What is meant by globalisation? In what ways does it have an impact upon the nation-state?

“Because sovereign national governments appear impotent in the face of such global problems, which do not respect borders, it is said that traditional models of politics are becoming increasingly redundant”.  The pursuit of collective solutions to global problems through international co-operation has encouraged the growth of supranational organisations such as the United Nations or the European Union with an increasing range of decision-making powers binding on member states.  However, it must be said that organisations like the United Nations are not an overall authority.

     “The power of the state upon its citizens is exerted in several ways.  One of these is by its capacity to impose and collect taxes, which is one of the primary and more central features of the state and something that affects the day to day life of the citizens”.  The twentieth-century nation-state was built, at least in part on the ability to tax and spend a large proportion of national income, for the most part on defence and on welfare.  "Developments in communications technology by the year 2025 will", says Rees-Mogg, "make it much more difficult for states to raise tax revenues, because many taxable transactions will have been shifted into the cyberspace, and thus become virtually, beyond regulation.  The modern nation-state will starve to death as its tax revenues decline."

Most people when they think about globalisation they have in mind a world with no borders, just one global state.  However this is far away from reality, “local and regional identities seem to be growing in political strength.  More autonomous regions and more independent nation-states are being created”.  Belgium is an example with state structures not only modelled on the French but also operating in French which has recently divided itself into two largely autonomous entities, Flanders and Wallonia.  The governments of these areas run practically all their own internal affairs.

The second field where globalisation is having a great impact is the economic field.  "The collapse of state socialism seems to herald the completion of a truly world-wide capitalist economy, although the speed with which countries like Poland, Russia, Mongolia or Cuba will be fully integrated into a system founded on market economics is still open to question."

What most people mean when they use the term global economy is a world of economic blocs with the pattern of global economic relationships linking three main centres.  Europe dominated by Germany, France and the UK, East Asia dominated by Japan and North America dominated by the USA.  These five countries are dominating the world economy.  It is evident that in the world's 500 largest industrial corporations by country of origin these five countries have 397 (See Appendix 1).  Furthermore they occupy 59% of world's total GDP (See Appendix 1).  This data reinforces the suggestion that the so-called global economy is in fact a western or northern dominated network of international economic relationships, which bypasses large parts of the world.  Although these five countries come from three different continents they can not be considered to represent the whole world.  It would be naïve if anyone believed that a global world is an equal world.

Large-scale companies were the first that took advantage of the opportunities of globalisation.  The world's largest companies have expanded far beyond their original national markets.  Some have become multinational companies, still strongly based in one country but operating in many others.  These companies gained so much power that one government can not control them, they are above the law.  A striking example is the Australian-born Rupert Murdoch controller of the giant News International Corporation.  "His company has holdings in cable and satellite television in the USA, Latin America, the UK, Germany, Australia and Asia.  The company owns a number of satellite channels transmitted by BskyB in Europe, satellite companies in Australia and Twentieth-Century Fox Cable Corporation in he USA. In addition to this, there is his huge newspaper empire with major titles in Britain and Australia.  Murdoch managed to get around foreign ownership restrictions in the USA by becoming a US citizen, which allowed him to obtain major stakes in television." 

Other companies have evolved beyond this stage to become trans-national companies, which have no strong allegiance to any state and treat the whole world as a single marketplace.  Trans-national companies shift their capital investment and production sites around the world to wherever labour is cheap.  For example most of the top brands of sport shoes are now manufactured in East Asian countries like Taiwan and Korea.

"The trend towards globalisation can be seen in the rising volume of imports and exports the world over.  Imports and exports formed an ever-increasing part of national economies.  In all countries international trade and the national balance of payments are increasingly important factors in economic developments.  No country in reality ever had exclusive control over its economic affairs but the consequences of globalisation appear to be particularly great for smaller economies and for the central and eastern European countries, especially as they try to integrate themselves into the world system."

The third aspect of influence is in the culture of the nation-state.  A crucial question when dealing with the impact of globalisation upon culture is whether we are moving towards a unitary global culture or on the contrary whether globalisation will strength the power and favour the blossoming of particular cultures.

A unitary global culture is difficult to be established.  First, because "real cultures are those which bind people to particular places.  National cultures are 'real' in this sense, full of imaginary, symbolism and meaning for people, because of the myths of origin, the flags, which provide them with a context for knowing who they are.  Global cultures, are none of these things, arising out of the general availability of global products and the pervasiveness of images carried by advertising and by the increasingly global entertainment industries."  Second, a global culture requires a common language.  Till now no language has been established as global language.  Although English, Spanish, French and Chinese may claim to be spoken by millions of people there is no globally shared language.

Globalisation seems to strength the power and favour the blossoming of particular cultures, rather than imposing a unitary global culture.  The American culture is the one that is imposed, in a way, through television series and movies.  Young people of the advanced countries are becoming increasingly nationality less and more like Californians.  The American culture is invading people's life and they adopt it, most of the times without realising it.  The Americanisation has also entered countries like Russia.  McDonalds's operate brunches in Moscow.  Russia was the last country that was retaining its tradition and was resisting any foreign cultures.  Russia was able to resist to German's attack in the World War and to Napoleon before, but could not resist to the American culture, which tends to be the global culture.

However the impact of globalisation depends to a significant extent on the size and the power that each country has.  All the cultures are affected and adopt some aspects of other cultures but to a different extent.  Countries like UK or France are not likely to be influenced in a great extent.  On the other hand, some countries in order to protect their culture they ban everything that they consider it to be a threat to their culture.  A typical example is Iran, which banned an American television series (Baywatch).

A global culture in the way that most people understand the term is impossible to be established but a culture that influence the world already exists, the American.

The governments of the nation-states have three options in order to deal with globalisation.  Their first option is to resist forces, second ‘to go with the flow’ and third to organise to control.  Countries with no political power most of the times simply ‘go with the flow’, while the Islamic countries, mainly, try to resist.  On the other hand most of the European countries are organising a unite defence towards globalisation which seems to be the best solution.

Globalisation requires a bigger authority, which will intervene wherever there is a problem.  Unfortunately the world does not seem to be ready for such a big change.  The benefits of globalisation are a lot, but the notion of a global world has to be accepted by everyone and then put into effect.

  The future of the nation-state looks rather fragile in the increasingly interconnected world.  But states remain important actors in world politics, with the myth of sovereignty still a powerful constraint on how the international system functions.  It is highly unlikely that nation-states will disappear in the foreseeable future, but the meaning of territoriality and the state centred nature of world politics is almost certain to be further eroded by transnational forces and institutions.

APPENDIX 1

DISTRIBUTION OF THE WORLD'S 5OO LARGEST INDUSTRIAL CORPORATIONS BY COUNTRY OF ORIGIN

TOP FIVE COUNTRIES 1993

THE WORLDS LARGEST INDUSTRIAL CORPORATIONS BY SALES IN 1997

Company / Country of Origin / US $ m. / Rank 1993               1.General Motors / USA / 178.174 / 1                                

2.Ford / USA / 153.627 / 2                                

3.Mitsui & Co Ltd / Japan / 142.688 / -    

4.Mitsubishi Corporation/Japan 128.922 / -

5.Royal Dutch, Shell Group/Britain, Netherlands 128.142 / 4

6.Itochu Corporation/Japan 126.632 / -

7.Exxon Corporation/USA 122.379 / 3

8.Wal-Mart Stores Inc/USA 119.299 / -

9.Marubeni Corporation/Japan 111.121 / -

10.Sumitomo Corporation/Japan 102.395 / -

LARGEST ECONOMIES IN TERM OF GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT IN 1992

Data taken from: http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/

 

MEANINGS OF GLOBALISATION

• Globalisation means a greater need to coordinate management services over wider expances of distance and time ( Alan Shocker, 1994)
• Globalisation has created the new critical success factor of organisational foresight wherein managers spend less time about how to position the firm in existing competitive space and more time creating fundementally new competitive space (Gary Hamel & CK Praholad, 1995)
• Different cultural preferences, international tastes and standards and business institutions are vestiges of the past . . . I do not advocate the systematic disregard of local or national differences, but a company's sensitivity to such differences does not require that it ignore the possibilities of doing things differently or better (Theodore Levitt 1983)
• The global corporation will serve its key customers in all key markets with equal dedication.  Its value will be universal and apply everywhere.  In an information-linked world where consumers, no matter where they live, know which products are the best and cheapest, the power to choose or refuse lies in their hands, not in the back pockets of sleepy, privileged monopolies like the earlier multinationals (Kenichi Ohmae, 1990)
• Globalisation has blurred the distinction between what is foreign and what is domestic (Bill Clinton 1993)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Tony Spybey Britain in Europe, Routledge 1997
• Ian Budge & Kenneth Newton The Politics of the New Europe, Longman 1997
• Barrie Axford Politics an Introduction, Routledge 1997
• Stephanie Lawson The state in Transition,
• Montserrat Guibernau Nationalisms, Polity Press 1996
• Montserrat Guibernau & John Rex The Ethnicity Reader, Polity Press 1997
• Paul Kennedy The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Fontana Press 1989
• Paul Kennedy Preparing for the twenty-first Century, Fontana Press 1994
• Anthony D.Smith Nations and Nationalism in a Global era, Polity Press 1995
• Gianfranco Poggi The development of the modern state, Stanford  Press 1978
• Tony Spybey Globalisation and World Society, Polity Press 1996
• John Dunn Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State?, Blackwell 1995
• E.J.Hobsbawm Nations and Nationalism since 1780, University Press 1990

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