The Power of Economic Growth and Its Relation to Politics and Military

             
In order to increase their economic growth, state need to build a relationship with another state by trading and cooperating with another state. Each state compete with the other by producing more product from their country, and also by developing the quality too so that they can have a remarkable product from their country. There’s an assumption that if they fail to protect their economic situation, they wouldn’t be able to have strength in military and politics. But the question is, does economy really controls everything including politics and military’s sake? What is the connection between economy, politics and also military?

Economy, military, politics is an absolute need for state. Superpower country is the country who has the capability to do anything, it has to have a connection with another country and also it has to have another country’s trust and all of them can be achieved by doing trade and business. For example like America and China, both of them have power on the economy, their product’s already all around the world, a lot of country see America and China as a powerful state because for them, America and China already have big influence to their country. Everycountry needs economic growth to advance their country, because economic growth means the citizen are prosperous. And also economic growth brings a big impact to social life.

           

Based on Mercantilist’s perspective state must expand their export so the value of export has to be higher than the value of import if the state wants to become a welfare state. Mercantilist here has the same view with Realists, they claim that power and wealth are tightly connected but there’s a little differences between them while mercantilists usually focus on economic threats to a state, realist emphasize a wider variety of physical threats and encourage the use of both military and economic instruments to defend the state or deter military attacks on it. However, realist and mercantilist has the same way in understanding that there has to be a dominant aspect in order to get the ability to have power.

           

As we can see here, mercantilist believe that if a country have a lot of gold by exporting they will consider themselves as a welfare country, without paying attention in military or politics’s aspect because welfare for them is simply having a lot of gold. There’s an assumption that if state have a lot of money, they can buy everything like strength and even power. Economy can give a lot of impact to another aspect in a country, without having money we can’t buy weapons, with the absence of income the government can slowly die any moment. It is true that politics and military are important to but if it has to be compared, economy always goes first. For example like Singapore, Singapore is one of the advanced country it can't be because of the military or politics. Singapore's military force is still weaker than Indonesia. Singapore is on 47th place while Indonesia is on 15th place, but as we can see Singapore is way more advance than Indonesia. Singapore becomes one of the advanced country because their economic growth. Each year there's a progress, there's an economic growth each year like in 2004 it increased 8,3% and 6,4% in 2005 also in 2006 it increased 7,9%. Just like Singapore, economy is so important, there's a possibility that it can advance the state even if politics and military are weak, as long as the economy is still in a good place then the country should not be worried because even if they can't become an advanced country, their domestic situation itself is gonna be in a safe zone because of the welfare that the citizen might get and because by being wealth, state can afford anything to protect and defend their country.

References: 

Balaam, D. N. and Dillman, B. (2011), Introduction to International Political Economy. 5th edition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

http://hankam.kompasiana.com/2014/02/12/gfpkekuatan-militer-indonesia-terkuat-di-asia-tenggara-bahkan-no-15-di-dunia-631291.html 

http://dahlansyuhada25.blogspot.com/2013/10/keadaan-fisik-penduduk-sosial-ekonomi.html 

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Yohana Sarah Mukti Kristanti / 1701349933