The role of the state in the global political economy or the relationship between the interstate system and globalisation has been the focus of scholarly debate for some time. Within mainstream international relations (IR) and international political economy (IPE) theories, however, these discussions have run out of steam. On one hand, neorealists such as Waltz (2000) and state-centric comparative political economists (HIRst and Thompson, 1999; Weiss, 1998) argue that globalisation mainly implies an increase in cross-border flows and, therefore, does not change fundamentally the interstate system. On the other hand, so-called hyperglobalists make the point that globalisation has drastically changed the international system with non-state actors, especially transnational corporations (tncs), increasingly taking over core functions traditionally carried out by states (Strange, 1996). In turn, states become mere conduits, adjusting national economies to the requIRements of global capital, to wither away as increasingly powerless actors (Ohmae, 1990, 1995) or to become restructured as competition states within the global economy, as transformationalists and others argue (Cerny, 2010; Held et al., 1999). The main bone of contention between these understandings is then whether and to what extent the state has lost authority vis-à-vis nonstate actors in the global economy. Posing the question strictly in these terms, though, fails to comprehend the historical specificity of capitalism and the related consequences for the relationship between the interstate system and global capitalism, as it takes the separation between the economic and the political as a starting point of investigation.

As argued in Chapter 1, it is through the philosophy of internal relations that we can comprehend the historical specificity of capitalist social relations and the way this results in the apparent separation of ‘state’ and ‘market’, the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’. The philosophy of internal relations implies that the character of capital is considered a social relation in such a way that the internal ties between the means of production, those who own them and those who work them, as well as the realisation of value within historically specific conditions, are all understood as relations internal to each other (Ollman, 1976: 47; see also Bieler and Morton, 2008: 116–17).