Introduction

Abstract

The title of this book ‘Political Globalization’ was chosen to signal that there are important political aspects to the process of globalization. In very general terms these aspects involve transformations in the relations between political processes and territorial states. There is a double process in which nation-states and the conditions under which national policies are formed and conducted are changed, while at the same time multiple international and transnational political relations develop and intensify, so that nation states increasingly must be seen as components in a larger and more complex international political configuration. Globalization is not only a matter of nation-states facing challenges and opportunities from an increasingly integrated world economy, but also and significantly a question of the political institutions of territorially defined national societies becoming integral parts of an increasingly interconnected international and global political system.