In this Article, we describe an emerging arena of global administration. We claim that this arena, not bounded by a state, raises accountability problems of a kind different from those addressed by conventional administrative law. And we argue that measures designed to address these problems will have potentially large implications for democratic theory and practice. Our argument starts from the premise—stated here without nuance—that something new is happening politically beyond the borders of individual states and irreducible to their voluntary interactions. To distinguish these developments from what is commonly called “international law and politics,” we use the term “global politics.” The emergence of global politics is marked by a proliferation of political settings beyond domestic boundaries. This proliferation expands the range of relevant political actors, while shifting our understanding of political units and of relations among them: the emergence of human rights as limits on Westphalian sovereignty was a first step in this shift, but not the last.

A recurring theme in the sociology of education is that schooling produces citizenship or a sense of membership in the nation-state. Much of the literature on civic education explores this theme, either lamenting school failures in this arena or fearing that hyper-successful schools will create massive conformity. Different though these perspectives are they share the premise that schooling is designed to produce national citizens with the national heritage and the nation-state as the crucial and bounded referential standards. This premise is challenged by the development of the human rights movement and its more recent human rights education focus. Human rights has emerged as an influential discourse and this discourse is changing from a solely legal to a broader human rights education focus. Civic education, once the central curricular area for teaching national citizenship, now teaches global citizenship and incorporates a rights discourse that extend beyond national borders.

This paper presents a framework to understand and measure the effects of political borders on economic growth and per capita income levels. In our model, political integrationbetween two countries results in a positive country size effect and a negative effect through reduced openness vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Additional effects stem from possible changes in other growth determinants, besides country size and openness, when countries are merged. We estimate the growth effects that would have resulted from the hypothetical removal of national borders between pairs of adjacent countries under various scenarios. We identify country pairs where political integration would have been mutually beneficial. We find that full political integration would have slightly reduced an average country's growth rate, while most countries would benefit from a more limited form of merger, involving higher economic integration with their neighbors.

Since Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, political theorists have depicted the state as "sovereign" because it holds preeminent authority over all the denizens belonging to its geographically defined territory. From the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 until the beginning of World War I in 1914, the essential responsiblities ascribcd to the sovereign state were maintaining internal and external security and promoting domestic prosperity. This idea of "the state" in political theory is clearly inadequate to the realities of national governments and international relations at the beginning of the twenty-first century. During the twentieth century, the sovereign state, as a reality and an idea, has been variously challenged from without and within its borders. Where will the state head in the age of globalisation? Can Catholic polilical thinking contribute to an adequate concept of statehood and government? A group of German and American scholars were asked to explore specific ways in which the intellectual traditions of Catholicism might help our effort lo rethink the state. The debate is guided by the conviction that these intellectual resources will prove valuable to political theorists as they work to revise our understanding of the state.

Under the Westphalian system of international order, each nation is understood to be sovereign and its borders are seen as inviolate. But with the emergence of worldwide problems and the increasing interdependence of nations, it is clear that what happens (or does not happen) in one country can have seriousrepercussions elsewhere. Beyond Westphalia? brings together a distinguished group of scholars to explore the question of whether recent political changes have shifted the balance between the sovereign rights of states and the authority of the larger international community. Contributors are Jarat Chopra, Ken Conca, Jack Donnelly, Robert H. Jackson, Stephen D. Krasner, Friedrich Kratochwil, Gene M. Lyons, Michael Mastanduno, Janne E. Nolan, Nicholas Onuf, James N. Rosenau, and Thomas G. Weiss.