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Politics in a Small World 69

the heading “ sovereignty ” in these debates. It can be hard to separate
them in practice, but analytically, it is useful to distinguish between
“ autonomy, ” which refers to the independence of state actors in taking
action; and “ sovereignty, ” which concerns their political authority and
legal jurisdiction. Political cosmopolitans tend to be concerned less with
autonomy than with sovereignty, while anti - imperialists understand global
governance as enhancing both the autonomy and sovereignty of over -
developed states at the expense of post - colonial states.
Autonomy concerns the capacities a state possesses to act indepen-
dently of other states and of other economic and social organizations to
articulate and pursue domestic and international policies (Held, 1995a :
100). Manifestly, no state has ever been fully autonomous; as we saw in
chapter 1 , the extent to which the modern state has been subject to the
imperatives of capitalist accumulation has been one of the most debated
issues in Marxist political sociology. However, the debate has taken on
new life insofar as theorists of globalization argue that global economic
processes now systematically undermine state autonomy to the point
where governments are reduced to managing processes over which they
have no control, even in principle, since they are not contained within
national borders. Similar arguments can be made with regard to other
border - crossing activities. Satellite broadcasting systems and digital tech-
nologies make censorship difficult, threaten national broadcasting systems,

and facilitate transnational terrorist activities and civil disobedience that
create insecurity. Environmental risks are created in particular places but
they cause problems elsewhere, potentially for everyone on the planet. As
none of these activities respect national boundaries, they cannot be con-
trolled by individual national governments.
In effect, globalization means that states must cooperate in order to
gain some degree of autonomy over cross - border flows that they cannot

control alone. However, states never begin cooperation from the same
starting point; inter - state relations are already embedded in long - standing
structures of economic exploitation and dependence. The fate of post -
colonial states has long been connected to that of metropolitan centers,
and global governance exacerbates rather than ameliorates imperialist
tendencies. In the fi rst place, then, global governance should be seen as
allowing economic practices in which over - developed states put pressure
on those that aim to become better integrated into the global economy,
to open up new markets, to privatize common and public goods (includ-
ing nature), and to exploit and export cheap raw materials and manufac-
tured goods (Tonkiss, 2005 : 16 – 28). This is happening in a context in
which world trade outside the highly integrated states of the global