ABSTRACT
Few issues have excited more attention in recent years, amongst academics, politicians and the media, than the question of globalisation. For some, the process of globalisation is inevitable and irreversible, something that national economies are forced to adapt to in order to survive and prosper in an increasingly integrated and competitive global economy. For others, globalisation is seen as a threat to the survival of the nation state and a constraint on the possibilities for economic development. There are no universally agreed definitions as to what globalisation actually is, there is little agreement on how economic statistics can be used to ‘measure’ globalisation and there is no consensus as to whether the current globalisation process is radically different from previous historical episodes. Globalisation is not the inevitable result of ‘natural’ or technical developments in the global economy. Globalisation is in fact a policy-induced process – national governments, either unilaterally or collectively, and sometimes perhaps acting under duress, agree to create the institutions (the World Trade Organization, for example) or take the decisions (financial sector liberalisation) that together make up our notions of globalisation. Technological changes – developments in ICT, more rapid air transportation (for both people and freight) – mean that the importance of geographical distance may well be decreasing, the earth may be becoming ‘flatter’ and the world ‘shrinking’. But the nation state is not in danger of disappearing or
becoming irrelevant. Indeed, in a more interdependent and uncertain world, ‘the nation state may become more salient as a means of protection against global forces beyond supranational control’ (Hirst and Thompson, 2003: 34).
