Most writing about "globalization" suffers either from one or the other of two main failings. The first is to confuse globalization with international interconnectedness and to see as unprecedented recent changes trends that have been developing for a long time. The second is to emphasize that "globality" is completely distinct from such phenomena as international interdependence, but then to collapse into portentous vacuity about what the global is. The virtue of Martin Shaw’s book is that he sets out to specify what the "global" might consist of and how it transforms both international relations and the theory of the state. "Globality" is the transformation of the economy, society and culture as relations that operate on world scale. This involves going beyond the nation state and international relations as the framework for politics. Both still exist, they are not displaced but transformed. The "state-society" in which economics and society were national, defined within the territory of a sovereign state with a distinctive culture, has be superseded by social relations on a world scale. Only global relations are now truly inclusive and constitutive of the social order.

This notion of a global state is an interesting idea and it is clearly defined in a thoroughgoing critique of international relations theory. The key problem with it is whether it is at all plausible. I think not. The national – international remains the structure of modern politics. I cannot see how the Western powers and the international organizations can be a conglomerate state, rather than a constellation of states and agencies that act together on certain dimensions of policy but have no inherent unity of interest. Shaw is writing of a period in which a significant number of governments in Europe and the USA have shared a consensus about human rights enforcement and Russia and China were willing to acquiesce in the UN. But neither of these conditions is stable. The Bush Administration is unlikely to use American power in the way Clinton did, and Russia and China are less likely to allow the UN to provide legitimacy for such actions. Likewise G7 states have adopted common views of the role of the IMF and World Bank, but this is an inter-governmental consensus and not a new form of state power. On vital issues there is no consensus and thus no concerted action. The USA will obstruct effective policies to limit the effects of climate change. What we have is a population of economically and militarily dominant states that control and fund the key functionally specific institutions of supra-national governance. They cannot be called a state. When the interests of key states differ then divergent policies will be followed and relative strengths will determine how successful they are. In that sense we still have a modified version of the " anarchical society", with certain common norms and governance agencies, but in which the major states have the capacity to go their own way.