemporary discussions about state sovereignty and globalization have come to be framed in terms of two seemingly contradictory forms of common sense. On the one hand, state sovereignty and globalization are taken to be incompatible opposites. On the other, they are seen as longstanding complementarities. Each framing comes in both popular and highly sophisticated variants, as statements of the obvious and as assumptions informing elaborately self-conscious theorizations.

We perhaps find it easiest to think about globalization as a simple alternative to, or negation of the modern state or system of modern states. This framing is often articulated as an opposition between political realism as a celebration of the necessity of state interests as opposed to a political idealism that celebrates the potentiality of some kind of universality, some global or human community. It is a framing that occurs most frequently as a seemingly natural assumption that if the modern state is being challenged, there must be some kind of withering away of the state and the emergence of some kind of supranational authority somewhere "above" the state. Developments in the United Nations, or in the European Community, or among multinational corporations, for example, have especially been read, and misread, on this basis. Globalization, it is said, must imply a decline of the state; and as a corollary, evidence of the continuing vitality of states must imply that claims about globalization are merely globalony. The rhetorical force of this apparently straightforward choice is quite overwhelming, though not because there is a shred of evidence to suggest that this is the most sensible way of posing questions about either the fate of modern states or the potential significance of globalizing tendencies.

This dualistic framing coexists with one that emphasizes complementarity. Several variations on the theme may be identified, especially those which draw our attention to the embeddedness of the modern state within structures that have been in some sense global from the outset and to the paradoxes of universality and particularity that are expressed in the principle of sovereignty itself. It is this pattern of embeddedness, and the paradoxical or dialectical character of state sovereignty that it implies, that produces a rhetoric of alternatives to state sovereignty that already presumes the natural necessity of state sovereignty, and thus the impossibility of reimagining politics on any other basis.

We can insist, for example, that the rise of the modern state and the states system has been coextensive with the rise of capitalism as a globalizing form of production, distribution and exchange. From Marx to Karl Polanyi, Immanuel Wallerstein, Robert Cox and other contemporary international political economists, we can assume that there is some kind of connection between particularizing states and globalizing capitalism, even though we also know that everyone has found it a bit difficult to say what this connection is with any great precision.

Or we can insist that the rise of the modern state and states system is co-extensive with some kind of over-arching cultural community, or sequence of communities, specifically those identified with the pseudo-universalisms of Christianity, Europe, and Modernity. The sense that particular states, and the supposedly anarchical structure of the states system challenge any overarching universality, and that sovereignty is a claim to separation and autonomy from any higher authority, is mitigated by the contrary sense that states nevertheless participate in some more collective order, whether of Christian ethics, European diplomatic culture, or, now, principles of modern reason and processes of modern rationalization. Again, quite how this participation works remains a bit puzzling, and also generates considerable theoretical controversy, but the need to work with a dialectical or complementary understanding of sovereignty and globalizing tendencies is not controversial at all. The notion that we are the (plural) peoples of the (singular) United Nations, for example, is simply a formal acknowledgment that our sovereign autonomies and our differences are somehow inseparable from our similarities as participants in some broader collective enterprise to which terms like ‘humanity’ and ‘global’ are easily attached.

Most incisively, we can insist that the principle of sovereignty itself already expresses a necessary relationship between some sort of global or at least general system or structure and the particularity or autonomy of states. This relationship takes the form of a basic contradiction, which might be expressed in two forms.

In one, sovereignty can be read as a claim to a monopoly of legitimate authority in a particular territory, but only while recognizing that this claim already depends on a wider system of states that enables that claim to be recognized and operationalized. For sovereignty cannot be just a claim to a monopoly or a particularity, as the usual definitions would have it, because only in some broader context could such a claim be either plausible or recognized. This is what gives rise to claims about the so-called ‘society of states’ analyzed by scholars sensitive to the customs, legal regimes and institutions generated by states to facilitate their mutual relation. In a more minimalist form, it animates some versions of the so-called ‘logic of anarchy’ that supposedly explains the action of any specific state in a system of states.

In another form, sovereignty can be read as an account of both one system and many states, of both a general and quasi-universal reason that informs the logic of the system and the many states that may, or may not, behave in accordance with that general or quasi-universal reason.

In either rendition, far from being an account of a claim to a monopoly, to an affirmation of difference and the absence of commonality, sovereignty expresses and works to reproduce a specific relation between claims to difference and claims about the forms of commonality and structure that permit claims to monopoly to have any meaning at all.

It is in this sense that sovereignty is a principle of modern politics and not just a principle of international relations. It is an expression of a politics that works both inside states and outside states, indeed as a principle that tells us why we must put up with a politics that is radically split between statist political communities and relations between such communities. It is in this sense also that sovereignty is a principle of modern politics, and has to be understood in part as a specifically modern account of what the world is and how it can be known as well as a specifically political authorization of states as legitimate political authorities.

IV

It may be that the most crucial move in thinking about contemporary politics over the past decade or so has been a rather bemused remembering that sovereignty is not simply an abstract principle fit only for constitutional lawyers and rather conservative political theorists. Still less is it simply an obvious assumption that theorists of international relations can use to ground their claims about states and national interests. As with the concept of the modern individual, or the modern aesthetics of representation and three-dimensional perspective, we have largely forgotten about the tremendous historical changes and levels of violence that went into making sovereignty seem like a simple theoretical principle. In fact, it expresses in a highly condensed form an entire modern cosmology.

The broad outlines of this story are well known. Theological authority and the claims of an overarching empire once came to be challenged by particular powers and, eventually, by claims to monopolistic authority in particular states. This is not an easy story to tell, of course, not least because the great categories under which some semblance of a coherent narrative has usually been attempted — the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the emergence of modern capitalism and new technologies, and so on — have all become exceedingly elusive. But however one reads this story, or melange of stories, it focuses centrally on the collapse of prevailing forms of legitimate authority expressed as a hierarchy under heaven and the gradual emergence of a different account expressed as sovereign rule over particular territories — sovereign states. The practice was long and violent. The conceptual shift was not easy either. It required a massive transition from thinking about a world of natural hierarchies capped by a great leap of faith from earthly temporality to heavenly eternity to a world of modern subjects separated in a horizontal space. This was the world mapped out by scientists and philosophers like Galileo, Descartes and Hobbes. This was the new modern world of spatial separations, of subjects separated from objects, of men separated from nature. It was a world that had to some extent been foreseen both by the Renaissance artists with their representational perspectives and by the late medieval theologians and their nominalist challenges to Aristotelian realism/essentialism.

Crucially, this was a shift that required redrawing the line that was previously drawn between earth and heaven, between the secular city of man and the sacred city of God, a line drawn on a vertical axis of above and below. It was redrawn as a line between man and world, between man and man, and between collections of men and other collections of men, between states. It was a line now drawn on a horizontal rather than a vertical axis. This is how we came to achieve the modern conception of subjectivity, the modern conception of what it means to be a modern self, or a modern state, separated from yet somehow linked to, other selves and other states. And just as the great gap between the temporalities and finitudes of earth and the infinities and eternities of heaven was posed as the great problem for a Christian theological universe, a problem that nonetheless guaranteed the legitimacy of the ranks and orders below, so also the rewritten gap between separated subjectivities has posed the great problem for us moderns, a problem that nonetheless serves to guarantee the legitimacy of modern subjectivities within.

Modern politics has become more a matter of drawing lines in horizontal space rather than of negotiating hierarchies and preparing for a final leap into infinity/eternity. Not least, it has become a matter of drawing lines between a proper politics within a specific territorial space and an absence of a proper politics beyond that space, whether in the explicitly international space of relations between states, in the timeless spaces reserved for those who inhabit the world beyond modernity, or, more positively, in the potentiality of a universal reason that might finally be brought down to earth, made immanent within modern spatially delineated subjects.

For modern subjects, for modern political theorists, the problem has been to find ways of affirming the possibility of some sort of universality within a particularity. Indeed, we have long been at a point at which the most privileged modern subjects, and not least the political theorists, have been able simply to assume that a particular state can simply be treated as a universal, as the natural ground on which all contradictions of human existence can be resolved. It has been the role of theorists of international relations to remind us that the state is not the world, and that the existence of particular states in a system of other particular states provides a puzzle that both enables and undermines the highest aspirations of all modern subjects and all political theories. Unfortunately, in this great division of intellectual labour, the puzzles and contradictions generated by sovereignty as a specifically modern rendition of the appropriate relationship between universality and particularity on the spatial terrain of the modern state have been replaced by crude reifications of the way things are on both sides of the line. The conditions under which this line was once drawn, or what was achieved by doing so, have largely slipped from our memory.

This is why state sovereignty is so easily misconceived as simply a claim to monopolistic authority on the part of a particular state, rather than as a specifically modern resolution of a dialectical relationship, a point of both fusion of and demarcation between particularity and universality. The claim to sovereignty already contains within it an account of what the appropriate relationship between universality and particularity or diversity must be. Universality, or the possibility of globalization, is already both present and absent in the claim to sovereignty. Universality seems absent because sovereignty seems to express a claim to particularity, to some national interest, or nationalist identity. But it is present because it can only express this claim to particularity in a wider world, in a more general system or society or culture that makes this claim possible.

For example, one of the most problematic of contemporary political concepts of politics is that of citizenship. There has been considerable recent debate about whether citizenship only makes sense in relation to specific states or whether we might reasonably talk about some kind of global citizenship. This debate is fundamentally misconceived for although it is technically right to insist that citizenship expresses a claim to membership in a particular community, citizenship also expresses an aspiration to principles that are generally understood in highly universalizing terms. Citizenship expresses the great hope that people can eventually become humans precisely through their participation in particular states. This is the great hope expressed by the Kant, the hope that we might be able to achieve a universality in the particular, to act on the basis of a universal law despite all our particularities. But it is no less a hope expressed by writers who are conventionally counterposed to Kant the supposed idealist; by Hobbes, for example. And it is the hope that seems so utterly beyond the possibility of achievement to those, like Max Weber, who have been most forthright in acknowledging the violence that results when hopes for universality in the particular turn out to be the celebration of a very parochial and particular understanding of universality.

Sovereignty expresses not only a specific account of the proper relationship between particularity and universality but a very specific understanding of space and time. Like the movement of hands across a clock face, sovereignty affirms a set of spatial demarcations. Inside, we can have an ordered space, which permits in turn the possibility of a progressive history. Outside, we can have only the inevitability of contingency and the eternal return of primordial conflict, balances of power and the permanently tragic wisdom of political realism at the limit of our normative ambitions. This is an account that meshes very uneasily with, say, contemporary patterns of internal war. Indeed, it is arguably an account that is difficult to reconcile with almost any credible narrative about the spatiotemporal organization of contemporary human existence.

It is at the limit of our modern normative ambitions, of course, that the common sense of complementarity gives way to the common sense of radical dualism. The latter is an effect of the former. The ease with which we are drawn to counterpose state sovereignty and globalization as mutually exclusive alternatives is a consequence of the way in which we have already framed state sovereignty in relation to a paradigmatic account of what globalization must be. But this framing, this account of the proper relationship between the sovereign state and the states system or society of states that makes this sovereign state possible, or more generally between modern subjectivities and the world that makes modern subjects possible, is always radically unstable. Kantian ethics sketches the abstract principles through which stability might be sustained in principle. Theories of international relations sketch the pragmatic rules of accommodation that have served to sustain some semblance of stability in practice, and to warn of the dire necessities and consequences of thinking that the modern resolution of universality and particularity in a spatial array of different political communities and subjectivities in a quasi-universal order could be anything but radically unstable. For despite all the criticisms that can be directed at the old political realists, it is their insistence on the radical instability of modern resolutions of universality and particularity expressed in the claim to state sovereignty that still forces us to take them seriously as theorists of modern politics. It is, for example, what sets them apart from the thin utilitarianisms of the contemporary neo-realists.

Although it is enshrined as an almost unchallengeable part of the common sense of our time, therefore, it makes little sense to frame questions about the future of either the state or of globalization, or of the possibilities of politics more generally, as if state sovereignty and globalization are mutually exclusive alternatives. Neither political realism nor political idealism can usefully be read as as alternative accounts of political possibility, only as complementary ways of framing the consequences of the same specifically modern account of what politics must be. This framing is already an effect of ways of thinking about politics that assume that some form of globalization is already a precondition for the existence of the sovereign state. It is an effect of the way in which modern subjectivities in general and state sovereignty in particular are set up in a spatially delineated antagonism, as a relation of self and other, man and world, state and system-system that can only be sustained as long as it is possible to draw the line that allows each subjectivity to struggle to achieve universality within itself.

V

What is at stake in contemporary debates about the future of politics is not whether globalization as a process of quasi-universalization is undermining the state as the site of particularity. It is whether it is still possible to draw the line that has enabled the state to claim to be able to reconcile all contradictions between universality and particularity on a spatial terrain. If it is not possible to sustain a capacity to draw lines in this way, one should expect to see not a grand drift from a world of sovereign states to a world in which states have become defunct, but a rewriting of the relationship between universality and particularity that states have insisted must be articulated within their territories.

What is arguably at the heart of contemporary transformations of political life, in fact, is neither the weakness of states (which may well be getting both stronger and weaker as they continue to transform along many dimensions), nor the novelty of globalization (although we may well be witnessing some crucially novel features and be in a major phase of accelerations in this respect) but the decreasing capacity of states everywhere to claim a monopoly on the legitimate resolution of all relations of unity and diversity and a decreasing capacity to delineate their subjectivities within from other subjectivities without.

Whether or not states have the capacity to sustain their monopoly in this respect perhaps depends most crucially on five interelated challenges.

One is the challenge of multiple subjectivities. Few states have ever measured up well to the ideal of a modern nation as a more of less homogeneous subjectivity. Most states have experienced enormous difficulty reconciling ethnic and regional differences, and molding them into some semblance of a cohesive social order. In most if not all cases, the process of nation building has been and in many places continues to be spectacularly bloody. As many recent commentators have argued, however, the decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall has witnessed a considerable upsurge of ethnic, religious and regional differences that have put even the most hard-nosed defenders of nation building on the defensive. Moreover, the very idea of an idealized singular identity, the ambition to turn cultural difference into a unified nation, has been put into suspicion on many fronts, and not least because it has been associated with the oppressive forces of colonialism quite as much as with nationalist assaults against colonialism, or with a specifically male understanding of what it means to construct cultural collectivities.

In practice, political life does seem to be characterized increasingly by forms of accommodation to multiple subjectivities: to the functional disaggregation of citizenship in the European Community; to the differential rights and citizenships available to those who can afford to be mobile across borders; to the loosening of regional and national ties within states like Belgium and Canada; to the elaboration of spheres of autonomy for aboriginal peoples in some countries; to speculations about various ‘levels’ of governance, and so on. Many of the phenomena that are more usually read as symptoms of "failed states," or the emergence of ethnic conflicts, war-lords and drug cartels in may places, could perhaps be understood in this context also. Whether as a practical matter or as a regulative ideal, the image of the homogeneous nation sustained around a clear identity within the clear territorial borders of a state has become fairly tattered. The idealized self-identical modern subject that informs the claims of state sovereignty, that carries our modern hopes for universality in particularity, may still be celebrated by some of the most eminent social and political theorists of our time, but only against a growing chorus of cynics, on the one hand, and critics of its cultural parochialism, on the other.

Second, there is the challenge of multiple relationships, of signs of a shift from a world of compartmentalized spaces to a world of networks of connection that elude all containment. The conventional image of politics can, and very often used to be drawn as a system of black boxes, of coloured spaces on the map. States were assumed to be homogenous actors, and the relations that counted were relations between states. But just as the modern subject is being unbundled, so also is the space in which those subjects were contained being disggregated into multiple sites each connected to multiple other sites. The lines we draw are increasingly lines of connection between nodes rather than lines of separation between territorial spaces.

These lines of connection, of course, also imply new ways of distinguishing included and excluded, and this suggests a third challenge: contemporary lines of inclusion and exclusion are increasingly framed in a great many new ways and do not simply converge on the great zones of inclusion/exclusion at the territorial edges of states. Many contemporary patterns of inclusion and exclusion are constructed on the basis of cultural ascription, or around the fringes of large cities, or around free trade zones. The old categories of class and race are likewise failing to come to grips with forms of inclusion/exclusion within states precisely because inclusions/exclusion are articulated in patterns that cut across states. Most sociologists, for example, are in deep trouble in this respect.

Similarly, and fourth, there is the challenge arising from the degree to which contemporary life is characterized by movement and flows rather than attachments to territorial space. From the circulation of capital to the migrations of refugees and tourists and the activities of social movements, the valorization of speed and temporality over spatiality and geopolitics has made it more and more difficult to draw clear lines between here and there.

Finally, there is the challenge of simultaneity, not only in the sense of temporal convegence but also in the sense that states have lost much of their capacity to mediate between both the global and the local and between the outside and the inside. This capacity is crucial to a politics of state sovereignty. The local is that which owes allegiance to the state above it. The global is that which lies outside the state, whether as a system of states of a system of capitalism. And it is the state which seemingly mediates, which controls when inside may go outside, when outside may come inside, when the states system or global capitalism may impinge on its locales. But it is rather difficult to think about the politics of global cities in this way. Or many of the practices of globally organized corporations when investing in specific places. Or the practices of those diaspora that so confuse sharp distinctions between here and there. In many respects outside is inside, the local is global. States still try to maintain control over their territorial jurisdictions, to patrol the borders, to orchestrate the nation. In the meantime, our most basic categories of space and time have twisted, contracted, expanded and fractured.

It is possible, and indeed probable that none of these challenges is especially novel. It is undoubtedly the case that states will continue to show enormous resilience in meeting these challenges, and to insist on their capacity to draw lines, to resolve all contradictions between universality and particularity on their spatial terrain. But this is where states are most vulnerable. And this is where our prevailing concepts of politics are most vulnerable also.

There is no point in addressing this vulnerability by framing our future possibilities as a choice between states and globalization, between national citizenship and cosmopolitan ethics, between the dangerous parochialism of particular states and the hopeful universalism of some common humanity. There is no point because these are the choices that are already posed by the politics of state sovereignty, which forces us into an impossible dualism as a consequence of the necessary tragedies that enable our most elevated ambitions as modern subjects. What is at stake in reimagining politics under contemporary conditions is the possibility that our most elevated (Kantian) ambitions, our impossibly autonomous and spatially monolithic subjectivities, do not have to monopolize our understanding of what it means to shape the claims of either universality, or of difference, or of spatiality, or of temporality, or of who we are, or who we might become.

R.B.J. Walker is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Graduate Program in Contemporary Social and Political Thought at the University of Victoria. He is Editor of the journal Alternatives, and has written widely on theories of international relations, including Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1993). This paper is the text of lectures delivered at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, the University of Oslo, and Western Washington University in the Spring of 1998. Professor Walker can be reached at rwalker@uvic.ca.