Borders

Of course! If you don't believe in migration then America and Australia should be handed back to the native populations. The West wanted the world and we can't shore up our borders now! People should be allowed to live exactly where they want. No control.

Well, the nation state as we know it is relatively new thing which developed to suit a particular period of history. It's quite likely we'll something slightly different evolving of the next 30 or 40, although I think any global structures will be more like the EU than the USA - in terms of being a series of legal agreements between countries, rather than one collective identity.

Weell before we had any kind of village, town ,nation ,we lived in family groups and ate meat raw. I kind of imagine that you guys are all young and fit and would think it jolly fun if "whoever turned up" thought they should live in your place instead of you.The less robust might not find that so much fun.And without organization we don't have firemen,doctors etc. A regional govt is a nasty grey beaurocratic version of a nation state without a unifying history or common goal .Europe is trying to break up into smaller states because the big ones don't really suit the human psyche.And we are going to have to bury easy cheap air travel arent we or bury ourselves.

I recently read a very interesting book called 'Taming Globalization' - a collection of the Miliband essays from LSE. One of the most interesting essays therein is by Joseph Stiglitz who points out (taking East Asia as an example) that successful countries have opened up their markets slowly on their own terms. China's success is partly due to the fact that they didn't open up their markets to speculative capital flows ( a doctrine incorrectly advanced by the IMF). SO globalization according to Stiglitz has to be done whilst avoiding the pitfalls of capital market liberalization. If the transition to a market economy is mismanaged you end up with a worse situation for a nation's poor as has happened in Russia. If it is managed well, you end up with a success story as in China where incomes have increased by 250% and poverty has decreased. But onto the borders issue, I don't believe that loss of National identity would be an inevitable consequence of globalisation. At present we have global governence without global government and I think that is suficient to act as scaffolding upon which globalization can advance. I don't think a global govenment (tax system, job market etc.) with regional administration is necessary or possible in the forseeable future. jude "Cacoethes scribendi" http://www.judesworld.net

I agree with the capital flows point but I'm not sure that was the key problem in Russia. Flogging loads of state assets very quickly is problematic at the best of times but it's even more difficult if you don't have a strong functional state to regulate who things are sold to and how much they're sold for. Not sure I'm call China a success story in a broad sense. Agree on borders for now but anything could happen in 30 or 40 years.

I don't actually agree with Stiglitz (who is very much opposed to free market capitalists whom he calls free market fundamentalists)... I am trying to read widely people who's world views don't match my own. I have badly represented this particular essay by contracting some four pages of it into a paragraph! The problem with speculative capital flows, according to Stiglitz, has resulted in financial crises and other problems in other countries in East Asia, which China has managed to avoid. Then, a few pages later he talks about mismanagement of a different kind when refering to Russia, although he doesn't go into much detail. I think he wrote a whole book about globalization but reading time doesn't permit. jude "Cacoethes scribendi" http://www.judesworld.net