The Brexit vote and the rise of Donald Trump indicate that a large number of the British and American voters have lost faith in a globalized world.
Fences, walls and other images of isolation seem to be displacing bridges and networks as the guiding metaphors of twenty-first century geopolitics.
Chastened by economic uncertainties, populist leaders decry remote bureaucrats, caution against asylum-seeking and job-taking migrants, and call for stronger border security to deter terrorists.
But however consoling such visions of self-sufficiency may be – especially to those who have lost jobs to cheaper foreign labour or who fear being overwhelmed by newcomers – they belong to a vanishing world. In 2014, on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the political scientist Alexandra Novosseloff wrote that “Walls give the impression that a nation can recover control over its territory. In a fast-moving world where traditional values and milestones are questioned, walls can seem to provide an easy and concrete answer.” But their solidity is an illusion for “in the long term, the movement of people is always more powerful than the construction of walls.” Novosseloff adds: “This is as true today as it was in the past” for eventually “[a] wall ends its life as a tourist attraction, like the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, or the Berlin Wall.”
Despite the recent backlash our world continues to become more interconnected. In 1960 some 73 million people lived outside the country of their birth; today that number is 300 million. 1970 there were 300 million air passenger flights; today there are more than 3 billion. In 2007 a UN report on the world’s main urban immigrant destinations found more than 20 cities housed more than a million foreign residents, for a combined total of 37 million. These economic migrants range from the lowest-paid labourers to multimillionaire CEOs, and while many of us associate migration with poor countries, half of today’s migrants move from one developed economy to another – especially since the 2008 financial crisis. Americans account for at least six million of this international migrant pool and surveys suggest the proportion of younger Americans (18-24) who plan to emigrate has more than tripled in recent years, from 12 percent to 40.
A wiser response to the vicissitudes of globalization is to ensure, through investments in infrastructure, that local economies feel the benefits of competing within the global marketplace. Asian economies have struck this balance successfully during the last two decades, but America has been slow to address its aging infrastructure. Given the decrepitude of so many of America’s bridges, highways and mass transit systems, not to mention its increasingly outmoded communications infrastructure, Mr Trump’s navel-gazing is not only shamefully parochial, it is economically foolish.
In a recent book the international relations analyst Parag Khanna, writes that “Human society is undergoing a fundamental transformation by which functional infrastructure tells us more about how the world works than political borders.” In this new reality, Khanna argues, “the `de jure’ world of political borders is giving way to the `de facto’ world of functional connections. Borders tell us who is divided from whom by political geography. Infrastructure tells us who is connected to whom via functional geography.” As fading ‘Westphalian’ notions of national space yield to the more fluid concepts of control appropriate to the tug-of-war competition of market states, “functional geography is becoming more important than political geography.” Or, in visual terms, “The true map of the world should feature not just states but megacities, highways, railways, pipelines, Internet cables, and other symbols of our emerging global network civilization.”
Rather than growling at a changing world, Western democracies might borrow a few ideas from the playbooks of their Asian competitors and open themselves up to the world more thoughtfully rather than retreating from it. Recent economic growth suggests that the future belongs those who connect themselves, and their economies, to the wider world and to those who learn how to manage and exploit its vast flows of capital, information, technology and skilled labour. By contrast, those who wall themselves away, in the idle hope that isolation will provide security, will likely lose out to those who have accepted the new reality and are busy building its bridges.
