The world will impinge on Vermont. This threat of globalization, and policies to counteract it, often tend to be the focus of discussions of globalization. This course will offer two views in contrast to this dominate perspective. First, rather than a recent threat, globalization can more accurately be seen as an irreversible process that has been going on for some centuries, indeed the European settlement of North America took place well after the current wave of globalization began. Second, rather than something to be feared, globalization presents a number of opportunities to those communities which adapt to the new reality.
Administrators can learn, then, from the experiences of others.
The comparative cases that will make up the bulk of this course share a great deal with the US and with Vermont, which make them useful for our purposes. As a result, these countries have great similarities in history, political culture, and in many contemporary problems. At the same time the three offer interesting variation within this common model. North America shared a common history up until 1776, when the British settlers of Nova Scotia declined to join in rebellion with their British settler neighbours to the south. Canada was born.