Globalization

A few weeks ago, Palle Christiansen, Greenland’s minister of finance warned that his country was facing an existential threat from immigration. Yet unlike the far-right politicians of Europe who take up this theme, Christiansen was not fretting over foreigners coming to his country’s shores, but about fellow citizens leaving. 

Check out Walter Russell Mead's take on the American future:

The learned professions in the United States — lawyers, doctors, nurses, accountants, educators, journalists, government bureaucrats — are under the gun.  The IT revolution is going to put them all through the wringer — the way it has already put blue collar America through the wringer by a combination of automation and outsourcing. The upper middle class did very well in the last generation, even as blue collar incomes stagnated and in many cases fell.  The next phase of change will challenge the institutions and the livelihoods of America’s managers, professors, lawyers and others in the same way that it has already thrown journalism into the maelstrom.

These changes are necessary and in the long run benign.  Dramatically and thoroughly restructuring the professions will ultimately make the vital services they provide much cheaper and much more widely available — just as the destruction of the old manufacturing guilds in the industrial revolution eventually made manufactured goods much cheaper.  But just as the spinners and weavers fought the new machines, so we can expect a lot of our intellectuals and managers to fight the challenges to a system that has worked very well for them.

The whole post is worth reading. And if you are interested in this topic, be sure to read Gregg Easterbrook's Sonic Boom, which treats the coming changes at greater length. I reviewed Sonic Boom here.

TWO WEEKS AFTER September 11, while the whole world was still checking in with itself, the New York Times called up a bunch of novelists. The paper of record wanted to see if their jobs still had any meaning.

SO NOW WE KNOW: The Saudi Arabian regime is no friend of ours. Sure, they sell us oil and tell us that they keep the OPEC cartel from pushing prices through the roof. But their refusal to go along with OPEC price hawks is self-serving.

THE ISSUE OF GLOBALIZATION is very much on our minds at the moment--and the experience of the ancient world proves an aid to understanding what we think of as a uniquely modern problem.

It was Jean-Marie Guehenno who argued in his brilliant 1995 book "The End of the Nation-State" that during the age of empire--beginning with the conquests of Alexander the Great--the ancient world embarked on a vast experiment in cosmopolitanism that eerily foreshadows what we are experiencing today.

War in a Time of Peace
Bush, Clinton, and the Generals
by David Halberstam
Scribner, 544 pp., $28

THE STORY OF AMERICA'S FOREIGN POLICY during the years of Bill Clinton will be of considerable interest to historians. The United States, having won a stunning and surprising victory in the Cold War, emerges as the most powerful, prosperous, and politically attractive nation on the planet.

MANY HAVE SUGGESTED THAT THE September 11 attack on America was payback for U.S. imperialism. If only we had not gone around sticking our noses where they did not belong, perhaps we would not now be contemplating a crater in lower Manhattan.

CAN THE UNITED STATES WIN A WAR ON TERRORISM while winking at some terrorists and cozying up to nations that support them? Can the United States effectively fight terrorism and reward terrorism at the same time? You shouldn't have to ponder those questions very long. The certain answer is no.

But the Bush administration isn't certain.

I'D NEVER REALLY CONSIDERED the way George W. Bush resembles Gilligan of Gilligan’s Island until I read Paul A. Cantor’s brilliant book, Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization. As Cantor points out, Gilligan is not the smartest one on the island. He doesn’t have the obvious leadership résumé. Yet the audience instinctively sympathizes with him, and the show’s creators were right to put him in the center.

IT HAS BEEN A BUSY SUMMER for European diplomats and for the human rights activists who dance to the Euro-beat. They have been much exercised about dangers to global stability. The main danger, they seem to think, comes from the United States.

Europeans want to stop global warming and stand up for global justice. So do the globalist non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, who are their moaning bass accompanists. But the Bush administration has said no to the Kyoto Protocol and no to the International Criminal Court.

MOST PRESIDENTS RETREAT to the bully pulpit after suffering a setback, but George W. Bush has done the opposite. Following the Jeffords defection, President Bush went down into the trenches, conducting detailed negotiations with members of Congress, and visiting the Capitol building to personally move legislation.

This has yielded some startling victories. The Bush administration seemed to have painted itself into a corner on the patients’ bill of rights, but it is now likely to get a bill it can live with.

HALF A CENTURY AGO it was plain which way democracies were heading: left. In the United States, the Democrats held the White House for the nineteenth straight year. In Britain, the Labour party had just created the National Health Service and nationalized the commanding heights of the economy. Europe’s Christian Democratic parties were creating welfare states hardly less ambitious than those advocated by their social democratic rivals.