Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Corporate foreign policy

Corporations that do business in more than one country must have a "foreign policies" -- even if it appears as a passive acceptance of the law within countries. What makes those foreign policies different from the foreign policies of nation states? What distinguishes those corporations from the nation states? Do corporate foreign policies infringe on the sovereignty of nation states?

While the thrust of this article is more about international relations than comparative politics, it does raise some good questions that students of comparative government should give some thought to.

Google Searches for a Foreign Policy
When Google announced last week that it would shut its censored online search service in China, it was doing more than standing up to a repressive government: it was showing that, with the United States still struggling to develop a foreign policy for the digital age, Internet companies need to articulate their own foreign policies...

For Internet companies, that choice has been sharpened by the fact that the World Wide Web is no longer just a force for freedom and diversity but also a tool for repression…

"What forces Google to have a foreign policy is that what they’re exporting isn’t a product or a service, it’s a freedom," said Clay Shirky, who teaches at New York University and writes about the Internet’s social effects…

If the folks at Google were diplomats instead of “digirati,” one might say their view of the Internet had evolved from Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic notion that independent countries tend toward democracy to the realpolitik understanding that their interests simply differ from your own…

Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed.

Find out What You Need to Know


Labels: ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home