FIFTEEN YEARS ago it was fashionable to pronounce the eclipse of the nation-state. In a globalized world, power would flow to supranational bodies: to the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Trade Organization and the European Commission, and even to a United Nations freed from the paralyzing divisions of the Cold War. Today this trend appears exhausted. Supranational institutions are not exactly retreating, but they have run out of forward momentum.

Start with economic institutions. The latest round of tariff-cutting talks under the auspices of the WTO is stalling, not because countries oppose trade but because they do not want to make concessions in this multilateral forum. Ambitions to deepen the WTO's power to settle disputes beyond trade into labor and environmental issues have (fortunately) fizzled, while WTO rulings against protectionist European food regulation or American cotton subsidies don't (unfortunately) cause those policies to be reformed quickly. The same story holds for NAFTA. In the 1990s there was talk of building NAFTA tribunals on labor and the environment into influential voices. It hasn't happened.

The International Monetary Fund is even more diminished. In the 1980s and 1990s, it had a place at the top table, leading the charge for economic reform in developing countries during the years of the debt crisis, then struggling to manage financial crises from East Asia to Russia to Latin America from 1997 to 2001. But now the East Asians have built up financial reserves, partly to withstand future financial shocks without the IMF's assistance. Russia is high on petrodollars. And Brazil and Argentina recently paid off the IMF early in a gesture of independence. The world still faces big international financial issues, from the vast U.S. trade deficit to China's currency manipulation, but the IMF has chosen to duck them. Meanwhile, the World Bank is struggling to define its role in a world awash with private lenders. Its new leader, Paul D. Wolfowitz, wielded power confidently when he was part of the Bush administration, but he is feeling his way along in his new job.

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