This paper serves as an introduction to a collection of papers on regulation in the global economy and environment, and seeks to outline the changing bases of regulation within the world economy since the nineteenth century. During this period there has existed a search for mechanisms which can order the dynamics of capitalist accumulation. Over time there has been a shift away from abstract concepts of regulation towards more concrete and contextual regulatory mechanisms. In the nineteenth century, regulation revolved around the rule of money through the international gold standard. Between 1945 and the early 1970s an attempt was made to regulate the world economy through a set of institutions which sought to create an international regulatory space, within which the power of money was subordinated to politically and economically sovereign states. The breakdown of this system of international regulation in the early 1970s resulted in a more explicit form of geoeconomic competition between states, and in a widespread restructuring of regulatory frameworks. International regulatory mechanisms are being reconstructed as part of processes of negotiated competition between nation-states. It is suggested that the tendency towards geoeconomic competition within the global economy precludes the construction of international regulatory mechanisms capable of controlling the tendency towards overaccumulation on a world scale or preventing further environmental degradation.
