What is the state of the state? The members of the national Research Centre Transformations of the State (TranState) at the University of Bremen use the contrast with the OECD nation-state during its ‘Golden Age’ in the 1960s and early '70s to study the rapidly changing interface between international and domestic politics, and between public and private governance. Studies currently underway at TranState confront the changes in the tightly woven fabric of the twentieth-century western, multi-functional state, which emerged after World War II with the functional amalgamation at the national level of the Territorial State, the state that assures the Rule of Law, the Democratic State, and the Intervention State. This functional definition is expressed in the acronym TRUDI.

Both TranState research and the contributions to this volume are aligned along TRUDI's four dimensions of statehood: resources (financial, means of force), rule of law, (democratic) legitimacy, and welfare. These dimensions developed over four centuries and merged, during the ‘Golden Age’, in one institution, the nation-state. Since then, however, processes of globalization, denationalization, privatization as well as individualization have initiated a new dynamic. The finely woven national constellation of the Golden Age state is coming apart – it is unravelling. Yet though an era of structural uncertainty is ahead, not everything is in flux. We may see structured asymmetric change in the make-up of the state, with divergent transformations in each of its four dimensions. TranState aims at accounting empirically for these transformations since the mid-1970s; explaining them and their dynamics; and, finally, determining how these transformations affect the provision of public goods such as security, the rule of law, democratic legitimacy, or welfare provision.