FROM the anarchist or petty-bourgeois romanticist Utopia of reorganisation of globalisation and smooth subversion of the capitalist empire to bring about a counter-empire of the multitude, let us turn to those Marxists who still talk about imperialism but are so worried about the decline of inter-imperialist rivalry and are seriously taken in by the mischievous rumour of retreat of the nation-state and erosion of sovereignty. We will see how the two streams once again converge in their helpless surrender to imperialism.

The talk of retreat of the nation-state has been premised primarily on three points, phenomenal growth of MNCs/TNCs, extreme cross-border volatility of speculative finance and the domineering discipline of multilateral institutions like the IMF, WB and WTO. But on all these scores there are enough evidences to suggest that what is happening is no generalised retreat of all nation-states, but the retreat of some which in turn means the advance of others. Moreover we will see that even where states are being said to be making a retreat, the states are actually playing a more vigorous role in shaping and implementing neo-liberal economic policies.

As for TNCs or MNCs they are still heavily rooted in their parent countries and there is intense competition among them. Moreover even though technically there are some 63,000 parent TNCs with over 8,00,000 foreign subsidiaries, wealth is highly concentrated among the top 500, and within the top 500 club among the elite top 100. According to the latest Fortune 500 list of the world's biggest 500 corporations (in terms of total revenue), US accounted for 185 followed by Japan (104), together accounting for 58 per cent of the total. Among the top 100, the US accounts for 37, followed by Japan (22), Germany (10) and France (7).

A 1993 study of the world's 100 largest companies showed that only 18 companies maintained the majority of assets abroad. The internationalisation of shares was even more restricted. 2.1 % of the board members of the top 500 US companies were foreign nationals with only 5 of the top 30 US companies listed having a foreigner on their boards. All the companies seemed to have benefited from industrial and trade policies of their own countries and at least 20 would not have survived if they had not been saved in some way by their governments (Financial Times 5 January 1996, The Economist 24 June 1995). UNCTAD's own index of transnationality based on shares of foreign assets, foreign sales and foreign employment shows 40 of top 100 multinational companies in 1993 have more than half of their activities abroad, with the average for the whole group at 41 per cent, falling to 34 per cent for US Multinationals, which comprise nearly one-third of the total. Even these figures are misleading as Nestle, which tops the list with 92 per cent, limits non-Swiss voting rights to 3 per cent of the total. In addition most research and development (R&D) takes place in the home country. For US multinationals, the share of R&D performed by majority owned foreign affiliates was only 12 per cent in 1992. Another study by Hirst and Thompson (H&T), based on company data for 500 MNCs in 1987 and 5000 MNCs in 1992-3, assessed the relative importance for MNCs of home and foreign sales and assets of particular countries, mainly US, UK, Germany and Japan. They found that between 70 and 75 per cent of MNC value added was produced in the home nation. They therefore concluded that international businesses remained heavily 'nationally embedded'.

The massive and mysterious cross-border flows of finance capital and the nation-state’s ‘inability’ to establish any kind of control on that is generally treated as technologically ordained. But this again is more a question of policy than technology. Technology in any case is a double-edged sword, the same technological revolution which enables finance capital to skip state control can also be used by the state to strengthen its control mechanism. If technology can be used to intensify control over labour and ordinary citizens, the same can also be used to control capital. The issue is ideology and not technology. Similarly, it is nation-states which are members of the multilateral institutions and of various regional trading blocs. Noted leftwing critic of globalisation James Petras quite rightly points out, “The scale and scope of nation-state activity has grown to such a point that one needs to refer to it as the “New Statism” rather than the free market. Globalisation is in the first instance a product of the New Statism and continues to be accompanied and sustained by direct state intervention.” (Petras and Veltmeyer, Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century)