| Over the past thirty years, subnational states have become significant global economic actors, yet they remain unincorporated into the main body of IPE research. This is largely because their relevance has been sought in the narrowly defined local economic milieu, when instead their real significance lies in their emergence as sites of regulation of the global political economy. In particular, through efforts to attract transnational corporate investment and create transnational business networks, sell exporting to small and medium firms, and imagineer local metropolises into 'world cities,' subnational states become the structural site around which the local social foundations of transnational liberalism are built. As national Fordist blocs composed of national capital and nationally organized labor erode, a new hegemonic bloc in the Gramscian sense emerges, organized not simply globally or locally but 'glocally.' Such blocs have the potential to join transnational capital, small and medium manufacturers and farmers, and the consumerist metropolitan middle class in and through the subnational state into a social formation supportive of the transnational liberal project. This is a key element in the re-scaling of the state and the production of new geographies of global regulation in the twenty-first century. |
