Fletcher School international politics hotshot and blogger extraordinaire Dan Drezner kicked off this month’s Cato Unbound last week with an essay drawing on his recent book, All Politics Is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes, which argues that big nation-states still rule the roost and globalization has changed things less than you might think. 

In her reply to Drezner, Ann Florini, director of the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the National University of Singapore and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, disagrees that global governance remains dominated by a few great state powers. “We’re heading for a multi-polar system where very different kinds of states, at very different levels of development, will matter,” she argues.

Jeremy Rabkin – recently moved from Cornell to the George Mason School of Law – argues that the collapse of communism and the discrediting of socialism has led to a world in which “states now are so entangled in international regimes — because so entangled in international exchange.” He agrees with Drezner that the big states tend to dominate the process,  but non-state actors now often succeed in making marginal changes to policy (which add up) while the big powers are asleep at the wheel.  

And hot off the press today, UCLA’s Kal Raustiala maintains that we can learn something important about global governance by looking to the forces affecting domestic politics over the last century: powerful lobbyists and special interests did not emerge because the state was getting weaker. “The rise of interdependence and NGOs in American society didn’t signal the end of the state; it signaled the growth of the state.”

Who can get enough of the exciting evolution of international regulatory regimes? So stay tuned as Drezner kicks off the informal blog conversation Friday with a response to his critics.