LONDON -- A French philosopher remarked some years ago that national politics had become "a secondary activity." What he meant was that, with the globalization of finance and economic forces, and with the citizens of the world linking up across borders (700 million people will be linked to the Internet worldwide by next year, according to a recent U.N. report) the doings of governments at the national level would become of decreasing importance and significance.
The great principles of liberty, power and justice are no longer being debated at national level. The body politic has dissolved into innumerable lobbies and warring interest groups. This is the end of the nation-state.
The analysis in this argument has some truth in it, but the conclusion seems badly astray. Nation-states still clearly have a lot of life in them, and if anything are acquiring more significance in people's everyday existence as the need for a sense of identity and for local loyalties grows amid the impersonal swirl of global forces.