Is the sovereign nation state a thing of the past?
Globalization, via technological advances, has made the world much smaller. The World Wide Web, Smart Phones, Computors, Jet Airplaones, and numerous other technological advents are responsible for this. Capitol is traded with the click of a button, as are war crimes, and human atrocities. Bigotry, sexism, imperialism, genocide, and even war itself, an historically basic human impulse, have become predominantly taboo in the eyes of the globally active players that encompass the globe. In the Capital of the World Hegemon, the United States, one can find food from every content, and people that speak every language in use to date. These things combined, along with numerous other areas, each person reading this encounters daily and are not even aware of, shows how much smaller globalization has made the world.
The current age has evolved the nation state, defined largely by Westphalian Sovereignty, as a purely regional puzzle piece in a much larger anarchic system. Despite this the global economy and interaction have forced each of these pieces to care far more about the others opinion than ever before; economically, culturally, philosophically, historically, and politically. Due to this the U.N. in the last decade has gained an unprecedented amount of power over each free, sovereign state than ever before. If the Leugue of Nations was the Articles of Confederation, then the U.N. ss slowly developing into the U.S. Constitution. As the original U.S. States have continually given up more rights and state sovereignty to the U.S. Federal Government, so to is each current nation state slowly giving up their own anatomy to the greater good of the world; even when selfishly motivated. This study seeks to examine whether the current regional, nation state model is becoming a thing of the past, and if in its place, a one world unified government may soon take its place.
*Note* The below articles are merely meant to establish an antiquated worldview on the nation state, while more to follow will build on the previous work.
Ohmai, K. (1995), The End of the Nation State, New York: Free Press.
Scholte, J. A. (2000), Globalization: A critical Introduction, London: Macmillian.
McGrew, A. (2011), "Globalitation and Global Politics" in Baylis, J., Smith, S. and Owens, P. (eds), The Globalization World Politics, Oxford, Oxford University Press. p.16.
Krasner, S.D. (1999), Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gilpin, R. (2001), Global Political Economy, Princeton, NJ: Princton University Press.
Hi Andrew,
ReplyDeleteI think you need to narrow down your topic a little bit. For example, you could talk about globalization and how globalization affects a state's sovereignty. From there, you could add other factors that have an impact on sovereignty and come to the conclusion that sovereignty as we define it does not exist anymore. But all together, I think you chose a great topic.
Is you research question, "Does the U.N.'s power have a negative effect on nation state sovereignty? If you are studying this I think is a very good idea to choose a specific country or region. Other than that, I love the idea of reading your paper and find out more about how you will proof nation state's sovereignty is developing into a form of unified government.
ReplyDeleteI like your research question but I'm just wondering what stance you're taking on this topic. I also think that you should probably narrow it down a little. Overall though, this sounds like an interesting subject of research.
ReplyDelete