The Costs of Crossing Borders in the Global Economy

‘“Transnationalism” is a term which suffers from being “in” in social science’ (Huntington, 1973, p. 334). Although this opening quote is from 40 years ago, it could just as well have appeared in a publication this year. It was written in the aftermath of a global energy crisis, when there was a need to redefine the role of some of the key actors and their relative position in the global (political) system. Transnationalism continues to be popular in the social sciences, at least in part because four decades of globalization have resulted in a world economy that presents a mixture of public and private governance, where new actors continue to emerge, but where state borders still matter. In this context, transnational organizations and transnational corporations (TNCs), in particular, continue to exert a powerful influence on the world economy, but the world economy they are operating in is in some important ways quite different from the economy that was shaping up in the 1970s.