In the vocabulary of politics, there is no word more popular than “we.†It is the favored voice of campaign proclamations, the fulcrum of almost every speech on the stump.
But it is also a word with varied, and even contradictory meanings. At the heart of political debate today, a struggle is raging over which definition will prevail in the years ahead, not only in the United States but across the face of the Earth.
Put simply, the choice is between an expansive “we†that accepts the reality of an ever-shrinking world – and a “we†so narrowly defined that it effectively means “people just like me.†At the moment, this debate translates into a Jekyll-and-Hyde planet that is globalizing and building walls at the same time.
THE NEW XENOPHOBIA
The signs of that tension are unmistakable, as glaring at the level of neighborhood life as they are in macro-economic figures.
In America, the narrow “we’s†chief neighborhood metaphor is the gated community, in which literal walls are combined with legal fortifications to erect defensive barriers around residents who live, act and – most important – think alike. Residential clustering, according to The Big Sort, a recent book by journalist Bill Bishop, is balkanizing American democracy into a fractured mosaic of fearful, isolated stockades. A June article in the London-based Economist profiled “Paulville,†a proposed Texas subdivision limited exclusively to supporters of libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul.
Clustering on an international level, in an era of profound economic and technological enmeshment, is no less absurd and far more perilous.
North America, East Asia and Europe are all currently reeling from politically-engineered movements that identify “foreigners†(in China) and “undocumented immigrants†(in the United States and Europe) as sinister threats to national health and welfare. The results include batteries of dubious anti-immigration laws and deportations, punctuated by gate-keeping on a monumental scale: the enormous frontier barriers constructed by the United States and Israel, or China’s incessant efforts to block out any and all “corrupting†web sites on the Internet.
At their worst, such movements can spiral out of control in a way that echoes the violently xenophobic madness of Hitler’s Germany or Mao Zedong’s China.
This spring brought violent mob assaults on presumed settlements of illegal immigrants in Italy, where a new government came to power in April largely on the strength of fear-mongering against “criminal outsiders.†Most of the victims turned out to be innocent citizens of other European Union (EU) nations, with a legal right to live in Italy – a country whose crime rate has actually been falling steadily for two decades.
SELF-DEFEATING ILLUSIONS
The modern stockading of “the homeland,†in physical and political terms, inevitably recalls the Great Wall of China, constructed and endlessly reinforced over nearly two millennia to maintain the purity of the Han race and keep out the yi-ren, the feared and despised “barbarians.†By the year 1450, it stretched more than 4,000 miles. In the end, the wall’s main legacy – apart from the loss of an estimated three million workers killed in accidents, and the fantastic cost of stationing more than a million guards on its towers – was to isolate China itself.
Excluded from the global exchange of of scientific knowledge and commerce for the next five centuries, the planet’s most advanced society was reduced to unimaginable backwardness and poverty.
As China’s experience suggests, walls tend to be dangerous illusions, buttressing empty reassurances. Today, more than at any other point in history, it is the expansive “we†that offers a reality trip – not necessarily an easy journey, but one in which the world is so deeply engaged that there is no turning back without inviting full-fledged catastrophe.
Moral issues can be raised, for and against globalization, although the moral argument for a forcibly narrow “we†ought to be a hard sell in the wake of the Khmers Rouges, the Bosnian Serbs and Robert Mugabe. Nonetheless, it is sheer reality, apart from ethical questions, that makes the most compelling case against walls.
Consider, by way of a staggering example, the market realities of 21st century America. In the very years that a U.S. president has pursued a narrow and often contemptuously go-it-alone foreign policy, the U.S. economy has been internationalized as never before.
By 2007, the United States was annually importing $1,956,961,800,000 in goods and services from abroad. That’s just under $2 trillion worth. In the same year, its exports were worth another $1.2 trillion. America’s foreign trade is now greater than or equal to the entire gross domestic products of Germany, China and the United Kingdom, the third, fourth and fifth biggest economies on Earth.
Economic events have trumped the stockade mentality everywhere, for the blunt reason that the global economy is a commanding reality everywhere – and almost everywhere, its benefits outweigh its price in national sovereignty. The best evidence is provided by Europe.
COLLECTIVE SUICIDE
For 2,000 years, western history was a narrative of bloodshed and aggression framed by narrow, tribal definitions of “we:†chronic warfare among Britons, Italians, Germans, Austrians, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Swedes. Today, thanks in large part to the modern world’s most expansive redefinition of “we,†in the form of the European Union, war among these nations is all but inconceivable.
It would be difficult, in the long view of history, to identify a more signal achievement over the past 20 centuries.
Yet like U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, both of whom endorse the massive fence along the Mexican-American border, European politicians on the right and left alike increasingly sound the ancient rallying cries of emotional nationalism. Within the ranks of the EU, the retro mood has provoked referendum defeats of crucial EU-wide legislation in France and Holland, two of the union’s founding members, and in Ireland, which has risen from the bottom to the top of the European economic heap thanks mostly to EU subsidies.
The blindness of the narrow “we,†however, is even more striking in Europe’s rush to limit immigration. Longstanding racial insecurity over the “menace†posed by newcomers from the south and east – the occidental version of China’s Great Wall phobia – lies at its core. Yet viewed in the light of reality, the return to narrow walled-off boundaries is also a collective act of suicide.
Overall, most of Europe in 2008 has a birth rate so meager that its population will plummet by 50 percent in the next four decades without immigation. Demographers, points out New York Times writer Russell Shorto, have had to invent a new descriptive category for phenomenon – “lowest-low fertility.†Its consequences range from vast labor shortages to a disastrously aging population and the prospect of collapsing social security systems.
The only feasible solution, many experts say, is a policy that broadens the concept of “European†to include startling numbers of immigrants – 60 million in Britain alone over the next four decades, and 188 million in Germany, according to United Nations projections.
Those figures may be frightening to English or German voters, and music to politicians who recognize the electoral value of fear. But like the trade relationship that inextricably binds China and America, and the universal need to keep stride with globalized systems of knowledge and information, Europe’s “lowest-low fertility†is an overwhelming and inescapable reality.
Throwing up walls, clinging to a small comfortable “we,†won’t make those realities go away.
Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5
