1. 1. As an illustration from peaceful and law-abiding Scandinavia: a hotel near Oslo in the early 1990s Advertised its facilities for holding congresses and seminars by stressing, among many other things, that its windows were bullet-proof.
2. 2. For example, state power in Spain, or Catalonia, was helpless when faced with the unilateral decision of Volkswagen to stop manufacturing SEAT cars in Barcelona, with serious consequences for the regional economy.
3. 3. In extreme cases, as in countries governed by neo-liberal economic theology, even prisons have been ‘privatized’.
4. 4. ‘It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (B.Anderson, Imagined Communities (revised edition), London and New York: Verso, 1991).
5. 5. Thus social security transfers, which in the West were mainly made through state agencies, in the former Soviet Union were, in practice, largely ensured through the citizen's place of employment, she or he being theoretically guaranteed employment. Hence the privatization of the economy would leave the country without an effective social security system, until one could be constructed.