1 Globalization and the Nation State Bob Jessop This version is the pre-copyedited, preprint version. The published version can be found here: ‘The Future of the State in an Era of Globalization’, International Political and Society 3(July), 30-46, 2003. * * * * * Lively debates over the future of the state resurfaced in the 1980s as scholars and politicians began to suggest that the nation-state had become too small to solve the world's big problems and too big to solve its little ones. Among the most frequently cited problems were: (1) the rise of an uncontrolled and possibly uncontrollable global capitalism, (2) the emergence of a global risk society, (3) the challenge of national politics of identity politics and new social movements based on local and/or transnational issues; and, more recently, (4) the threat of new forms of terrorism and decentralised network warfare. But there is little agreement about what this means for the future of the state. Prognoses range from the rise of an entirely new kind of state; the re-scaling of the nation-state's powers upwards, downwards, or sideways; a shift from state-based government to network-based governance; or a series of incremental changes in secondary aspects of the nation-state that leave its core intact. In this contribution I will focus on the implications of the alleged rise of global capitalism for the state. Before presenting my own forecast, some clarifications are needed concerning the state, globalisation, and their relationship. First, all forms of state are based on the territorialization of political power. A formally sovereign national state exercising sovereign control over a large territorial area is only a relatively recent institutional expression of state power. It is the historical product of a specific, socially constructed demarcation of an operationally autonomous political system and divides the latter into many