The 1990s has seen an acceleration of globalisation as the prior Cold War nations opened their economies and the democratic dividend started to be felt in Europe and parts of Asia. The increasing capital, labor and communication flows of globalisation make many aspects of the old industrial order uncertain - one of these being the authority of the nation-state.

Allen Gyngell and Micheal Wesley describe globalisation as having the attributes:

• economic interdependence
• transnational communications
• homogenisation of differences
• collapse of chronological time and geographic space (ie world is getting smaller)
• transnational social and political movements
• local action for global causes
• transfer of allegiance away from the state

One of the other interesting ones was the "emergence of a global risk culture where people regard the greatest threats that face them as ones that overwhelm the state's response." However the argument for globalisation is that individuals are creating social, cultural, economic and political networks outside of the geographic space and political confines of the nation-state.

Under such a situation ethnic-nationalism becomes an antiquated political technology. Other pressures are placed on nationalism as an informative political technology through the mobility and cosmopolitan nature of the modern workforce. Citizenship as defined under nationalism becomes a discriminative and isolating technology that effectively denies suffrage to individuals who are fully immersed socially, culturally, economically and politically in a nation for work reasons.

As Gyngell and Wesley note, it is unclear how globalisation will affect the nation-state as a form of social and political organisation, but it is obvious already that changes will occur.

In terms of collective decision making, a liberal democratic nation-state remains the best form of organisation. Though some of the technologies the state used in the 19thC to sustain, define and legitimise its authority - such as ethnicism, nationalism, protectionism and isolationism - will have to go. Apart from being socially and morally repugnant to many, they are inefficient technologies in a world where the dominant form of competition between states is economic.

Central to this is that globalisation is eroding both the state's control over the individual in a global polity as well as the state's capability to give individual's singular and collective identity. There will be those that continue to crave a collective identity anchored in the state's authority, however, as the Australia diaspora is showing, economic competition is dominating as Australians head overseas in search of higher remuneration.

This process will only increase as labour is unfettered in the same manner that capital has been. Nation-states currently have an isolationist approach to immigration and migration. Due to the desire for economic advantage Australia has already seen its immigration policies changed from an ethnic one in the 1960s to one that is more merit based.

As it is one quarter of the Australian work force is foreign born, while nearly one million Australians are overseas working in other nations. To put the diaspora in perspective it is nearly ten-percent of the current Australian workforce.

The Great and Powerful Friends [GAPF] doctrine has guided Australian foreign policy for nearly a century. Other than a short spate of international liberalism during Doc Evatt's time, when the United Nations was established, the GAPF has been dominant.

The Engagement doctrine rose in the 1990s under Paul Keating and Gareth Evans. I consider this a disruptive technology or policy because it is heavily aimed at harnessing globalisation for Australian advantage.

Central to the Engagement doctrine is the philosophy that security comes from complete engagement with a political entity. GAPF policy tends to be bilateral and not go beyond the relations that states historically have communicated with. For instance diplomatic, military and high level economic talks where the states negotiate economic terms.

Under Engagement the political entities communicate politically, culturally, socially and economically. Engagement goes beyond the arms of state intersecting and places all aspects of national life as a communicative tunnel toward national advantage.

There are several things that comes from this. One is that security is not possible unless there is political, social, cultural and economic familiarity between political entities. Additionally it is not necessarily nation-states having the monopoly on being a political entity that is recognised by the Australian nation-state. This is important in the global polity and transnational nature of globalisation.

Secondly there is an inherent belief in Australian culture, society and economic achievement that it will give something positive to the world through Engagement, while, at the same time being strong enough to positively absorb outside influences such that Australia is culturally, socially, economically and politically advantaged.

Thirdly it recasts Australian power, strength and influence as being beyond, and not limited to, the machinations and institutions of the nation-state. For instance the Lowey Institute's report on the Australian Diaspora contained the recognition that the diaspora advanced Australian interests in unusual and unexpected ways.

Engagement recasts Australian political influence as being beyond the geographic space and political confines of Australia (or its great and powerful friend) defining it instead as limited only by the reach of modern communications and immigration. For this reason Engagement is a superior foreign policy doctrine for the reality and opportunities of globalisation.

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