This weeks reflection

I'd never thought about how to define world politics before because I thought it was obvious. I thought it simply had to do with diplomacy between countries. But during our class discussion I realized that it is a lot more complicated than I thought. Even a simple issue here like plumbing can be considered a part of world politics. However, after listening to everyone speak and reading a number of the blogs I still think that competing interests are the biggest problem in world politics. These competing interests can be between different countries or within the same country. But no matter what the issue is it probably can be considered a world politics issue because the world is a lot more connected than it has ever been before. So even if plumbing is an issue between a government and the people of that country, it still has to do with world politics because chances are the pipes or water come from a different country and are acquired through a trade agreement. The other issues raised, such as education, nuclear weapons, and religion all cause problems because each country has an interest in the subject that doesn't go along with another country's. This makes competing issues the underlying factor in every political issue.

One thing I do agree with is how difficult it is to talk about an issue that has not really been defined. Because it is left up to interpretation, world politics could mean very different things to different people. Until we are able to actually define world politics the question we were given to answer in our blogs might never exist. But because just talking about world politics is somewhat political, it makes me think that everything in some way has to do with world politics. The name "world politics" itself makes any discussion about it a global issue because the definition effects people all over the world.