GLOBALISATION OF BUSINESS, Syed Sajid [reading in the dark .txt] 📗

income and resources people may be excluded and marginalised from participating in activities which are considered the norm for other people in society.
—Government of Ireland

i. Globalisation Dimensions

ii. Confidentiality and conventional diplomacy go together. As diplomacy is about communication and negotiation involving governments, they have inevitably to undertake their sensitive work outside the media's reach.
iii. However, the 21st century is characterised by globalisation, assertive public opinion, an ever present 24x7 media and Web 2.0 technology. This combination lends increased significance to public diplomacy. Recognising the magnitude of the changing scene, India has begun well, but it has miles to go for securing optimal projection of its foreign policy concerns.
iv. What is public diplomacy? Barack Obama told the Indian Parliament that he was “mindful” he might not be standing before it as the U.S. President “had it not been for Gandhi[ji] and the message he shared and inspired with America and the world.” Michelle Obama won hearts by dancing with Indian children. Carla Bruni, the French President's wife, communicated by doing a perfect namaste, besides informing the public that she prayed for “another son” at a shrine near Agra. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao proclaimed that China and India “would always be friends and would never be rivals.” Our distinguished guests were thus using tools of public diplomacy to connect with their hosts in India.
v. Public diplomacy is a web of mechanisms through which a country's foreign policy positions are transmitted to its target audiences. The term was first used by U.S. diplomat and scholar Edmund Guillion in 1965. He saw it as “dimensions of international relations beyond traditional diplomacy, the cultivation by governments of public opinion in other countries …” Indian diplomats, however, rightly maintain that public diplomacy has to do with both foreign and domestic audiences. When you put out a story on television, blog or YouTube today, it is consumed by a university student in Bhopal as much as by a financial analyst in Toronto.
vi. Delhi conference: Recently the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) hosted, in collaboration with the CMS Academy, a two-day conference and workshop in Delhi to explore the challenges of “Public Diplomacy in the Information Age.” Attended by a cross-section of scholars, communication experts, media personalities, business leaders and diplomats, it aimed at crafting a new understanding of how India could exploit the full potential of public diplomacy.
vii. Participants, including this writer, gained much from the presence of four top experts in public diplomacy and communication in the world today, namely Nicholas J. Cull and Philip Seib, both professors from the University of Southern California, Prof Eytan Gilboa from the Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Nik Gowing, chief presenter, BBC. Select panels of Indian and foreign speakers, interacting with an informed audience, examined diverse themes such as “Public Diplomacy in a Globalized World,” “21st Century Statecraft and Soft Power,” “24x7 News and Public diplomacy,” “Web 2.0 and the New Public Diplomacy,” and “Corporate Diplomacy.” Three workshops were also held focussing on fascinating aspects of the subject. It may be useful to recall the key takeaways for a broader audience interested in foreign policy projection.
viii. Key conclusions: First, public diplomacy and “new public diplomacy” (which uses social media tools for reaching younger audiences) need to be situated in the post-Cold War context. With a clear trend towards multipolarity, globalisation and democracy, non-state actors, NGOs, business enterprises and others have been playing an increasingly important role. The emergence of global television and Internet-based communication have now empowered governments to reach out to constituencies as spin doctors of yesterday could hardly dream of. Hence the importance of the medium has grown enormously.
ix. Second, the message nevertheless retains its significance: if it is not clear and credible, it will not get through. The former Minister of State for External Affairs, Shashi Tharoor, suggested that while “Incredible India” has been a great campaign, what we needed was to project a “credible India.”
x. Third, the link between public diplomacy and foreign policy formulation is inextricable. If policy is flawed, projection alone cannot help. Therefore, senior public diplomacy officials should have a seat on the policy-making table.
xi. Fourth, thinking about how to put across one's message has undergone a fundamental change. The advice now is to transcend government-to-public communication and, instead, focus on two-way communication, on “advancing conversations.” Public diplomacy is about listening and articulating. Beyond the traditional media, the cyber space sustains a “Republic of Internet” and a “Nation of Facebook” which cannot be ignored. If the government does not cater to their needs, someone else, possibly with an adversarial orientation, will. Perhaps this perspective led the MEA to embark on a new journey last year, establishing an interactive website, a Twitter channel, a Facebook page, a YouTube channel, a BlogSpot page and a presence in online publishing sites like Scribd and Issuu. These may still be “baby steps,” but they are laudable.
xii. Fifth, the importance of speed in communication was repeatedly stressed. “Tyranny of deadline,” impact of the ticker, “Breaking news” and “citizen-journalist” were referred to. Image managers no longer have the luxury of time nor leisurely weekends. Addressing them, a television professional put it bluntly: “If we don't sleep, you don't sleep!”
xiii. Sixth, management tools such as planning and evaluation are essential for devising and assessing the impact of public diplomacy strategies. They clearly form part of a continuing process, to be handled with transparency, integrity and professionalism.
xiv. Finally, the concept of nation branding is highly relevant to the task of projecting India.
xv. After the conference, Prof. Seib, a keynote speaker, reportedly observed that India lacked “a consistent profile that it can present to the world,” that it did not have “a comprehensive public diplomacy strategy.” I find it difficult to accept this assessment. India's foray into public diplomacy in the digital era may be new, but it can certainly lay claim to a decent record of projection abroad. Turning Western public opinion in Delhi's favour prior to the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971 is a shining example. India has a broader conception of public diplomacy encompassing all facets: media, cultural, educational, and economic and Diaspora diplomacy. Speaking at the conference, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao aptly observed that “the tradition of public outreach and interpretation of foreign policy positions” had been “ingrained in our conditioning as diplomats.”
xvi. Tasks ahead: In the MEA, projection is driven by the External Publicity division as well as the Public Diplomacy division. Beyond them, the bulk of work is handled by our missions abroad, often the unnoticed members of our collective choir.

The state of the literature

They all perform very well, but room for improvement exists. Our ambassadors should be trained to become savvier at handling TV interviews. Our diplomats should rapidly acquire skills relating to Web 2.0 technology. The rising importance of non-state actors should be factored in fully.Finally, the striking disconnect between India's self-perception and the world's view should be addressed. Amidst unprecedented visits by leaders of all P-5 states within five months, our nation's attention was primarily focussed on internal concerns — scams, onion prices and excessive politics. Assuming we want India to become a truly Great Power, we, as a polity, must deepen interest in world affairs. The MEA would do well to use all its weaponry of public diplomacy to increase our awareness of the world and India's place in it. It must sustain its initiatives to project India's soft power. The task begins at home!
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International Relations
International Relations (IR) (occasionally referred to asInternational Studies (IS)) [1] is the study of relationships between countries, including the roles of states, inter-governmental organizations (IGOs), international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and multinational corporations (MNCs). It is both an academicand public policy field, and can be either positive or normative as it both seeks to analyze as well as formulate the foreign policy of particular states. It is often considered a branch of political science (especially after 1988 UNESCO nomenclature), but an important sector of academia prefer to treat it as an interdisciplinary field of study.
Apart from political science, IR draws upon such diverse fields aseconomics, history, international law, philosophy, geography,social work, sociology & social sciences, anthropology,psychology, women's studies/gender studies, and cultural studies/ culturology. It involves a diverse range of issues including but not limited to: globalization, state sovereignty, ecologicalsustainability, nuclear proliferation, nationalism, economic development, global finance, terrorism, organized crime, human security, foreign interventionism and human rights.
The history of international relations is often traced back to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, where the modern state system was developed. Prior to this, the European medieval organization of political authority was based on a vaguely hierarchical religious order. Westphalia instituted the legal concept of sovereignty, which essentially meant that rulers, or the legitimate sovereigns, had no internal equals within a defined territory and no external superiors as the ultimate authority within the territory's sovereign borders. A simple way to view this is that sovereignty says, "I'm not allowed to tell you what to do and you are not allowed to tell me what to do." Classical Greek and Roman authority at times resembled the Westphalian system, but both lacked the notion of sovereignty.
Westphalia encouraged the rise of the independent nation-state, the institutionalization of diplomacyand armies. This particular European system was exported to the Americas, Africa, and Asia viacolonialism and the "standards of civilization". The contemporary international system was finally established through decolonization during the Cold War. However, this is somewhat over-simplified. While the nation-state system is considered "modern", many states have not incorporated the system and are termed "pre-modern".
Further, a handful of states have moved beyond the nation-state system and can be considered "post-modern". The ability of contemporary IR discourse to explain the relations of these different types of states is disputed. "Levels of analysis" is a way of looking at the international system, which includes the individual level, the domestic nation-state as a unit, the international level of transnational and intergovernmental affairs, and the global level.
What is explicitly recognized as International Relations theory was not developed until after World War I, and is dealt with in more detail below. IR theory, however, has a long tradition of drawing on the work of other social sciences. The use of capitalizations of the "I" and "R" in International Relations aims to distinguish the academic discipline of International Relations from the phenomena of international relations. Many cite Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War as the inspiration for realist theory, with Hobbes' Leviathan and Machiavelli's The Prince providing further elaboration.
Similarly, liberalism draws upon the work of Kant and Rousseau, with the work of the former often being cited as the first elaboration of democratic peace theory. Though contemporary human rights is considerably different than the type of rights envisioned under natural law, Francisco de Vitoria, Hugo Grotius and John Locke offered the first accounts of universal entitlement to certain rights on the basis of common humanity. In the twentieth century, in addition to contemporary theories of liberal internationalism,