Agriculture and the Changing Nation‐State: Implications for Policy and Political Economy

Abstract

only the globalization of markets and related institutional and economic change but also change in the long-stable assumptions, value beliefs, and institutions that sustain our basic unit of governance: the nation-state. This in turn transforms the way in which nations and private interests pursue their political objectives both domestically and internationally. We present the case that economic and technological changes are transforming the political role of the nation-state. The integration of national economies on a global and a regional basis imposes new constraints on the capacity of the nation-state to fulfill its traditional policy roles. At the same time, technological changes are transforming national politics by fragmenting political interests along increasingly narrow lines, thereby diminishing the nationstate's capacity to define and defend the national interest in the face of the escalating demands of rapidly proliferating interest groups. The result is that (a) the power of the nationstate is drifting upward toward increasingly complex networks of international institutions and nongovernment organizations and downward to subnational levels of government; (b) the c nflicting forces of global economic integration and proliferating interest group demands increase the transaction costs associated