RE EARLIER POST MENTIONING KINDLEBERGER AND VERNON HERE IS SNIPET FROM KOBRIN THE PARDONER'S TALE CHAUCER

Here is Kobrin:


'The dramatic expansion of the Multinational Enterprise (MNE) after 1960 produced a 
‘first wave’ of literature in the popular and academic press.  The opening lines of Raymond 
Vernon’s best known book capture its tenor well: ‘Suddenly, it seems, the sovereign states are 
feeling naked.  Concepts such as sovereignty and national economic strength appear curiously 
drained of meaning’ (Vernon 1971, p 3).
3'

'In a seminal series of lectures two years before the publication of  Sovereignty at Bay, 
Charles Kindleberger (1969, p 207) argued that the ‘nation-state is just about through as an 
economic unit.’ ' 


They had hoped, back then, for a 'united states of the world', (ANALOGOUS TO STEINGART'S UNITED STATES OF THE WEST, which however now excludes of course the pesky non West) 


based on expanding trade investment and political unification, 
and thereby the taming of the murderous nation state concept itself, that would make war obsolete. 


The nation state was the devil that needed to be exorcized. 


(Problem: the US itself is a nation state needing to be exorcised by virtuous Cobdenist multinational enterprise.)


Rather like the Pardoner's Tale, in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, really.