The warning foreshadows contemporary debates about globalisation. National sovereignty, and what is left of it in the era of globalisation, is at the heart of modern European politics both in practice and in theory. Less remarked, though, are the highly politicising effects of globalisation. Lindblom was right in 1977 to describe corporate power as a non-issue, outside the political left. That is not the case now.
Globalisation makes corporate power explicit.
In part, the corporations themselves and their political supporters are responsible for this, through the rhetoric of market triumph. By drawing attention to their capacity to escape state regulation, they inadvertently highlight their own responsibility for good or ill. In the process, they politicise consumption. The first signs of this came from the phenomenal success and popular appeal of the environmental activists such as Greenpeace. They held to public account individual companies, naming and shaming them for acts of environmental destruction and reckless cruelty.