International Relations and Globalization

First session: Introduction to the course

In this first session after the syllabus was introduced, each student had to present himself very briefly and gave his owns expectations of the course.

The principle reason I chose this subject, in order to widen my field of view of the topic International Relations and Globalization, is because International Relations and the word “Globalization”, is nowadays in our daily life, a topic that appears every day in the media and I consider that to have a critical think about what is happening in the world, is very important to be well informed, not only for the professional life but also in the personal life. Moreover I consider that it is interesting to understand how IB and Globalization intertwined, clear examples are Coca Cola, Television, Laptops, Mobile Phones, etc. (Chibba, 2014),

Another point why I have chosen this subject is because the definition and usage of Globalization is more complex and varies according to the viewpoint being exposed. The book, “What is Globalization?” written by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, concentrate on achieving a way to mold the Globalization process politically. (Beck, 1997). As Beck other authors, economists, politicians present different points of view of Globalization.

For this reason, what I expected from this course is to understand witch of these viewpoints, is the correct one and the less disadvantage for our society. Also it would be interested that we would focus on the effects of the globalization in all aspects to the society for example economic, political, technological or cultural.  To give an example we can mention Brazil, a country, that has as many multinational companies, so free trade agreements with many countries of the world. And despite this he has one of the unfair distributions of income in the world. (GINI index of 52,7, in 2012) (The World Bank, 2015) (Beck, 1997)

Second session: Globalization and global politics

Globalization is implicated directly and indirectly in many aspects of our daily lives. For this reason the purpose of this session was to understand the concept of globalization and how it shift our conception of world politics.

To begin with global politics, I can mention that it was a new concept for me. Because of that, it was hard to understand the differences between international and global politics. According to this lecture, the approach of global politics focuses his attention on global structures and processes of rule-making, problem-solving and the maintenance of security and order in the world system.  (Mc Grew, 2014). Even though, this concept led me to the question, if the state is the main actor of global politics. I personally think that through the continuing centrality of states and geopolitics, have emerged other organizations and institutions like NGO’s, NATO, the World Bank, ONU, etc., which some how are very influenced in global politics. Therefore because of a changing world, it is difficult to defined, who really the main actor of the global politics is. More over, in attempting to make or implement global or transnational rules and regulate trans-border problems, organizations, like the ILO, have been founded. Regarding to the book of Standing, the Hungarian political economist Polanyi contemplated the ILO as a mechanism for shaping regulated national labor markets, (Standing, 2008). In this book Standing has also a dilemma about the ILO. He argued if the declarations on fundamental Principal and Rights had a positive consequence, apart from the millions of dollars, that this organization receive as support from the US Administration (Standing G. , 2008).  But do this organizations and institutions always benefit our world?