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As the state domain has been rolled back around almost the entire world,and as global markets have expanded in scope and power, what is left for governments and the nation state? David Howell argues that, far from the day of the nation state being over, it has become more vital than ever in the emerging network world. But the tasks of governing nations badly need defining.
Politics in the new millennium continues to revolve around economics, and economics continues to rely on time-expired theories about how individuals and economics behave and on ever more unreliable statistics. New insights from the worlds of science and biology, combined with the new realities of a largely privatized and globalized world order, have changed for ever the way governments need to govern and politicians to seek and retain power and influence. In this book David Howell, who has worked both at the highest level in government and deep inside the global financial machine, and who has an unrivalled experience of international affairs, raises the key questions for democracy in the new millennium.
The idea of privatizing public assets, and of unravelling the state's all powerful and longstanding domain, was the great heresy of the 1960s and 1970s. In turn it became, as heresies do, the new orthodoxy, not just in Britain but throughout the world. Now Howell turns to new ideas and new heresies. Could they be the orthodoxies of the globalization age? Can our political institutions handle the new challenges? This is the central question posed by a book which draws on unchronicled episodes in modern political history and on a vast quarry of new ideas for a new era.
