In our modern world where countries are economically interdependent and politically connected, states seek to cooperate with one another to benefit themselves while helping the other. While people used to live in their own bubble, people today are not as exclusive to their own nation. As technology advances and people become more accessible to information around the world, the interests in one state slowly becomes an interest in another. Countries seek to advance and develop at the same level as the other nations. Thus, the question of whether states should organize some form of supernational integration to interact and cooperate with each other is brought up.
When we look at an organization of supernational integration, we have to consider the economic, social, and political difference between smaller and larger states. Smaller states often deals with less drastic domestic issues because of the small population size that is has. Larger states, on the other hand, deals with more and major domestic matters because a lot more conflicts are produced by the mass amount of people. If they were to be integrated together by a supernational organization, most smaller states would greatly benefit from it because they would be politically and economically supported through the rest of the community. Larger states, however, would have a disadvantage from the smaller states because the rest of the community would not be able to support the larger states’ issues. Although this may be a downside to supernational integration, by having the organization the majority of the nations in it would greatly benefit from it because they would need to work their differences to try to bring a balance to it all. By taking a view at this issue, a constructivist would say that the by having supernational integration, states would be able to share their interests with other nations and use the ideas to expand their own. Countries are definitely growing as a global actor in the world. Because of economic globalization and their political connections, the development of a supernational formation would benefit the global actors in today’s society.
I really enjoyed your distinction between the larger states and the smaller states. It is often a significant aspect of global politics that goes unnoticed. I find that a majority of our discussions tend to attempt to create all countries as equals, and while we may be intellectually, there is no way that a person could effectively argue that states are equal economically. The amount allocated on missile defense alone in the United States was nearly $2 billion more than the yearly GDP of the Bahamas. Economic superiority must be recognized as a part of interdependence. While I agree that our world is becoming more interdependent, it is the smaller countries that have begun depending on the larger countries, not the other way around.
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