Introduction

Over the past few years there have been increasing conflicts between the U.S.A. and several of her main political allies over the extraterritorial assertion of U.S. jurisdiction. Complaints, mainly from European countries and in particular Britain, about the application of U.S. ‘long-arm’ legislation outside the U.S.A. have led to retaliation against the application of U.S. laws and to U.S. justifications and assertions that some European regulation of international business is also extraterritorial in scope. From the point of view of international lawyers, technical questions of public and private international law are involved, concerning the devising of adequate positive rules for the allocation of regulatory jurisdiction. From the political point of view, policy conflicts are involved which raise the question of whether the Western alliance can maintain a common policy towards such questions as the use of trade sanctions against the Soviet bloc in a period of economic depression (for example, Woolcock, 1982). Both of these approaches assume that the international state system is essentially a functional one, and that provided the correct technical solutions can be found, it is merely a matter of resolving and accommodating national policy differences.

A different perspective on the matter is provided by looking at the literature on the internationalisation of capital and the growth of the multinational corporation. Some 10 years ago, Robin Murray pointed to the growing “territorial non-coincidence” between an increasingly interdependent international economic system and the traditional capitalist (or socialist) nation-state.