Globalisation and nation-sates: « The logic of the world economy has in many ways transcended the scale of nation-states » (Knox and Agnew, 1998: 372)

globalisation is a complex phenomenon based on an economic dynamic of internationalisation of trade and the emergence of a single world market but that entails significant geographical, political and cultural repercussions. Indeed, the volume of international exchanges of goods has been multiplied by 16 between 1950 and 2001and the development of international trade of service since the 1970s has been even superior to the growth regarding manufacturing goods.
Then, globalisation has also meant an irreversible opening of national economic territories, sine qua non condition for the integration of the states into the world economy and to take advantage of the great single market. But in the same time, such a move has impacted traditional attributes of sovereignty in terms of economic policies, regulation of the job market and also promotion of particular cultural or political paradigms. Furthermore, globalisation has produced a new economic framework as well as a changing of scale in Europe in which the future of nations-states that has emerged against the "rest of the world" (role of the "constitutive other" in the construction of European states) has often been described as jeopardized.