...At the same time, the United States' continued hold over the UN, exercised by financial blackmail as well as by its domination of all aspects of the organization,8 reminds us that the so-called `retreat' or `demise' of the state has been vastly overstated. It is not merely that many international regulatory attempts can be deconstructed as instruments to enhance state power; it is also that many of these regulatory attempts have generated or encouraged powerful social countercurrents against neo-liberal globalization and in favour of national control or sub-national subsidiarity, including sometimes ugly particularistic appeals to ethnicity. Both UN and business elites now fear, as Richard Falk has noted, `backlash threats ranging from extremist religions, micro-nationalisms, and neo-fascist political movements'.9 The US Congress's shortsighted attempts to penalize profligacy is only one indication that, if there is such a thing as a `natural direction of history', there is at present no evident steady progression towards greater international legal harmonization or global governance. On the contrary, the very multilateral institutions usually cited as evidence of such a historical progression often engender powerful counter or decentralizing pressures. To state the most obvious political example: the United Nations, intended to institutionalize an effective collective security system, has become the greatest state-producing device in the history of the world. Even now, with decolonization concluded, that organization's charter - especially through its troublesome concept of `self determination' - is helping to legitimize and encourage the emergence of other states through the break-up of existing ones.