Write 12 pages with APA style on Analysis of Thomas Friedmans The World is Flat, and Tarek Barkawis Globalisation and War.

Write 12 pages with APA style on Analysis of Thomas Friedmans The World is Flat, and Tarek Barkawis Globalisation and War. As pertains to the concept of the state within the era of globalization, neither of the authors engages in the explicit discussion of this question. Their position on the question, however, is implied throughout each of their works and, a close reading indicates that they adopt diverse positions.

Friedman, a globalization proponent, an optimist believes that globalization has minimalized the role of the state in both the economic and, interestingly enough, political spheres. Globalization, as he argues, implies the triumph of rational economic considerations over, often emotional and ideologically-based, political ones. The state, in other words, has not simply been eliminated as a market-player but, to a great extent, it no longer has the requisite power or capacity to impose its will over the market nor, indeed, to stand in the face of globalization.

To protect their status and maintain their control and authority over their territories, states customarily imposed artificial barriers to the movement of people, goods and services, let alone information, across borders. With these barriers in place, the world was a vast space, comprised of politically and economically sovereign nation-states wherein states primarily governed on the basis of political ideology. Not only that but as major market players/shapers, states based economic and market decisions on ideological considerations.

Globalization did not, according to Friedman, simply flatten the world, as in make it infinitely smaller (9-10) but it effectively minimalized the role of the state. Trade networks, inextricably connected nation-states together, concomitant with the emergence and proliferation of the information highway, implying the interconnection of cultures and diverse peoples, rendered states incapable of controlling economic activities within and across their borders any more (Friedman, pp. 8, 45, 74, 102-103).&nbsp.