so here we go,,,

Due to my lack of a Swedish keyboard I`ll just be lazy and write in English I guess.
My intention with this blog is that it will become a place for brainstorming about Geopolitics, Global Politics, International Relations, Power structures etc. anything concerning international politics basically.

It`s meant to be something to keep track of my own thoughts and not to drive opinion but to try and see where politics is moving.
I hope that some of my friends will write about global politics on this blog every now and then and post might show up in either Swedish, English or Japanese but I`ll make sure that there is always an English translation available. That said I`ll start on the subjects of India, Globalization and Democracy.

I recently came across a Podcast from Johns Hopkins where a professor named Rina Agarwala held a short 10 minute presentation that made my mind spin(the others were quite good as well except a journalist named Donald Oberdorfer who tried to cover all of Asia in a quite subjective 10 min presentation). prof. Agarwala talked about the impacts globalization has had on the workforce in India where about 92% of the workforce (of about 400 million workers) are informal workers (defined as: wage workers without legal or social protection who work for formal or informal firms, for households. or for no fixed employer).
Competitiveness is crucial in this day and age and transnational firms have to (not always, but when it comes to manufacturing) rely on cheap labour, hence a huge chunk of workforce ends up in a position where they can`t hold the companies responsible as they don`t always know who their employers are as they often use a lot of middle-men, and they have to compete for the job`s I.E it`s hard to blame the employer (no working conditions+ Making demands + other jobtakers = Fired). So they end up with the politicians.

In India this had led to something interesting, in a democracy when an economically insecure group (who, we can assume, wants security for their day to day livelihood) makes up a huge part of the (voting)population politicians have to react, and it seems like they are. Instead of the increased wages that they might demand from an employer if they organized, they organize on a town/city/region level making demands of the politicians such as welfare benefits and ask for recognition for the work they do from the state. This all forces the state to play a much bigger part in the workers lives and thus the decline of the role of the nation-state that`s been proclaimed by so many seems quite far off. Or is it?States also have bills to pay. Todays capital (at least for the TNCs) is highly mobile when it comes to the manufacturing sector and uneducated workforce is not. The developement is hard to foresee but will be interesting to watch.