Predictions regarding the balance of geopolitical power in the year 2015 depend on the view that is taken of the nature and future role of the nation-state and the continuing importance of nationalism, territorialism, and the future of global economic relations. Realist conceptions of the nation-state and the balance of power assume that the bipolar balance of power will renew itself as some counterforce rises to balance U.S. power. And the relations between poor South and rich North are often viewed in terms of the core and periphery model of dependence theory which argues that the core industrialized nations block development in the periphery. But the most promising, in the sense of the most likely to be correct, views of the future are being developed by those who consider how, in the last twenty years, the world's "spatial practices, the ways in which space is produced and used, have changed." The nation-state is far from disappearing but it is evolving under the pressure of changes in other spheres of activity.
This is very different from the view that transnational actors or institutions will impose some kind of central authority on the world system. Nor is it like the claim that the individual state will disappear into cooperative groups or surrender responsibility for itself. The prevalence of nationalist feeling and the number of current ethnic and nationalist conflicts in the world make it very unlikely that such changes will take place in a mere twenty years' time, if ever. The continuing power of national feeling is probably, in fact, fed by the growing weakness of international borders. In studies of the internal effects of recent immigration, for example, scholars have noted that national feeling is as strong as ever and growing. Smith found that the nation-building impulse is strengthened by the selectivity of immigration policies which have "a symbolic as well as practical role [in demonstrating] that nat...