Transnational states

The irony here is that neoliberal distaste for planning is but declaratory and often selective as austerity politics, the redesigning of the international trade architecture and the demands for Structural Adjustment in low- and middle-income countries loudly testify. Both nationally, and globally, neoliberalism roots itself through the institution of the state as the main legislative authority capable to legitimately perform such rooting. Thus, the state is assigned a role ‘to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate [for neoliberal] practices’. This transformation gave rise to what Robinson calls the ‘transnational state’ – a key change of the recent decades that involves the extension of existing and the creation of new mechanisms for lessening state control on capital, while tightening control on labour in terms of regulations and taxation. The state itself is a terrain of class struggle, where the dominant classes and their fractions tend to determine its strategic direction; in a transnational state, the transnationally orientated fractions are dominant.

—Yuliya Yurchenko, Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketisation to Armed Conflict, (London: Pluto Press, 2018).