Globalisation

Globalisation is a phenomenon we experience each day in almost each area of our lives. We meet people from all around the world, we recive information from each part of the globe and finally, we buy goods which come from different countries. Today, advances in technology and computer networks, as well as a transport developement, have led to a worldwide globalization of the economy. Does the high level of global economic and other movements and relations mean that individual countries have been replaced as the key economic actor by the global economy?

There are examples that confirm this theseis. For instance, worlds largest international companies. The majority of them belonge to private investors, not states, which means that goverments influence on their policies is relatively small.  It is then the heads and managers of vast corporations, and not the countries that have the real power of making decisions that concern certain sectors of economy . That leads to situations, when companies can literally blackmail the goverments in order to get some profits. For instance, in USA in 2008, banks and car companies said that if the goverment won't help them financially they will fire their employees and therefore, conciderably increase the unemploymet level. Obamas cabinett decided to pump billions of dollars from budgett to private banking sector and car manufacturers to save them. I am not arguing that it was right or wrong, but the fact is that American peoples money ended corporation accounts.

Global economy also defines the relations between countries, not other way round. Lets give example of USA and China. Americans buy most from China so they are their key customer, and China supplies USA with a lot of cheap goods, so America can develop faster. Theese two are addicted to each other. They can't efford any hostile moovement's towards each other in terms of politics, cause the stock exchanges would react instantly and make them loose a lot. It is another example that its the global economy that runs countries and not countries that run economy.

States combine and merge their economies in order to develope faster. The European Union is an graphic example of the globalisation phenomenon. Although EU consist of 27 states, in many cases it's being concidered as one superstate. Countries are being more dependent on each other by the expand of trade and miggration so they prefere to run common politics. In order to strenghten its possition, European states try to run the fiscal, monetary and international policy together. The proceeding unification of Euroland clearly shows that the meaning of particular states gets less important.

In terms of society, the graduall globalisation proceeds. Due to transport and information technology developement people easily moove from one country to another in order to get a job or learn. Borders disappear and societies are getting multicultural, multiracial. Some local economies base on cheap emmigrant labour. So again, from economical reasons societies change and become global and both states and people benefit from that fact.

There are however some areas, where its the countries that have the key influence on economy. The natural recourcess sector is mainly controlled by states. Worlds biggest earth gas company - the Russian Gasprom in fully depemndent on the authorities and its frecquently being used as an international politics device. There is a similar sitation regarding oil. OPEC countries petrol industry is mainly nationalized.

To sum up, the countries possition in the economy arena gets weaker, whlie the globalisation expands. Liberal economy simply doesn't like the borders. Obviously there are more and less powerful states, but none of them is fully independent on the rest. The complicated network of trade links all over the world created a situation where every change has a bigger or smaller impact on each economy, and it seems that whether we like it or not there is no way out of it.