What will power look like in the century to come? ”Imperial Great Britain may have been the model for the nineteenth century,” Richard Rosecrance writes, ”but Hong Kong will be the model for the twenty-first.” We are entering the Age of the Virtual State - when land and its products are no longer the primary source of power, when managing flows is more important than maintaining stockpiles, when service industries are the greatest source of wealth and expertise and creativity are the greatest natural resources.Rosecrance's brilliant new book combines international relations theory with economics and the business model of the virtual corporation to describe how virtual states arise and operate, and how traditional powers will relate to them. In specific detail, he shows why Japan's kereitsu system, which brought it industrial dominance, is doomed; why Hong Kong and Taiwan will influence China more than vice-versa; and why the European Union will command the most international prestige even though the U.S. may produce more wealth.

A leading scholar of international relations tells why the rise of virtual economies will make military conquest obsolete.

First published in 2000. Virtual States challenge the idea that the nation state is dead. In all the hype about the Internet, little thought has been given to the systematic inequalities being brought about by globalisation, and exacerbated by the global spread of the Internet. Jerry Everard argues that new disparities are emerging between the information 'haves' ad the information 'have-nots': between wealthy and poor states; and between the wealthy and poor in wealthy states. Virtual States systematically addresses these inequalities.

What will power look like in the century to come? Imperial Great Britain may have been the model for the nineteenth century, Richard Rosecrance writes, but Hong Kong will be the model for the twenty-first. We are entering the Age of the Virtual State -- when land and its products are no longer the primary source of power, when managing flows is more important than maintaining stockpiles, when service industries are the greatest source of wealth and expertise and creativity are the greatest natural resources.Rosecrance's brilliant new book combines international relations theory with economics and the business model of the virtual corporation to describe how virtual states arise and operate, and how traditional powers will relate to them. In specific detail, he shows why Japan's kereitsu system, which brought it industrial dominance, is doomed; why Hong Kong and Taiwan will influence China more than vice-versa; and why the European Union will command the most international prestige even though the U.S. may produce more wealth.

The benefits of using technology to remake government seem almost infinite. The promise of such programs as user-friendly "virtual agencies" and portals where citizens can access all sections of government from a single website has excited international attention. The potential of a digital state cannot be realized, however, unless the rigid structures of the contemporary bureaucratic state change along with the times. Building the Virtual State explains how the American public sector must evolve and adapt to exploit the possibilities of digital governance fully and fairly. The book finds that many issues involved in integrating technology and government have not been adequately debated or even recognized. Drawing from a rich collection of case studies, the book argues that the real challenges lie not in achieving the technical capability of creating a government on the web, but rather in overcoming the entrenched organizational and political divisions within the state. Questions such as who pays for new government websites, which agencies will maintain the sites, and who will ensure that the privacy of citizens is respected reveal the extraordinary obstacles that confront efforts to create a virtual state. These political and structural battles will influence not only how the American state will be remade in the Information Age, but also who will be the winners and losers in a digital society.

In recent years culture has become the primary currency of politics – from the identity politics that characterized the 2016 American election to the pushback against Western universalism in much of the non-Western world. Much less noticed is the rise of a new political entity, the civilizational state. In this pioneering book, the renowned political philosopher Christopher Coker looks in depth at two countries that now claim this title: Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He also discusses the Islamic caliphate, a virtual and aspirational civilizational state that is unlikely to fade despite the recent setbacks suffered by ISIS. The civilizational state, he contends, is an idea whose time has come. For, while civilizations themselves may not clash, civilizational states appear to be set on challenging the rules of the international order that the West takes for granted. China seems anxious to revise them, Russia to break them, while Islamists would like to throw away the rule book altogether. Coker argues that, when seen in the round, these challenges could be enough to give birth to a new post-liberal international order.

This unique volume traces the history of the state from its beginnings to the present day.