This paper aims to reveal how the global power structure influences a state's policy-making and which factors have driven states into neoliberal policies. Additionally, it examines the relationship between global capital and states, along with problems arising as side effects under global structure.
Globalization has been accompanied by a neoliberal reconstruction of socioeconomic relationships. The rise, spread, and embeddedness of neoliberalism has, in turn, boosted globalization that has brought about tremendous transformation in all social relationships and produced a new global power structure. Under this structure, a state's modality and capacity are forced to transform. With economic globalization's progress, especially after the Bretton Woods System's breakdown, the global power structure influences every state's policy-making, and states cannot escape it. To attract capital and avoid capital flight, states have been driven into a competition of implementing neoliberal policies related to de-regulation, liberalization, corporate tax reduction, and other economic strategies. Methodological nationalism cannot capture the global structure. Certainly, viewing states' policy-making as isolated from the global context is difficult. To tackle this problem, theorists must acknowledge the importance of a supranational epistemological framework, "methodological cosmopolitanism."
Capital's source of power is global mobility, which constructs the global power structure. Capital can move freely to more desirable locations worldwide, and this mobility creates competition among states. Such mobility also generates a new stratification issue. According to Zygmunt Bauman (1998), there is a gap between people at the top, "tourist" who have global mobility, and people at the bottom, who do not. In a globalized era, people with global mobility can freely choose where to stay and even escape obligations through means such as tax evasion. With mobility, they gain power without obligation. However, people at the bottom struggle under the burden that remains after people at the top leave. Methodological nationalism cannot address this problem that needs to be acknowledged and confronted through methodological cosmopolitanism. For a single country to tackle this structural issue is difficult; it needs to be tackled through supranational and cosmopolitan cooperation. Although this agenda is ambitious and hard to address, it is essential in avoiding continual reproduction of poverty under the global structure.
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