system now coexists with an equally powerful, though more decentralized, multi-centric system" (Rosenau 1990:11). Looking forwards, even if "the enthusiastic vision of a single global society is a technologically possible one" (Mann 1997:473), "robust nation-states are essential for its progress (though states [...] can frustrate its progress too)" (Weiss 2005:538). For now then, and for the foreseeable future, economic globalisation does not mean the end of the nation-state.