Globalisation and state sovereignty: a mixed bag

As the process of economic globalisation has unfolded since the 1960s, international trade and capital flows have grown tremendously (Hay, 2014). While perhaps not unprecedented, this growth has led some to argue that the sovereignty of the nation-state is under dire threat. At a campaign rally in April of 2016, then U.S. Presidential-nominee Donald J. Trump affirmed such a notion, stating that “the nation-state remains the true foundation of happiness and harmony,” and vowing to “no longer surrender [the U.S.] to the false song of globalism” (Hattem, 2016). This paper engages with the globalisation President Trump refers to as the expansion of social connections, wherein any person, irrespective of their spatial location (and therefore often transcendent of their territorial geography) has an expanded ability to engage with any other person in the world (Scholte, 2007). Economic globalisation, which is the re-spatialisation of human connection as it relates to economic activity from the local or national level to the planetary arena, exists as a process of integration toward a single, shared global economy (Scholte, 2007; McGrew, 2014). Further, state sovereignty, as clarified by the Oxford English Dictionary, is the supreme, or absolute and independent authority of a state over its communities, especially in regard to the independent creation of policy. President Trump’s doubts over U.S. power are founded but misguided. While the process of economic globalisation has eroded some aspects of state sovereignty through the imposition of institutional policy constraints as a means to growth, there is no evidence that the concept of the autonomous nation-state will disappear under further pressure from market integration, due to its embedded authority within the contemporary international system