Topic A:

‘The world economy is no longer a set of interacting national economies, but a single global economy.’ Discuss.

It’s my topic of thought for the trip to London. It’s pretty easy to show that global economies are more interrelated than they used to be, what with global finacial crisis like Japan in 1999 and so forth, but it’s hard to show that the world is really one large economy. I think I’d have to conclude that the world has certain elements in its economic structure that link countries together, but that because states can still act independently of one another, one cannot conclude that the world consists of simply one large economy.

Topic B:

To what extent is the nation-state entering a period of crisis? How important is globalisation in causing this?

I’m guessing that whilst I like the thought of the first essay more – it’s rather general and would mean I could do lots of reading about economics, I think this essay would be easier to answer – you just have to show that there is some crisis, but that there was no time when the nation-state was not under threat. When has ‘the state’ ever been secure? So globalisation will have a role in causing the new crisis – a crisis of global integration but it’s a role less severe perhaps than other factors of the past – namely rulers who would take it upon themselves to conquer other states because they just wanted to… Although… now we do have Bush.

Thoughts on the back of a postcard.

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