(HOST) The pros and cons of globalization have been hotly debated for some time now, but commentator Olin Robison thinks that the debate is about to get hotter.
(ROBISON) Some ten or twelve years ago I heard a senior member of an East European government say that the smaller the country, the greater the perception of threat from globalization.
It turns out that he was wrong, or at least his perception was misplaced. Several recently published rankings of countries that have benefited most from globalization consistently place a number of the smallest countries at the top of their lists. For instance, over and over, Ireland, the Scandinavian countries and Singapore, all rank high.
Globalization is basically an economic concept, and its most bold champions are frequently corporations rather than the traditional defenders of free trade, the Democrats.
Unregulated free trade has turned out to be bad news for trade unions and that means bad news for the Democrats, who have long found great favor with trade unions. The Unions have long been a dependable source of both money and votes for the Democrats. But in a globalized world, more and more jobs are being exported to places many American workers have never heard of, and their sense of being threatened carries with it great political implications.
So, where does all of this lead us? It probably leads us to a time of new protectionist laws meant to stem the tide of outsourcing jobs to cheaper labor markets. I recently called the service department of a computer company and soon realized that I was not talking to a US citizen when I was asked what part of Canada Vermont was in.
We are in the middle of one of those seismic shifts in domestic politics brought on by major international changes.
All of us, of course, know of the famous remark by the late Tip O’Neill that all politics are local. Well, globalization is not a local phenomenon, but it is beginning to have a lot of local implications. Jobs are local, and that is very much where people live. More jobs in India or China may in the grand scheme of things be highly desirable, but not if it means serious job losses at home.
There are many ironies in all of this. The world’s largest corporation is Wal-Mart, a retailing giant that has truly mastered the benefits of globalization. And yet its retail success is significantly dependent on American working class customers — the very people most threatened by the entire process.
Wal-Mart is now running into trouble internationally for treating non-American producers in ways that are forbidden here in the US. Their union-busting tactics are finally catching up with them in some places abroad.
I predict that all of this will become a major fault-line in American politics soon after public attention is no longer consumed by Iraq. And it is going to pose a serious challenge for US politicians because old alliances are already crumbling.
Since politicians are always reluctant to take positions that cost them more votes than they gain, these issues are going to be seriously problematical.
So, stay tuned, dear neighbors. Stay tuned. We certainly have not heard the last of this.
Globalization is not cost free. There is a dark side, and we are not yet at the point where that dark side impacts key political decisions. But that time is now probably just around the corner.
Olin Robison is past president of both the Salzburg Seminar and Middlebury College. He now lives in Shelburne.