All over the world, globalisation is under challenge from resurgent nationalist forces. One of the great political challenges of the coming year will be to defend the benefits of globalisation — while fending off the arguments of nationalists such as Mrs Le Pen, Donald Trump in the US and his new admirer, President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
The benefits of globalisation are both economic and political. In economic terms, they include enhanced global trade and international investment, which boost prosperity and enlarge choice for ordinary people. Believers in globalisation are more interested in opening borders than closing them. Globalisation is closely linked to internationalism in politics, since it involves a recognition that the world faces common problems, such as climate change or refugees, that can only be dealt with effectively through international agreements.
Comments posted at FT.com and Steve Sailer:
* This piece is so full of intellectual dishonesty, its barely worth taking serious. It takes the nationalist position to extreme positions without taking the globalist position to extreme positions. It uses strawmen arguments that nationalists don’t propose. It misquotes Trump to an extreme he didn’t suggest. It treats the US multicultural history as if it came from open border policies when it did not. It doesn’t address any key issues that concern nationalists that truly are legitimate, like difference in forms of government that matter to those wanting a society different from others in the world. It uses black and white statements to characterize the opposing side, while soft statements to characterize its side. And its simply plain disengenous. There is no discussion, as is the case with socialist type thinking, of freedom and private property rights, that different peoples have different views on this, and borders are necessary to protect freedom and private property rights.
And no one I know in the US is against immigration as you suggest.
With open borders and no control over the RATE of immigration, bad things happen, and a country can quickly become a two..or three language country. Liberals always want better communication. One key to that is speaking the same language.
A country without borders is not a country.
Some countries want everyone in their country to have equal incomes. I don’t. Thats a road to nowhere, to malaise, to a country of automotons. In the US you are free to sit at home and drink beer….or quit worrying about what other people make and make something of yourself.
Equal incomes is not ‘justice’. If some countries want that, they are welcome to it. Pick the country you want to live in, while you can, before some globalist tries to give you a bronze, silver or gold type country to live in.
* “Lets face it. The only people benefiting from this “globalization” are international traders”
Well, I benefit, and I’m not a politician.
I eat fine tomatoes from Israel, apples from New Zealand, etc.
I could clothe a family of four for peanuts by buying stuff at Costco that’s mostly made in China. I can buy very nice shirts for my son for $15 at TJ Maxx.
Almost everything except land is better and cheaper than it was when I was kid.
* Are you safer than you were before? Is your safety dependent on isolating yourself in an enclave of people who hold to the same norms of behavior that you do, now that the country increasingly doesn’t hold to those norms?
Do you feel that the scope of your freedom has been enlarged or at least maintained from the starting point of your parents and grandparents? Not just the freedom to consume, but freedom of speech, of association, freedom of safe movement or safe settlement wherever you want in your country? I’m thinking here of the growing ethnic enclaves and ghettos that accompany not just recent diversity injections, but past ones as well.
Do you feel that the erosion of your personal political power (your vote as it were, and your relative importance in the calculus of political agents) not through natural population growth, but through immigration driven growth, poses a danger to your interests and those of you community and group?
Do you feel that your country has accomplished something of value to you and your descendants through diversity that it would not have been able to do? Has it attained a higher level of human development, basic wealth and security, contentedness and formation of social capital to accompany the economic one?
* A big part of the reason that liberals have made a mess out of immigration is that they refuse to recognize any sort of group differences – Somalis and Swiss, Ashkenazim and Abyssinians – they are all the same according to their quasi-religious ideology. So the success of earlier generations of immigrants who may have been more adaptable to American culture is taken as irrefutable proof that the new ones will do great too. Cohen’s grandfather the talmudic scholar did great so surely illiterate Muslim shepherds will do well also.
