Comparative politics: State & Societies
“Sovereignty is an illusion for any state that joins a regional bloc – especially in the age of globalisation”. Discuss

Since the end of World War II in 1945, the world had become smaller every day: the development of new technologies, especially in transportation and in communication has considerably reduced the distance between people. Now, thanks to the internet, you can follow in live the result of an Australian rugby match from your living room, in London, or, thanks to the development of railway, spend your afternoon walking around Amsterdam, and then go to dinner on the Champs Elysées, in Paris.
Those innovations also helped the emergence of the phenomena of internationalization. But what exactly is that? Robert Cox defined the internationalizing of the state as “the global process whereby national policies and practices have been adjusted to the exigencies of the world economy of international production”[1]. This notion is de facto closely linked to the notion of globalization that R. Cox explained as the “growing connectedness and interdependence on a world scale. It is multidimensional: connectedness in politics and the organization of security, in economics and welfare, in culture, in ecology, in values of all kinds”[2].
In this essay, we will try to see if the processes of joining a regional bloc and of globalisation are responsible for the loss of sovereignty for the state, and so if the State had lost power. But in order to do that, we first need to define what sovereignty is. For Susan Strange, sovereignty is based on the power of a state. She defined power as “the ability of a person or a group of persons so to affect outcomes that their preferences that their preferences take precedence over the preferences of others”[3]. From that definition, Strange explained that the power is based on 4 structures: the structure of security, the financial structure, the structure of knowledge and the structure of