Does Anthony Giddens overstate the power of globalisation in

In his opening lecture, Giddens focuses on Globalisation. For Giddens' globalisation is a contradictory and uneven process. Giddens refers to globalisation as a process which at one and the same time, 'pulls away from' local communities and nation states, yet globalisation also 'pushes down' on those same communities and nation states. He takes the perspective of globalisation being something of an equalising procedure since it gives hitherto disempowered groups and nations the potential to realise their goals. Giddens argued that the driving force behind globalisation is the information technology evolution. "Instantaneous communication…changes almost everything. It invades the texture of everyday life, but it also provides for the restructuring of other institutions." The inevitable consequence of this technological ‘revolution’ can be simplified with a three-fold image. Globalisation pulls away from the nation state, removing control from national governments in areas like economic, and foreign policy. However, globalisation also pushes down from the state, allocating new resources for local economies, facilitating the emergence of local cultural identities, and strengthening sub-national units of governance. Finally, globalisation squeezes sideways, creating new cultural, economic, and political regions that cut across national boundaries. Barcelona, for instance, is a city in Spain, but it is also the capital of Catalonia, an autonomous region with many cultural and economic ties to southern France and with special status in the European Union.

“The nations that gained the most from globalization are those poor countries that changed their policies to exploit it, while the ones that gained the least did not, or were too isolated to effectively change economic and political policy…”

The focus of this essay is power. How does Giddens recognise and analyse the power of globalisation? The first lecture began as an explanation and introduction to globalisation. Giddens discusses how the topic of conventional global debates is usually based around the nation state. For political and religious leaders this is the key issue – will succumbing to global influence take your power as a nation? Giddens went a step further in his lectures describing not only the power of globalisation on a political and ‘national’ level, but as an environmental and democratic issue. In his second lecture, based in Hong Kong, Giddens talks about risk. Two types of risk are distinguished – that of external, and manufactured risk. In simple terms, external risk is that of the environment destroying societies (floods, famine, drought) and has been a recognised issue for social sciences. Manufactured risk on the other hand has become an increasingly lightened issue today – in contrast to external risk, manufactured risks concern what society has done to the environment. Giddens clearly focuses on this term as ‘directly influenced by globalisation’. In his own words, Giddens links globalisation to ‘the end of nature’. In this, as he goes on to discuss, does not mean the end of the physical world or possessions, but the complete intervention of human on the planet. No longer will people be able to visit a place on earth not

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