Analysis of the political environment of international business can be approached on two levels. At the global level, attention is focused on the world's various political systems and their alliances—the subject of international politics or international relations. At the state or country level, the focus is on the nature of the political system and of the government in which it is expressed and on the government's attitudes toward private enterprise.
Currently there are almost 200 nations on earth. Most of these nations arose in recent history, as shown in Figure 4.4. All of these nations—new as well as old—share characteristics. They have legal authority over their territories and people; they have armies and air forces; they send and receive ambassadors; they collect taxes; and they seek to regulate their economies and maintain order through parliaments, ministries and departments, courts, police, and prisons. Almost all of them belong to the United Nations. But they also vary enormously in many different ways. The most important distinction that people make among the countries of the world is the degree of freedom that their citizens have to choose their own political leaders. The 1986 count by The Freedom House reported that the world contains fifty-seven free nations, fifty-seven partly free nations, and fifty-three unfree nations. 1 In the 1973 survey, half as many nations were classified as free.
Table 4.1 provides a list of problems confronting most of the countries of the world. The international manager is strongly advised to study the list thoroughly and, when proposing to expand the business into another country, to incorporate into his or her proposals ideas that, if they do not contribute toward the solution of these problems, at least do not aggravate them.
|
Policy Problem |
Industrial Nations |
Preindustrial Nations |
|---|---|---|
|
Governmental organization |
Maintaining andadapting existing policymaking and implementing agencies (e.g., reform of parliament, reorganization of provincial and local government) |
Creating effective governmental agencies; recruitment and training of governmental personnel |
|
National unity |
Coping with persistent tendencies toward ethnic and subcultural fragmentation |
Creating national identity and loyalty |
|
Economic development |
Maintaining satisfactory growth rate through some combination of public and private investment and use of fiscal controls and incentives |
Accumulating capital from domestic and foreign sources for investment in industry and industrial infrastructure (e.g., transportation, education) |
|
Economic stability |
Combining satisfactory growth rate with control of inflation; maintaining balance of payments equilibrium and adequate employment |
Coping with fluctuations in demand for raw materials, extreme inflation resulting from rapid and uneven growth , and acute unemployment problems due to urban migration |
|
Social welfare |
Maintaining educational opportunity, medical care, old-age assistance, etc. in time of limited growth and taxpayer resistance |
Creating educational and welfare systems |
|
Participation |
Responding to demands for popular participation and from disadvantaged racial, ethnic, status, age, and sex groups; coping with demands for greater participation in industry and local communities |
Creating organizations for participation: political parties, interest groups, communications media, local community organizations |
|
Quality of life |
Coping with problems of industrial growth, urban blight, and consumption of natural resources |
Coping with environmental deterioration, the crowding caused by urban migration, and beginning conservation |
|
Foreign and security policy |
Maintaining national security through weapons development and alliance systems; seeking to reduce risks of war through disarmament negotiations and effective foreign trade diplomacy |
Dealing with economic and security dependency through integration in Western or Eastern camp, or maintaining a neutral posture; copingwith foreign trade and investment problems |
|
SOURCE: Gabriel A. Almond and G. B. Powell, Jr., Comparative Politics Today: A World View, Second Edition (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1980). |
||
Patterns of Political Alliances. The possibility of these states' living together harmoniously is rather unlikely. Indeed, hardly any day passes without some incident involving one country's aggressive act against another. For this reason, throughout human history nations have tried to form alliances with one another to protect themselves from aggressors.
In general, there are three types of alliances: alliances for collective security, political alliances, and economic alliances. Each of these three categories includes both governmental organizations and nongovernmental organizations. 2
Humanity's greatest accomplishment in forming alliances for collective security was establishment of the United Nations (U.N.), which succeeded and remedied some of the defects of the pre-World War II League of Nations. The U.N. was founded in San Francisco in 1945. Its original charter was signed on October 15, 1945 by fifty-one nations and took effect on October 24 of the same year.
The United Nations organization represents an attempt on the part of the earth's inhabitants to keep the earth in one piece. It is a global effort; almost all members of the human race belong to it. Although compliance with the United Nations' directives is not mandatory, almost all nations believe in and abide by its rules and directives. It is an apolitical alliance in the sense that any nation, whether democratic or autocratic, whether capitalist or communist, has the right to apply for membership and expect to be accepted in the world community.
A number of regional alliances with more stringent rules are also in existence today. These regional alliances are political to the extent that their members have more or less similar political systems and government selection procedures. In addition, the members share a uniform and coordinated defense strategy. The two most important regional political alliances tend to divide the world into two camps: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the West and the Warsaw Pact in the East. Both the United States and the USSR have their own treaties or agreements with other nations outside of NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
- 950 reads
