Nations need to forge their way in a new world order

Washington, DC

ACCORDING to the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, it is impossible to have full national sovereignty, democracy and globalisation simultaneously. The concept of a "political trilemma of the world economy", which Javier Solana also recently explored, is useful, but incomplete.

Prof Rodrik's argument, elaborated in his new book, is that too much globalisation erodes the sovereignty of democratic nation-states by increasingly subjecting them to economic and financial forces that may not correspond with the wishes of the domestic majority. By this logic, an authoritarian state may function better in a globalised world, because it is unconstrained by, say, electoral concerns.