Globalization is responsible for rendering the state irrelevant not only as an economic actor but also as a social and cultural container.
Globalization is the (post 16th century) massive flows of goods, peoples, information, capital across huge areas of the earth's surface in ways that make the parts dependent on the whole.
The State is a set of practices and processes and their effects as much as a way to look at them.
The State is a unified source of intention, a person writ large in a way not reducible to government.
The State is concerned with the question as to whether the state is reducible to government.
The State is either a concrete-concrete (i.e. Something 'out there'), a concept necessary to understand something 'out there' or an ideology that helps shield power by masking something else out there.
The State is made up of an isolation effect (i.e. Subjects molded for governance), an identification effect, a legibility effect, and a spatialization effect whereby boundaries and jurisdiction are produced.
The State is more than ever an entity under whose shadow we live. There is a depth of governmental presence in our lives, regardless of the regimes and the particulars of the social formation.
The West is inconceivable without a metanarrative. That narrative involves the emergence, in the sixteenth century, of a concern with world capitalism, the modern state, and colonization whereby under the umbrella of a narrative about the universal legitimacy of power, order became, in that process, the answer to that question.
