CHAPTER 5 Future Work
5.2 Step (1) Printing Settings/ Parameters
On the affirmative, globalisation has clearly spawned a new international system.
Porous borders and interdependence have undermined the capability of states to pursue security, economic growth, and political sovereignty through traditional uses of power, state-to-state relations, and balance of power or collective security mechanism.
Globalisation has placed states in a strategic straightjacket, and national interest must be redefined. Globalized partners benefit from globalisation and have a stake in maintaining their interdependent relations. Thus, they must redefine their priorities away from a strictly state-centered focus or risk losing their position in the globalising system. The use of force to gain strategic advantage or to resolve disputes among globalising states is presently irrational and increasingly unlikely. War between the great powers (United States, West European states, China, India and Japan) is almost unthinkable. Each operates within a strategic straight jacket imposed by globalisation.
There are the new power realities created by globalisation: the information technology revolution, inter-dependence, and porous borders, through which the multiple forms of power flow. The new issues on national and international agendas cannot be solved by one 19
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country alone. New York Times columnist, Thomas Friendman writes that the “inexorable integration of markets, nation-states, and technologies to a degree never witnessed before- in a new way that is enabling individuals, corporations and states to reach around the world faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before”,simply means that we must think of foreign policies with new techniques and new agenda.
Friendman in his book, The World Is Flat (2005), argues that the economic playing field has been leveled by the global fiber-optic network, into which some three billion people are rushing, from other countries whose economies have thrown off socialism.
According to him, these are the recipients of outsourcing.
Globalisation in effect has made the world one massive interconnected market place that challenges the traditional role of separate national interests and separate sovereign states.
Globalisation has produced six types of wars that states are loosing because they have not adopted new strategies to deal with these struggles that now shape the world. The stateless decentralised networks that cannot be fought by traditional foreign policy techniques are terrorism, drugs, arms trafficking, intellectual property misuse, alien smuggling, and money laundering. United States is loosing its war on terrorism and in fact attacking and occupying Iraq has increased the number of terrorists now opposed to the United States.
The attacks on the strategic points in the United States on September 2001 highlight the point that the globalized world in which we live, is one where traditional foreign policy and powerful defense systems (including long-range missiles and nuclear weapons) may not prevent another major world crisis.
However, on the other side, while globalisation has created new realities within the international system, nation-states, and their government have not disappeared. They still remain key players on the international landscape, and realism and power politics in their foreign policies still make a difference. Globalisation has not created an international society of global citizens, and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) frequently have little independence apart from the government of their states. Globalisation has not seriously challenged the profoundly national nature of citizenship.
While human beings may engage in the life of globalized networks, the human identity remains national in character, an identity that resists cultural homogenisation. Fundamentally, national identity still super cedes global or international identity. National identity is a powerful
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factor behind traditional state foreign policies, and the national governments and people that lie at their foundation.
Some states remain far more powerful than others and their foreign policies are more dominant than others. Traditionally, United States of America’s foreign policy and the power that backs it is a good example.
The major national security threat to the world today is terrorism. The primary responsibility of every state government is to protect its people.
Islamic radicalism is non-state in nature. And therefore cannot be defeated by attacking another state as the United States did in Iraq. That attack multiplied the radical Islamic threat to America and attack of United Nations Offices by mobilizing radical Islamic behaviours around the world. The United States must shed its state-centric thinking, a legacy of Cold War, and develop a new foreign policy approach in order to be able to combat terrorism.
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3
Assess the effect of globalisation on foreign policy behaviour of states
4.0 CONCLUSION
Globalisation has actually spawned a new international system. Porous borders and interdependence have really undermined the capability of states to pursue security, economic growth and political sovereignty through traditional uses of power, balance of power or collective mechanisms. Examples of limitation on the traditional use of power include the failure of military force, as demonstrated in the pitfalls of the United States- led war in Iraq, economic interdependence, as illustrated when a downturn in a single state’s economy affects the whole system. The rising price of oil undermines oil-dependent economies, including that of the United States. The European States are integrated in the European Union (EU) and Canada, the United States and Mexico are interdependent within North America Free Trade Association (NAFTA). The Southeast Asian and Latin American debt crises in the 1990s led to a global economic down turn. The events of the 1990s had repercussions on the global economy. This therefore calls for a rethink on foreign policies of nations requiring new techniques and new agendas.
5.0 SUMMARY
In this unit, an attempt has been made to show the pros and cons of globalisation in the foreign policy approach of sovereign states. It is therefore important to point out that while globalisation may have created new realities within the international system resulting in global
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human community rivalries between great and small states, and while wars between states have become less common, wars within states (civil wars) have been distinctly on the rise. Outside states have found it necessary to intervene through or under the United Nations (UN) auspices to prevent such civil wars from spreading regionally.
Meanwhile, a regional hegemony-may attack another state with potentially serious consequences for external non-belligerent states, as in the case of the Persian Gulf War precipitated by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. These developments point to the continued need for traditional foreign policy tools in collaboration with new techniques and new agendas.
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3
What are the contributions of globalisation to foreign policy execution?
6.0 TUTOR-MARKED ASSIGNMENT
1. What is globalisation?2. Globalisation has spawned a new international system. Discuss in relation to the call for new foreign policy techniques and agenda.
3. Critically examine the impact of globalisation on foreign policy tools.
7.0 REFERENCES/FURTHER READING
Friendman, T (1999). The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York:
Farrar Straus, and Giroux.
Friendman, T (2005). The World is Flat, A Brief History of the 21st Century. New York: Farrar Straus.
Nye, J. (2004). American Power and the 2004 Campaign. Project Syndicate. Project of 2009 Newspapers.
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