Supranational

Above rather than outside is what separates this from extranational. An extranational merchant class operates between national structures and is answerable to none of them, which was the second age arrangement. A supranational power sits above them, which means the states themselves are the sublated party rather than the merchants being unreachable. That is the third age of nations, a supranational empire where trade has fully abstracted the relationship between oligarchs and the people they exploit, and abstraction is what the elevation accomplishes, since distance removes the relationship that would carry any debt. The framework's account of transcendence describes the same movement structurally, since a transcendental endogroup absorbs smaller endogroups and their endo-ideals become reflectors of the larger centre, which is what happens to a state under a supranational power. Marsh's example of the effect is the incoherence it produces at the level a state is supposed to operate on, since allegiances change without reference to anything a population would recognize, and a state can be enemies with one country and allies with another while abducting its own allies' citizens for torture in the first country's prisons. Male endo-idealism has been sublated into transcendental endogroups by the same process, which is her point that the pattern is not confined to states. The mono-empire is where the sequence ends, the transcendental global empire at the close of the third age, which cannot fully form because it has no outside.

Supranational is a technical term in international relations for institutions with authority over member states, with the European Union the standard example and the distinction from intergovernmental cooperation well established. Globalization theory studies the erosion of state capacity, and Hardt and Negri's Empire describes a sovereignty without a territorial centre. World-systems theory places states within a larger economic order. Marsh's usage matches the technical sense and extends it, since applying the same term to the sublation of male endo-idealism into larger endogroups treats supranationality as one instance of transcendence rather than as a fact about international institutions.