Month: February 2012

Globalization and the Nation-State

In a previous blog assignment, my POLI 1100 students were asked to answer the question: “is globalization the death-knell of the nation-state’? Here are some representative responses

This is from the bordersandwalls blog:

Professor Chomsky suggests that defining globalization is ideological, the definition depends on how you look at it. By looking at globalization from the perspective of Adam Smith and the free movement of people, one could suggest that globalization is on the decline. Militarized borders have stopped the free movement of people and agreements like NAFTA, which was suppose to increase globalization, have actually led to increased nationalism at the expense of the people of Mexico.

And here is an opposing view, from langarafalcons blog:

In my opinion, the answer is yes. An interesting article (which can be found here) from the New York Times quotes MIT’s head of  Media Laboratory Joichi Ito as saying that the Middle East is going to be the next Silicon Valley. Ito believes that the region will become a technological hub, with promising investment opportunities to attract North American technological investors. While this an economic issue, I believe it relates to the topic of globalization and nationalism as well.,, The way technology shapes our lives, is a threat to traditional Middle East cultures. With social networks like Twitter and Facebook, the Middle East is constantly more exposed to North American society.

In a recent post on the same topic, Dani Rodrik (from Harvard) mused about the re-birth of the nation-state. He calls the conventional view that globalization has condemned the nation-state “to irrelevance” one of the foundational myths of our times. Rodrik notes:

The revolution in transport and communications, we hear, has vaporized borders and shrunk the world. New modes of governance, ranging from transnational networks of regulators to international civil-society organizations to multilateral institutions, are transcending and supplanting national lawmakers. Domestic policymakers, it is said, are largely powerless in the face of global markets. The global financial crisis has shattered this myth. Who bailed out the banks, pumped in the liquidity, engaged in fiscal stimulus, and provided the safety nets for the unemployed to thwart an escalating catastrophe? Who is re-writing the rules on financial-market supervision and regulation to prevent another occurrence? Who gets the lion’s share of the blame for everything that goes wrong? The answer is always the same:

I’m fairly certain that you know the answer to the question already, but have a look at Rodrik’s piece for his insight into the renaissance of the nation-state.

Another interesting student post on political ideology

alicesweeney

After taking the Political Compass Test, I found the outcome interesting when I compared it to an individual who is a generation older than I am.

Dalai Lama is one of the political leaders that is closest to me in political ideology.

In contrast, this is the political ideology of somebody who is one generation older than I am.

My result as compared to the person who was one generation older than me shows that the differences may be due to age. Conservatism is about preservation and liberalism is about changing things. It would make sense that someone who is younger is still surrounded by diversity. On the other hand, as you age, you become adapted to a certain way of life so it is easy to become conservative. From this test it would seem likely that every young generation would  find the next generation to be more conservative. In Dasovic’s post, however, research has shown…

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Functions of Constitutions

In a response to a story that I blogged about yesterday, New Yorker Magazine Senior Editor, Hendrik Hertzberg, takes issue with the claim that the US Constitution has become increasingly irrelevant as a model for constitution-builders worldwide. Hertzberg writes:

The problem is that the study focusses almost exclusively on rights—the individual and civil rights that are specified in written constitutions. But it almost totally ignores structures—the mundane mechanisms of governing, the nuts and bolts, which is mainly what constitutions, written and unwritten, are about, and which determine not only whether rights are truly guaranteed but also whether a government can truly function in accordance with democratic norms. Or function at all with any semblance of efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability.

In Chapter 6 of the Dyck text, we learn that there are five main functions of any constitution, the first one of which “to define the structure of major institutions of government.” Other major functions are:

  • To divide powers and responsibilities among the various institutions of government
  • To regulate relations between the citizen and the state (this is where rights–civil, legal, political, sometimes economic, social and cultural–are enumerated)
  • To serve as a political symbol
  • To specify a method for amending the constitution

What does the study in question say about whether the US Constitution is being used as a template in these other areas? You’ll have to wait until the study is published in June of this year to find out.

 

 

Great Post on Political Ideology from a Student of Mine

Here’s a link to a great blog post from a POLI 1100 student of mine about political ideology and the role of the family as an agent of political socialization. Here’s an excerpt:

When I got my mother to take the political compass test I was sure her result was going to show that she was much more conservative that I was. I believe I thought this because whenever my older coworkers and I discuss issues that are being highlighted in the media, most of their views on those issues seem extremely conservative to me. Or at least, more conservative than that of my own…

…My mother’s ranking on the political compass, and my ranking on the political compass turned out to be almost the same. This was interesting to me because for the 18 years of my life I spent living with her, we barely said three words to each other everyday, much less discuss politics. So my political opinions were formed from other adults around me, such as teachers and my friends parents.

This is a very interesting observation. In a book I co-authored with Alan Zuckerman and Jennifer Fitzgerald, data analysis of panel surveys in Great Britain and Germany, led to some intriguing results. One of the more interesting was the role of the family matriarch–the mother–as the lynchpin in the familial political socialization process. While it is conventionally believed that the patriarch is more influential in a child’s political socialization, this was not true in our study. Mothers spent much more time with their children than did fathers (the data sets tracked this phenomenon), and it should not be surprising that, while often mothers don’t talk about politics with their children explicitly, their quotidian interactions with their children leave the latter with all sorts of clues and cues about the way to think and act about issues that are foundationally political. For example, where to school one’s child–public secular versus private parochial school–is a fundamentally political decision, yet parents may not express their reasoning for this in explicitly political terms.

Go read the rest of the blog post, and check out our book as well.

PM Harper’s Foreign Policy Shift Towards China

In the National Post, Peter Godspeed argues that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s pending visit to China represents somewhat of a foreign policy pivot for the Conservative government.

Like the United States, Canada is in the midst of a foreign policy pivot in Asia…

…Tuesday, Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister, arrives in the Chinese capital for what almost amounts to a traditional “Team Canada” trade mission, seeking to strengthen economic ties with Canada’s second-largest trading partner.

With four cabinet ministers — John Baird, the Foreign Affairs Minister, Ed Fast, the International Trade Minister, Gerry Ritz, the Agriculture Minister, and Joe Oliver, the Natural Resources Minister — and seven MPs and 40 business executives and academics, he hopes to build on rapidly expanding ties that have pushed bilateral trade to US$57.7-billion a year in 2010.

“China’s growth as an emerging market is very significant for Canada’s business community, and it is an economic relationship that requires the attention of the highest political level,” said Peter Harder, president of the Canada-China Business Council.

From the perspective of foreign-policy decision-making in IR theory, the makeup of the Team Canada mission to China would indicate the importance of the pluralist and organizational/bureaucratic models. The pluralist model notes the impact of powerful interest groups, such as the Canada-China Business Council, and business executives and academics. Radicals, especially Marxists, would note the absence of any environmental or union groups amongst the mission’s members.

About the tone of the trip, NDTV reports that

The visit can be seen as a change in attitude for Canada, which has a record of taking a hard stance on the Chinese regime’s human rights abuses, as it looks as if economic ties between the two nations are warming.

Countries no longer look to US Constitution as Template

Via the New York Times, we learn of the waning popularity of the US constitution as a guide for constitution-makers worldwide. A study in the New York University Law Review, which will be published in June, shows that whereas in 1987 a vast majority of the world’s countries had “written charters modeled directly or indirectly on the U.S. version”, today the ” U.S. Constitution appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere,” According to recently retired US Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg [it was Sandra Day O’ Connor, of course, who recently retired from the SCOTUS], who was interviewed on Egyptian television last week (see video below), had this to say:

“I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” she said. She recommended, instead, the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights.

Two reasons that this many constitutional scholars agree with Bader Ginsburg is that i) the US constitution guarantees relatively few rights, and particularly guarantees none of the “second-” and “third-generation” rights, such as social and economic rights, and group-based cultural rights, and ii) the US constitution is notoriously difficult to amend. It is, in fact, the most difficult to amend of any constitution today. The Times wryly notes that Yugoslavia used to hold that distinction. Yugoslavia, as we know, no longer exists today.

The US constitution, however, was plenty good enough for Captain Kirk!

Joseph Nye on Shifts on Smart Power

One of the leading scholars of IR theory is Joseph Nye, who teaches at Harvard University. He, along with co-author Robert Keohane, wrote one of the seminal works in IR theory–Power and Interdependence. Here is a short, but interesting TED talk in which Nye explains, amongst other things, the distinction between power transition and power diffusion, the “rise of China” and what “smart” power is.

Comparing My Political Ideology to that of an Elderly Couple

I recently blogged about research that does not support the conventional wisdom that individuals get more conservative as they age. What kind of research design would help us determine, with a high degree of certainty, whether individuals do, in fact, become more conservative (politically) as they age? The best would be a panel study, which interviews the same individuals over time. Ideally, it would be great if we had data on an individual’s political ideology at various stages of her lifetime.

What about comparing young people today to old people today? That, unfortunately, is not ideal since  we would have to know the average political ideology of today’s elderly against their young selves. Nonetheless, I found it interesting to compare my political ideology–using the political compass test–to an individual who is a generation older than am I.

What were the results? Well, first here’s an informative chart produced by Political Compass.org.

Which one of these political leaders is the closes to you in political ideology? For me, it is the Dalai Lama. Here is my personal political ideology:

Here is the political ideology of somebody who is one generation older than I am.