Реферат: Globalisation What Implications For Democratic Decision

can use information about what

neighbouring governments are or are not doing, to challenge or pressure their

own governments. Calls for referenda on EU membership, or fundamental EU

legislation, in some EU countries (especially those without a tradition of

referenda) were inevitably influenced by well-documented events occurring in

neighbouring countries. (go into the activism

as related to globalisation that has occurred) Globalisation allows

people to organise themselves more quickly and effectively across national

borders. Interest groups are increasingly organised internationally and capable

of influencing the policy debate in several countries at the same time. A

prominent example is Greenpeace, the environmental group formed in Canada in

1977, now an international organisation with 40 offices in 30 countries and

annual revenues of $US 130 million and a staff of over 1,000.(23) The recent

Royal Dutch/Shell Brent Spar case illustrates the capacity of such

internationally organised interest groups to mobilise citizens and to create

strategic pressure simultaneously in multiple countries. The 1993 Rio Summit

and the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population Growth are examples of fora where

governments were lobbied both by their own and by foreign interest groups. The

world conference on women in

Beijing bore witness to the same phenomenon. Multi-level pressures on

governments to react ? from national and foreign interest groups and from

foreign governments sometimes wielding to pressure from local interest groups ? are becoming more

common and harder to resist. Even domestic interest

groups collaborate with foreign counterparts. New communications technologies

are allowing groups ? linked by race, religion or conviction ? to overcome the

barriers of physical distance. And because citizens talk to each other,

governments must as well. For example, groups of indigenous people ? such as

New Zealand Maori, Australian Aboriginals and Canadian Indians ? are

increasingly sharing strategies across national borders, putting pressure on