The Global Economy as Political Space.

• Author: Maruca, Robert

In the late twentieth century, it has become commonplace to note that such phenomena as cyberspace, the fax machine, Cable News Network, MTV International and the general growth of the telecommunications and transportation industries have fulfilled Marshall McLuhan's 1960s vision of the "global village." In this environment, non-state actors are increasingly becoming participants in the global sphere: Organizations such as Amnesty International and Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) monitor and publicize the human-rights offenses of nation-states; multilateral organizations such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade regulate trade barriers imposed by states; and multinational corporations produce and sell goods and services in several locations.

Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make any clear distinction between domestic and foreign policy. A domestic environmental regulation is alternatively seen as a foreign trade barrier, and foreign trade policy is pursued in order to improve the domestic economy. Sub-national units also play a significant role in world relations. Regions and localities, for example, now compete with one another to be chosen as factory sites by multinational corporations. As these examples demonstrate, global behavior is increasingly transcending national borders.

The emergence of non-state actors at all levels (sub-national, supranational and multinational) challenges the way in which we understand global - rather than international - relations. As the editor of the volume, Stephen J. Rosow, points out in the Introduction to 7-he Global Economy as Political Space, the realist and neo-realist theories of international relations (IR) are inadequate paradigms for understanding interactions among all parties in an interdependent world. Rosow argues that even the neo-realists, who have challenged traditional IR theory with the introduction of the field of international political economy (IPE) and the very notion of interdependence, ultimately support rather than question the basic realist assumptions about the primacy of the state. As a collection of essays, the volume seeks to question this and other fundamental realist and neorealist tenets of IR, to challenge traditional notions about which actors can and do participate in IR as well as how they participate and to assert the "historically produced and contestable character of international practices."

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