Part 1:
Global Problems: Disease and the
Environment
Part 2: Nationalism
Part 3: International Organizations
and Non-governmental
Organizations
Theme: The effect of globalization on the
power of the nation-state
Lesson 23
Part 1: Global Problems:
Disease and Environment
Lesson 23
Disease
• Globalization has
facilitated the
spread of disease
through things like
travel and
immigration
• Globalization has
also helped stop or
slow disease
through technology
and international
cooperation
Probable early diffusion of AIDS
(Adapted from The Geography of
AIDS, Shannon, Pyle, and Bashsur)
Disease
• One phenomenon that
works against
eliminating some
diseases is that they
occur in the
predominantly poorer
Southern Hemisphere
where money for both
research and medicine
is scarce
– Leprosy
– Malaria
– AIDs
Global distribution of AIDs
Disease
• The World Health Organization (WHO)
– Established in1948 as the United Nations’
specialized agency for health
• Objective is the attainment by all people of the
highest possible level of health
• Defines health as a state of complete physical,
mental and social well-being and not merely the
absence of disease or infirmity
Disease
• WHO launched an intensified plan to eradicate
smallpox in 1967
• Small pox was pushed back to the horn of Africa
where the last natural case occurred in Somalia
in 1977
• There was a fatal laboratory-acquired case in
the United Kingdom in 1978
• A commission of scientists certified the global
eradication of smallpox in December 1979 and
the World Health Assembly endorsed this
announcement in 1980.
Disease
• In 1988, the World Health Assembly adopted a
resolution for the worldwide eradication of polio
• Since then, polio cases have decreased by over
99%
– In 1998, there were more than 350,000 cases in more
than 125 endemic countries
– In 2005, there were just 1951 reported cases
– In 2006, only four countries in the world remained
endemic for the disease
• Eradication of polio is within sight thanks to the
global effort to eradicate the disease
Environment
• By 2000, the world’s population had
passed 6 billion and had created great
strains on the environment
– Many, especially in poorer nations, have left
the countryside in search of employment and
opportunity in the city
– Urbanization has created overcrowding,
pollution, and sewage problems
Environment
• Many environmental problems are
transnational in nature and require
massive international cooperation to solve,
but national self-interest works against
meaningful change
– Global warming
– Amazon rain forests
– Garbage
Environment
• In 1986, the nuclear
power plant at Chernobyl
in Ukraine, at that time a
republic of the USSR,
exploded and led to huge
releases of radioactive
materials into the
atmosphere
• Fallout drifted throughout
the western Soviet Union,
Eastern and Western
Europe, Scandinavia,
Britain, and as far as the
eastern coast of North
America
Environment
• The UN World Tourism Organization and the UN
Environmental Program are increasingly
concerned with the environmental aspects of
world tourism
– “The Wider Caribbean Region, stretching from Florida
to French Guiana, receives 63,000 port calls from
ships each year, and they generate 82,000 tons of
garbage. About 77% of all ship waste comes from
cruise vessels. The average cruise ship carries 600
crew members and 1,400 passengers. On average,
passengers on a cruise ship each account for 3.5
kilograms of garbage daily - compared with the 0.8
kilograms each generated by the less well-endowed
folk on shore.”
• UNEP
Part 2: Nationalism
Lesson 23
Thirty Years’ War (We talked about
this in Lesson 3)
• From 1618-1648, Spanish, French, Dutch,
German, Swedish, Danish, Polish, Bohemian,
and Russian forces fought the Thirty Years’ War
over political, economic, and, especially,
religious differences
– It was the most destructive European conflict before
the 20th Century
– One-third of the German population was killed
• In order to avoid tearing their society apart,
European states ended the war with the Peace
of Westphalia in 1648
Peace of Westphalia (1648)
• Laid the foundation for a
system of independent,
sovereign states
• All states agreed to
regard each other as
sovereign and equal
• They mutually
recognized their rights to
organize their own
domestic affairs,
including religious affairs
• States would conduct
their own political and
diplomatic affairs
according to their own
interests
Detail from a painting of the
oathtaking of the Peace of
Westphalia by Gerard
Terborch (1617-1681)
Nation-state
• “A political unit consisting of an
autonomous state inhabited predominantly
by a people sharing a common culture,
history, and language.”
• Sometimes called “Westphalian states”
Tension of Globalization
• Governments still operate on the basis of
the territorially delineated state as
proclaimed by the Peace of Westphalia,
but, as the world’s nations and people
become increasingly interdependent,
nations are being pressured to surrender
portions of their sovereignty
Decline of the Nation State
• “Erosion from above”
– International problems and the grow of international
organizations that try to solve them
– The global economy
• “Erosion from below”
– Internal ethnic, racial, cultural, and linguistic tensions
– Exacerbated by weak national economies
• The result is that “national governments spend more and
more of their time, energy, and money simply reacting;
reacting to problems or crises, to challenges both from
above and below, and to agendas set by others.”
– Olin Robinson, Vermont Public Radio
The Role of the Nation-State
• “Although the nation-state as an institution will
not die out in the foreseeable future, its
monopoly of power has been considerably
weakened, and its hold on populations has been
greatly reduced. The nation-state has become
just one of several world organizational
structures. Sovereignty - presuming such a
thing ever really existed - may well be consigned
to the history of the late Industrial Age, a mere
picturesque oddity on the pathway of humanity’s
journey.”
– Gary Dean
Part 3: Non-governmental
Organizations and International
Organizations
Lesson 23
Why?…
• “Why should international institutions exist
at all in a world dominated by sovereign
states?”
– Rhetorical question posed by Robert Keohane
Because….
• “Global problems require global solutions.
We fall together or we succeed together.”
– Joseph Deiss, Minister of Economic Affairs of
Switzerland
Air pollution
obscures the
ground in this
aerial photo of
China
Diseases such as bird flu
threaten to become pandemics
Tension of Globalization
• Traditional nation-states have difficulties
handling problems of a global magnitude
• A plethora of nongovernmental
international organizations that do not
respect territorial boundaries and are
beyond the reach of national governments
have sprung up to try to tackle the problem
– Usually focus on a largely singular agenda
Some NGOs and their Agendas
• Red Cross
– Relieve suffering to
wounded soldiers
and prisoners of
war
• Greenpeace
– Preserve the
earth’s natural
resources and
animal and plant
life
• Amnesty International
– Ensure human
rights
Some IGOs and their Agendas
• An organization of
sovereign nations
devoted to a
agenda of
international
scope or
character
• United Nations
– Maintain
international
peace and
security
• World Trade
Organization
– Foster free trade
The Reduction of Sovereignty
• “Under the WTO, member
countries cannot tax or limit
imports made under unfair or
unsafe labor conditions. The
same can be said for those
imports that significantly
harm the global environment
during production. National
sovereignty is what is at
stake, since countries do not
retain the ability to choose
for themselves.”
– David Carstens, “Bringing
Environmental and Economic
Internationalism into US
Strategy”
Pro-democracy protests
in China in 1989 resulted
in the massive
government crackdown
at Tiananmen Square
NGOs and the “New Diplomacy”
• With the end of the Cold War, the US became the world’s
only superpower
– “But a funny thing happened on the way to American supremacy.
No sooner had the United States won the bipolar superpower
game than the rules of international law and politics began to
change.”
• Thousands of NGOs have succeeded in getting their
issues to the top of the diplomatic agenda and taken
advantage of technology and communications
improvements to change the methods by which
international decisions are made
• “The mantle of international leadership is no longer
conferred by economic and military power alone;
instead, the power of ideas, and how they are
communicated and marketed, has come to the fore.”
• David Davenport, “The New Diplomacy”
Case Study: The Ottawa
Convention
• Throughout the 1990s,
concern mounted over
the use of land mines
• Land mines left in place
after fighting stopped in
Cambodia, Afghanistan,
Angola, Nicaragua,
Bosnia, and elsewhere
were continuing to claim
victims, many of which
were children
Cambodia land mine victim
Case Study: The Ottawa
Convention
• Traditionally such an agenda was handled by
international arms control and disarmament
experts
– The U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional
Weapons and the U.N. Conference on Disarmament
in Geneva were working toward international
agreements limiting land mines
• Some thought the traditional process was going
too slowly and a new NGO, the International
Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) decided a
new approach was needed
Case Study: The Ottawa
Convention
• The ICBL acted as the
“master NGO” for a group
of over 1,000 NGOs from
more than 60 countries
• A small core group of
states, led by Canada,
provided the necessary
element of state
leadership
– Canadian Foreign Minister
Lloyd Axworthy told the
delegates in Ottawa the
goal was to have a treaty in
15 months
Lloyd Axworthy
Case Study: The Ottawa
Convention
• Usually international negotiations seek
consensus, if not unanimity
• The ICBL and its cohorts felt this would be
destined to accepting the lowest common
denominator and they felt too passionately about
the subject to settle for that
• Instead these negotiations required a 2/3
majority vote rather than consensus
– Less national participation would be accepted in order
to keep the central content of the proposals intact
Case Study: The Ottawa
Convention
• The NGOs waged what
Axworthy called “the
mobilization of shame”
using faxes, email, cell
phones, and displays to
strengthen their message
and ridicule opposition
• The US was left on the
sidelines and by the time it
recovered the momentum
was strongly with the NGOs
• US reservations to the
treaty were never seriously
considered and the US,
along with China and
Russia, had no choice but to
not sign the treaty
American Jody Williams and the
ICBL shared the 1997 Nobel
Peace Prize for their efforts to
ban anti-personnel land mines
Accountability
• “Yet, the greatest challenges
created by the growing
influence of NGOs are not in
the field but in the arena of
public opinion and the
corridors of power. Today, in
a phenomenon that one
environmental activist
bemoaned as the ‘rise of the
global idiots,’ any group with
a fax machine and a modem
has the potential to distort
public debate…”
– P. J. Simmons
Pamela Anderson
helping PETA make
its point
Case Study: Kosovo
• Ethnic Albanians
comprised about 14%
of Serbia’s population
– Most of the Albanians
lived in the province
of Kosovo
• Throughout the 1990s,
Serbian military and
police forces battled
the Kosovo Liberation
Army
• By 1998, the Serbs
had embarked on a
campaign to
systematically cleanse
Kosovo of its ethnic
Albanian population
Camp Stenkovich II in
Macedonia held
approximately 20,000
refugees.
Case Study: Kosovo
• On 24 March 1999, NATO
initiated Operation Allied
Force in order to
– Stop the Serb offensive in
Kosovo,
– Force a withdrawal of Serb
troops from Kosovo,
– Allow democratic selfgovernment in Kosovo,
– Allow a NATO-led
international peacekeeping
force into Kosovo, and
– Allow the safe and
peaceful return of Kosovar
Albanian refugees.
Case Study: Kosovo
• On June 9, 1999, Serbia
agreed to a Military
Technical Agreement that
ended the 11-week war
• On June 12, KFOR
entered Kosovo under the
authority of UN Security
Resolution 1244
• On February 12, 2002
former Serbian President
Milosevic went on trial at
the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The
Hague.
– He died in 2006 before a
verdict was reached
Case Study: Kosovo
• From an international law
perspective, OAF got
mixed reviews
– It violated traditional
principles of
nonintervention and
nonaggression
– It could set a precedent for
using military force for
humanitarian reasons
– It represented the use of
force by a regional
organization (NATO)
without UN Security
Council authorization
The Legitimacy of Intervention
• “Is there some threshold
at which human rights
violations become
unacceptable and a
state's sovereignty no
longer precludes
intervention? Is it the
500th slain ethnic citizen
or the next refugee after
10,000 have been forced
to leave home that
triggers intervention or
makes it legitimate?”
– Robert Tomes
Holocaust victims in a mass grave
Role of the UN
• “The United Nations is the preeminent
institution of multinationalism. It provides
a forum where sovereign states can
come together to share burdens, address
common problems, and seize common
opportunities. The UN helps establish the
norms that many countries– including the
United States– would like everyone to
live by.”
– Shashi Tharoor
But whose norms?
Austrian Presidency of the Council of the European Union
Permanent Council No. 592
9 February 2006
EU Statement on Death Penalty in the USA
The EU reiterates its longstanding and firm opposition to the death penalty in all
circumstances.
We remain particularly concerned by the imposition of the death penalty in cases
of persons suffering from mental or intellectual disabilities. We urge states not
to impose the death penalty in these cases.
We wish to express our concern about an imminent case of execution in the
United States of a person suffering from mental illness. The EU has learned
that Mr. Steven Staley, who has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia,
is to be executed in the State of Texas on 23 February this year. We appeal to
the appropriate authorities in the State of Texas to grant Mr. Staley relief from
his death penalty.
While aiming for the universal abolition of the death penalty, we seek a moratorium
in all countries which retain capital punishment as a first step towards this end.
…
US and the UN
• “A United Nations that focuses on helping
sovereign states work together is worth keeping;
a United Nations that insists on trying to impose
a utopian vision on America and the world will
collapse under its own weight. If the United
Nations respects the sovereign rights of the
American people and serves them as an
effective tool of diplomacy, it will earn and
deserve their respect and support. But a United
Nations that seeks to impose its presumed
authority on the American people without their
consent begs for confrontation and, I want to be
candid, eventual US withdrawal.”
– Senator Jesse Helms
Unilateralism
• “I can assure you that, if
he (Saddam Hussein)
doesn’t comply this time,
we’ll ask the U.N. to give
authorization for all
necessary means, and if
the U.N. is not willing to do
that, the United States,
with like-minded nations,
will go and disarm him
forcefully.”
– Colin Powell
The US was unable to
obtain the UN resolution
to invade Iraq in
Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Next
• The End of the Cold War, Desert Storm,
and the New World Order