In a period of fundamental changes in global and national structures, the conventional separations of politics, economics, and society become inadequate for the understanding of change. These are aspects that in relatively stable times can conveniently be selected out for particular examination on an assumption of ceteris paribus. Fundamental changes have to be grasped as a whole. This whole is the configuration of social forces, its economic basis, its ideological expression, and its form of political authority as an interactive whole. Antonio Gramsci called this the blocco storico or historic bloc (Gramsci, 1971). We can think of the historic bloc, as Gramsci did, at the level of a particular country. We can also think of it at the level of Europe, and at the world in so far as there is evidence of the existence of a global social structure and global processes of structural change.

This chapter will focus on three broad issues of global governance in the transition from the twentieth century to the twenty-first: (1) the globalisation of the world economy and the reactions it may provoke; (2) the transformation of the inter-state system as it has been known since the Westphalian era; and (3) the problematic of a post-hegemonic world order. In discussing these issues, three levels of human organisation have to be considered in their interrelationships: the level of social forces, the level of states and national societies, and the level of world order and global society.