Abstract
Cobden, Mitrany, and Ohmae are all staunch critics of the international system. They have in common a desire to downgrade the importance of national boundaries; to de-territorialize politics and economics; and to create a more cosmopolitan social and political world order. There are more or less irremediable flaws in the nature of the nation-state in its preoccupation with (power) politics, national self-determination, sovereignty, and state equality in international organizations. These concerns are anathema to a peaceful and prosperous international or global order. Cobden, Mitrany, and Ohmae indicate a desire ultimately to replace the principle of state sovereignty and to supersede the political system of nation-states. However, the tensions between Cobden, Mitrany, and Ohmae’s rhetoric of state decline and their suggestions for what domestic roles states should play are carried over to their views on the nation-state system. This chapter demonstrates that, despite their desire to overcome the dominance of the nation-state in world relations, they offer very little that would promise to move beyond the system of nation-states. Despite their instinctive dislike of the nation-state, it continues to dominate their Utopias.
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Notes
John Morley, The Life afRichard Cobden, fourteenth edition (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920 [originally published 1879 in two volumes]), p. 91.
Ibid., p. 92.
Richard Cobden, “Russia” (1836), in Richard Cobden, ihe Political Writings of Richard Cobden, Vol. I, of two volumes, fourth edition (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903 [first published 1867]), p. 216, emphases in original.
John MacCunn, Six Radical Thinkers: Bentham, J.S. Mill, Cobden, Carlyle, Mazzini, TH. Green (London: Edward Arnold, 1910), p. 124.
Ibid.
A. J. P. Taylor, The Troublemakers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792–1939 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957), p. 62.
Richard Cobden, “England, Ireland, and America” (1835), in Cobden, The Political Writings, Vol. I, p. 34.
Crane Brinton, English Political Thought in the 19th Century (New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), p. 109.
Richard Cobden, Manchester, 10 January 1849, in Richard Cobden, Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Vol. I, of two volumes, John Bright and James E. Thorold Rogers (eds.) (London: Macmillan, 1870), p. 477. The speech was given in support of the Liverpool Financial Reform Association, which sought a reduction of government spending and the introduction of a more equitable and efficient system of taxation. See Francis W. Hirst (ed.), Free Trade and other Fundamental Doctrines of the Manchester School (London: Harper & Brothers, 1903), p. 291.
Richard Cobden, “1793 and 1853, in Three Letters” (1853), in Richard Cobden, The Political Writings ofRichard Cobden, Vol. II, of two volumes, fourth edition (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903 [first published 1867]), p. 329.
David Mitrany, A Working Peace System (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1966), p. 82.
David Mitrany, “The Functional Approach to World Organization,” International Affairs (Vol. 24, No. 3, 1948), p. 359. He ascribes these words to Dr. Johnson.
Mitrany, A Working Peace System (1966), pp. 14 and 19.
David Mitrany, A Working Peace System: An Argument for the Functional Development of International Organization, fourth edition (London: National Peace Council, 1946 [first published 1943]), p. 27.
Mitrany, A Working Peace System (1966), p. 97.
Abraham Lincoln, quoted in David Mitrany, “Functional Unity and Political Discord,” in David Mitrany and Maxwell Garnett (eds.) World Unity and the Nations (London: National Peace Council, 1950), p. 6.
David Mitrany, “A New Democratic Experiment: The Role of Non-governmental Organisations,” Review of International Cooperation (Vol. 47, No. 5, 1954), pp. 110–12.
Ian Clark, Globalization and Fragmentation: International Relations in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 183.
For these epithets, see Linda Weiss, The Myth ofthe Powerless State: Governing the Economy in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 225, and Clark, Globalization and Fragmentation, p. 183.
Kenichi Ohmae, The Invisible Continent: Four Strategic Imperatives of the New Economy (London: Nicholas Brealey, 2000), p. 123. Ohmae refers to Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York, NY: Farar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999), p. 62, and Benjamin Barber,.jihad vs. McWorld (New York, NY: Times Books, 1995), p. 276.
Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Global Marketplace (London: HarperCollins, 1990), pp. 197–8.
Ibid., p. 215.
Ibid., p. 196.
Ibid., pp. xiii-xiv.
Ibid., p. 215.
Kenichi Ohmae, Herbert Henzler, and Fred Gluck, “Declaration of Interdependence Toward the World-2005,” in Ohmae, The Borderless World, p. 217.
Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995), p. 138.
Ibid., p. 139.
Ibid., p. 144.
Ibid., p. 78.
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© 2005 Per A. Hammarlund
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Hammarlund, P.A. (2005). The Case Against the Nation-State System. In: Liberal Internationalism and the Decline of the State. The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980366_6
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