LOCAL-TO-GLOBAL THINKING FOR THE INTERNATIONALLY MINDED
BY TIM RIDOUT
Not long ago, “Think Globally, Act Locally” was a popular phrase that appeared on yard signs and bumper stickers in America. It was a mantra for environmentalists and globalization proponents of many stripes. It can still be found, but it is not the catchy meme that it once was, and a pessimism has set in about globalization as envisioned in the 1990s. Many early promises have not been realized, and certain scenarios that labor leaders and some strategic thinkers warned about have instead come to pass.
With the past four years of greater American retrenchment in mind, what would a reincarnated version of this concept mean for the 2020s, encapsulated in the phrase “local-to-global”? Now that the pillars of the past 30 years of globalization are contested and the nation-state as the primary building block of the international system is reasserting itself, what are we as globalists and internationalists to do? Do we dig in our heels and fight every step of the way, or do we concede that maybe some of our theories were wrong and that to preserve an internationalized world society we have to give greater deference to nation-states in managing human affairs and let some institutions fade or expire?
As Senator Ben Sasse recently put it, “Right now, many Americans think the choice is between retreating or clinging to every existing institution with a death grip. That’s a false choice.”
Where Did We Go Wrong?
In elite circles, we were aware of troubling trends. In the run-up to the 2016 election, I was working at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a Washington, D.C., think tank focused on foreign policy research, grant-making, and advocacy. We frequently debated the major issues of the day with visitors from major American and European cities, and amongst ourselves.
Aside from mega trade deals and pressing issues such as terrorism and the migration crisis, growing economic inequality in Europe, North America, and other developed nations was a common topic. But if we are being honest with ourselves, most of us failed to appreciate the urgency of those trends for people feeling the daily crush of living paycheck-to-paycheck while working conditions visibly eroded, with little hope in sight.
Anne Case and Angus Deaton have documented why the trends of economic inequality have led so many Americans to give up on life entirely in their book Deaths of Despair, but none of this needed documentation for people already living it. We certainly cared, and many of my colleagues were doing their best to keep issues of poor working conditions, unpaid interns, and the erosion of the middle class on the radar, but when I departed we still had not gotten around to paying our own interns for their administrative work, as if they were lucky just to be in our esteemed presence rather than a necessary part of our labor force that enabled us to hold as many events as we did.
This is not intended as an accusation. It is a statement of fact and a description of a certain mindset, and it was common throughout Washington, D.C., foreign policy non-profits and multilateral institutions. Those of us who are public figures in important institutions with at least a modicum of influence over the direction of our nation’s foreign policy must be able to endure some direct criticism of the sort our elected officials endure daily.
In this vein, the authors of “A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate” make many points in their response to a letter published by Harper’s Magazine during a summer of much letter-writing. They mention the factual circumstances of unpaid interns at Harper’s, which is a broader practice and is relevant to understanding the persistent problem of income inequality and an unrepresentative demographic sample comprising America’s elite, which can lead to blind spots in our understanding of how our own society works.
If we are to claw our way out of a downward spiral of mutual recriminations and hyperbole, we have to be able to talk about where things went wrong and why many Americans have actually lost faith in our global leadership role.
If an independent source of wealth is necessary such that one has to be able to work full-time without pay for four months just to get a foot in the door, any honest social scientist would identify that as a criterion that leads to selection bias in favor of those who are already at least modestly economically well off, regardless of their talents and work ethic compared to other potential applicants. It does not mean one is obligated to care or address the selection bias, but analytical rigor would require acknowledging that truth. But serious debate of specific organizational decisions and public policies through which inequality persists rarely made it into our intellectual discussions of the aggregate figures and trends regarding income inequality.
If the problems identified in the “More Specific Letter” did not run deep, why would logistics and program staff at the National Democratic Institute have formed a union? I did my share of conference-organizing, travel, logistics, and preparing briefing books during eight years in Washington’s international scene and it can be grueling, burn-out work, especially in an era of smartphones, short attention spans, and poorly defined boundaries between public and private space, between work and leisure time.
To be clear, I have deep admiration for the German Marshall Fund and its mission. I met some of the best colleagues I have ever had the privilege of knowing while there. My purpose here is not to trash specific organizations. Readers should be grateful to organizations like NDI for permitting candid discussion of internal dynamics with the press so the public has a better understanding of the points of contention within internationalist foreign policy organizations.
My point is to say that if we are to claw our way out of a downward spiral of mutual recriminations and hyperbole, we have to be able to talk about where things went wrong and why many Americans have actually lost faith in our global leadership role, not caricatured finger-pointing versions of events that deny relevant empirical truths that have already been brought to the public’s attention by serious thinkers in what certainly look like petitions for redress of grievances to me.
The Local-to-Global Frame
With this brief recognition of some criticisms and points of friction as background, what does local-to-global mean in today’s political environment? Does it mean encouraging Americans to keep other people around the world in our moral imagination and striving to lead by example better than we have been doing in recent years? Maybe it means attempting to rigorously trace and explain to the public the empirically verifiable impacts of global interconnectivity such that we can better understand how a virus or disinformation spreads around the planet? Or how supply chains bring our favorite fruit from a farm in Chile through ports, distributions centers, and warehouses to our local grocery store?
This is devilishly difficult to do with a meaningful degree of accuracy and requires investing more time in investigative and research activities, but perhaps regularly presenting a more clear and comprehensible picture to the public of the routes traveled by both the positive and negative manifestations of globalization could support a local-to-global way of thinking.
Local-to-global as a placeholder for a set of ideas could also entail greater discussion about where the locus of power and decision-making authority both is and should be for certain public problems and policy initiatives. Maybe the local-to-global concept should include an effort to better identify how power flows back and forth between cities and towns; provinces and states; nation-states; regional organizations and supranational institutions such as Mercosur, the European Union, ASEAN, and the Gulf Cooperation Council; all the way up to global multilateral institutions such as the United Nations Security Council, International Monetary Fund, World Health Organization, and World Trade Organization. Revisiting the principles of federalism in the United States, of subsidiarity in the European Union, and other variations on the same theme would be worthwhile to support such an approach.
If we want to convince American voters that a globalized world is in their interest, we have to make a better effort to explain why it is relevant to their circumstances.
Much as power flows back to the states in the U.S. federal system when Washington cannot act effectively, it seems appropriate that power flow back to nation-states from international institutions when they cannot act effectively. It does not necessarily mean that these institutions are failing. Their inability to act is often a reflection of the changing circumstances and novel disputes among the people and interests they represent.
For example, the WTO did not fail as an institution in the Doha rounds on agriculture; it could not broker a deal because Europe, the United States, the Cairns Group countries, and other agricultural powerhouses that negotiated through that institution simply could not reach agreement on a policy area of crucial national importance with extremely complex economics, and which is driven by powerful constituencies in their home countries. Maybe the Doha agenda was an untenable proposition for good reasons and the WTO served its purpose by serving as a vehicle through which it could be tested before it was discarded. In the process, nation-states came to better understand each other’s needs and unmovable sticking points on agriculture.
When U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer presented his case in Foreign Affairs about how to make trade work better for American workers, did he “[blow] up 60 years of trade policy,” as one headline put it? How is that even possible when the WTO is only 25 years old? The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade that preceded it was not the same type of centralized institutional arrangement. An alternative interpretation is that he is making the case to push more power back to nation-states because the WTO had become too powerful only in recent years and had begun to take on authorities that more appropriately lay with sovereign countries.
I am not a trade wonk and have not had the luxury of attending or poring over the minutes of the WTO’s regular meetings and mountains of commentary surrounding them. However, given what is known about mission creep and the tendency of groups and organizations to attempt to increase their power—even if for well-intentioned purposes—it strikes me as plausible that Mr. Lighthizer is merely arguing for nation-states to act as a check on a WTO Appellate Body that, in his words “had come to see itself as the promulgator of a new common law of free trade, one that was largely untethered from the actual rules agreed to by the WTO’s members.”
For the Pacific Council and other internationally minded organizations to move forward in this new political landscape where many of our prior assumptions are in question, the local-to-global frame can provide room for fresh ideas.
Our debates as Americans about the relative powers of the Executive Branch and Congress, and between the federal government and states, have been ongoing since their inception and are going through an especially contentious phase today. Is it not appropriate that the relative power of global institutions over the course of time also be contested? Should we interpret this as the beginning of the end of the entire international system that Americans, Canadians, Europeans, Japanese, Australians, New Zealanders, and many others have championed since the end of WWII, a return to the 1930s? Or is this part of the natural ebb and flow in the life of institutions, and they are fulfilling their mandate to international society as they bend to the circumstances of the day without breaking?
None of this is to dismiss criticisms and concerns about the trajectory of globalization, multilateralism, and the institutions that support them. Nor is it to oppose the robust exercise of countervailing checks against excessive retrenchment. I also have concerns, and the rhetoric we hear from many leaders around the world seems intentionally designed to cause panicked responses. But maybe, just maybe, we failed to ensure that the benefits of globalization reached enough people in our own country and inadequately explained why multilateral institutions are still relevant to the average American.
Rarely do I see the high-minded discussions of Project Syndicate or the World Economic Forum make it to local newspapers in tightly worded arguments that explicitly present the current parameters of debate among the elite to an audience that does not negotiate trade agreements for a living. For the unfamiliar reader, it can often feel like walking into a room and catching the tail end of an argument that makes no sense without the backstory. If we want to convince American voters that a globalized world is in their interest, we have to make a better effort to explain why it is relevant to their circumstances and keep them apprised of the relevant debates, intermingled with the local news they already consume.
Getting to Work
If our conversations remain excessively separated into tiers by social class and niche interest area, we will continue to suffer Marie Antoinette moments. Not only has the mutual awareness of each other’s life circumstances grown too thin for a healthy civic life, the weakening of the regular give-and-take of ideas and grievances up and down our societal hierarchy in a structured way has made it harder to make timely adjustments to fixable shortcomings and to redress valid critiques such that American workers see that a globalized system also benefits them sometimes. Without this regular exchange, we miss opportunities that would otherwise be obvious, and we end up treating each other like museum oddities when we stumble upon each other by accident.
Freeing up time for these types of deeper dives and partnerships with local news outlets that could support a healthier local-to-global conversation might require us in the foreign policy community to stop tweeting at each other throughout the day. I recognize that in a few short years this has gone from an obvious statement needing no explanation to a controversial proposition, but there is an opportunity cost in terms of less time doing investigative work and the tendency to get so lost in the weeds of esoteric debates that we forget to present the basic outlines of the topic in question when engaging a broader audience. I tweeted for several years and I regret the time wasted and needlessly harsh words exchanged.
For the Pacific Council and other internationally minded organizations to move forward in this new political landscape where many of our prior assumptions are in question, the local-to-global frame can provide room for fresh ideas. Focusing conversations on institutions and the appropriate locus of decision-making authority for different policy issues could ensure that those ideas are channeled toward constructive criticism and reforms.
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Tim Ridout is a Pacific Council member and a writer living in Cambridge, Mass.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.
