THE CRACK-UP OF THE NATION
“British” TNCs have violated British embargos. “American” TNCs have violated U.S. regulations concerning the Arab boycott of Jewish firms. During the OPEC embargo the transnational oil companies rationed deliveries between countries according to their own, not national, priorities. National loyalties fade quickly when opportunities present themselves elsewhere, so that TNCs transfer jobs from country to country, escape environmental rules, and play off host countries against one another.
“For the past few centuries,” Lester Brown has written, “the world has been neatly divided into a set of independent, sovereign nation-states.. . . With the emergence of literally hundreds of multinational or global corporations, this organization of the world into mutually exclusive political entities is now being overlaid by a network of economic institutions.”
In this matrix, the power that once belonged exclusively to the nation-state when it was the only major force operating on the world scene is, at least in relative terms, sharply reduced.
Indeed, transnationals have already grown so large that they have taken on some of the features of the nation-state itself—including then* own corps of quasi-diplomats and their own highly effective intelligence agencies.
“The multinationals’ intelligence needs . . . are not much different from those of the United States, France or any other country… Indeed,any discussion of the intelligence battles among the CIA, KGB, andtheir satellite agencies will be incomplete if it doesn’t describe the increasingly important roles played by the apparats of Exxon, Chase Manhattan, Mitsubishi, Lockheed, Phillips and others,” writes Jim Hougan in Spooks, an analysis of the private intelligence agencies.
Sometimes cooperating with their “home” nation, sometimes exploiting it, sometimes executing its policies, sometimes using it to execute their own, the TNCs are neither all good nor all bad. But with their ability to shunt billions back and forth instantly across national boundaries, their power to deploy technology and to move relatively quickly, they have often outflanked and outrun national governments.
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