Globalisation High School Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Globalisation High School - Essay Example These two books are Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, and Tarek Barkawi's Globalisation and War. As pertains to the concept of the state within the era of globalisation, neither of the authors engages in the explicit discussion of this question. Their position on the question, however, is implied throughout each of their works and, a close reading indicates that they adopt diverse positions. Friedman, a globalisation proponent and optimist, believes that globalisation has minimalised the role of the state in both the economic and, interestingly enough, political spheres. Globalisation, as he argues, implies the triumph of rational economic considerations over, often emotional and ideologically-based, political ones. The state, in other words, has not simply been eliminated as a market-player but, to a great extent, it no longer has the requisite power or capacity to impose its will over the market nor, indeed, to stand in the face of globalisation. To protect their status and maintain their control and authority over their territories, states customarily imposed artificial barriers to the movement of people, goods and services, let alone information, across borders. With these barriers in place, the world was a vast space, comprised of politically and economically sovereign nation-states wherein states primarily governed on the basis of political ideology. Not only that, but as major market players/shapers, states based economic and market decisions on ideological considerations. Globalisation did not, according to Friedman, simply flatten the world, as in make it infinitely smaller (9-10) but it effectively minimalised the role of the state. Trade networks, inextricably connected nation-states together, concomitant with the emergence and proliferation of the information highway, implying the interconnection of cultures and diverse peoples, rendered states incapable of controlling economic activities within and across their borders any more (Friedman, pp. 8, 45, 74, 102-103). Globalisation, in other words, rendered politics/state, an instrument of economics/trade/market, as opposed to the traditional and historic voice-versa. The state, from Friedman's perspective, has been flattened by the force of globalisation and, positively so. By claiming that globalisation has flattened the state, along with the world, Friedman does not mean that the state has been rendered ineffective. The state still has a role to play within the context of globalisation, although that role may be very different from its earlier one. Rather than an overtly political role which renders economic considerations subservient to ideological ones, the state now plays the role of coordinator, or protector of national economic interests. It does so, as may be inferred from the entirety of Friedman's treatise, not because it has been bought out by big business' but, because globalisation has rendered the national interest an undeniably, and overtly, economic one. In order to protect its national interests, as it is expected and required to do, the state need protect its economic interests and the