On a hot summer day in New Delhi, a young resident of the posh area of Greater Kailash looked down from the window of his air-conditioned room.

“I don’t know how people tend to drink lemonade from these carts—it’s so unhygienic,” he said, referring to nimbu paani, a popular tart salty-sweet drink often served in earthen pots. He added that the street vendors’ carts were a nuisance for him when he went out for a drive in his luxury car.

In recent decades, diverse political parties, corporations, and elite citizens have shared a common goal of remaking New Delhi into a “world-class” city. They envision skyscrapers and highways populated by residents whose consumption habits mirror those of citizens of high-income countries. Their efforts are referred to as “beautification” in popular parlance, but they ignore entire communities—entire worlds—on the ground.

Rather than improving life in the city for everyone, the beautification projects funnel public resources into creating a cosmopolitan bubble for a few.

One of the major engines of this so-called beautification is international events. With each high-profile event, government at all levels suspends normal development and planning to focus energy and public money on the international visitors and local elite.

This week, New Delhi will host the G20 summit, the annual gathering of the “Group of Twenty” national leaders meeting to discuss opportunities for economic and political cooperation. It will be held at the modernist Bharat Mandapam, and its theme borrows from a Sanskrit text: “One Earth. One Family. One Future.”

In advance of the G20 summit, India’s federal and state governments have made active efforts to remove signs of “backwardness” in the city to present a “polished” image to the visitors. Their actions have ranged from relocating beggars to sites where their existence will be less visible, and therefore less of a “nuisance” for upper-class and upper-caste urban commuters. These eviction drives have targeted the city’s unhoused trans community and have demolished informal neighborhoods without prior notice or offers of alternative housing—a direct violation of Indian eviction law.

One domestic worker told us about her experience with one of the eviction drives in May 2023. She and her husband, a factory worker, had built a two-room brick house in the Tughlakabad area. When the eviction drive began, she was not at home and only learned of it from her neighbors. “I had to rush home at around 12:30 pm, but by the time I came back, it had already been razed to the ground. We would have left with our belongings had the government informed us of the date. Now, I don’t know what to do or where to go,” she said. Now, the couple and their two children are among some 2,000 people rendered homeless on that day.

These actions are repeating those taken in advance of past international events. Delhi previously hosted 1982’s Asian Games and the 2010 Commonwealth Games. While the Asian Games gave Delhi a much-needed infrastructural upheaval, it happened at the cost of the thousands of migrant workers who sold their rural lands to seek work in the nation’s capital. Similarly, though the build up to the 2010 Commonwealth Games gave Delhi its much-appreciated Metro transit system, the Games also claimed the houses of around 250,000 people through evictions on lands marked for infrastructure.

Although the figures for the G20 summit aren’t out yet, thousands of people have already lost their homes and thousands more are sure to suffer, rendered homeless in a city with a burning housing problem; women, infants, and older people alike.

In addition to the violence of eviction, the suspension of normal urban planning operations also comes at a cost for the working class. While the construction and redevelopment are justified by appeals to beautification and development, their investment is centered in the upper-middle class and elite neighborhoods to the neglect of other areas.

We asked a resident of the market complex and residential area Zakir Nagar in north Okhla, why, in his view, there has not been an effort to develop his neighborhood in the same way there has been with other market complexes in the city. He replied that there could be little to no development in the pockets of land on the banks of the Yamuna River like his because the city government has never formalized the area’s unplanned urban settlements. Because of that, Okhla, which lies around 10 kilometers from the main venue of the G20 summit, stands in stark contrast to New Delhi’s global city aspirations, greeting visitors with potholed roads and heaps of garbage—an unplanned, unsanctioned, un-beautified zone of the aspiring world-class city.

While lower-class Delhi residents are displaced, upper-class residents see the beautification processes as beneficial to the city. “I believe these development projects are good because they make the city look refined,” said the aforementioned resident of Greater Kailash. “We cannot have things both ways: development and ensuring everyone in the city gets a place.” But while he complained about how hawkers hogged space on the roads, he didn’t feel the same way about how he and his neighbors took up space parking their cars on sidewalks.

Governmental authorities condone this sense of entitlement. They often refuse to act when dealing with the elite but move quickly when it comes to the underprivileged. In both processes, they skirt legal processes. India’s Supreme Court noted in 2016 that orders that adversely affect the rich are often delayed in their implementation. Former Supreme Court Justice Madan Lokur remarked, “The Law is different for the poor and the rich.”

Famously, the red walls of Shahjahanabad, the former imperial capital of the Mughal empire, have a splash of the blood of the laborers that worked on them. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to say the same of the Delhi of today. Delhi has been built, developed, and re-developed with the blood and sweat of the very people it was supposed to serve as a home for. And there are reminders of their sacrifice everywhere.

As we beautify cities—dressing them up for a single event in vanity projects meant to attract and impress fair-weather foreigners—we need to be asking ourselves whether “world-class cities” live up to their moniker if they are not equitable and inclusive for all residents. If we are willing to let ourselves be blinded by the dazzle of shiny modifications and ignore everything that has been bulldozed in the wake of it, we are hardly engaging with the world at all.

The post The Human Costs of Building a ‘World-Class’ City appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These aggressive cultural-religious nationalisms have asserted themselves not only in the U.S. and Europe, but also from Myanmar to the Middle East. Because this is a global phenomenon, it raises the question of whether these nationalisms are related in some way to globalization.

Answering the question requires unpacking a paradox. Globalization is marked by a rapid mobility of peoples, mass migrations, the proliferation of diaspora cultures, and a transnational sense of community facilitated by internet relationships. But despite all these exchanges, religious nationalism—which appears to take an inflexible stance towards local identities—persists, and in fact flourishes, in this global environment. Are these forces—globalism and nationalism—working against each other, as the common wisdom goes, or are they somehow encouraging each other?

To look at that question, we have to explore why local loyalties and parochial new forms of ethno-religious nationalism have surfaced in today’s sea of post-nationality.

One superficial answer is that this moment we are in is an anomaly, and it will soon pass. After all, history is poised on the brink of an era of globalization, hardly the time for new national aspirations to emerge. In fact, some observers have cited the appearance of ethnic and religious nationalism in the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, Algeria and the Middle East, South Asia and Japan, and among right-wing movements in Europe and the United States as evidence that globalization has not, in fact, reached all quarters of the globe.

But is this really the case? Is it possible to see these quests for local identities and new nationalisms not as anomalies in the homogeneity of globalization, but as further examples of its impact? In case studies that I have examined, I have found that the paradox of new nationalisms in a global world can be explained, in part, by seeing them as responses to one or more of several globalizing forces.

In many cases the new ethnic and religious movements are direct reactions to globalization—a fear of the “new world order,” as some patriot movements in the United States have put it. Such movements express angst over the loss of identity and privilege in a world that is rapidly becoming multicultural.

Ashin Wirathu, the Buddhist monk in Myanmar who has encouraged violence against the Muslim minority, told me that his stance was simply for the defense of the Buddhist community. “We are a tiny dot of Burmese Buddhist culture at the edge of a sea of Islam,” he said, adding that he did not want his traditions to be forever dashed away. This is a sentiment articulated by Muslims in Iraq and by Christians in the United States as well.

But many of these religious nationalist movements are also responses to a perceived failure in secular nationalism. Though the European Enlightenment touted secular nationalism as the most just and progressive form of political organization for the modern world, this vision is an empty promise in many places. The global political standard—the secular nationalisms of Europe and the United States—look more like vestiges of European colonialism in parts of the developing world.

From Egypt to India, new nationalists have criticized secular leaders for ignoring their cultural heritages and attempting to create imitations of European and American politics for their own gain. The corruption and inefficiency of many of these governments in formerly colonial states does little to assure their citizens that this secular model actually works in their interests. An exasperated follower of the Islamic State in Iraq said to me, “What have we gained from being a secular state?”

This sense of despair over the failures of secular nationalism comes at a time when it as an institution has already been weakened by global forces. Instant, worldwide communication, the erosion of traditional economic boundaries, and the easy mobility of populations across national lines have put secular nation-states under siege.

That vulnerability of the nation-state, in turn, has been the occasion for new ethno-religious politics to step into the breach and shore up national identities and purposes.

These ethno-religious politics come in many forms. Some, like the Islamic State, are transnational and reach across national borders often through the vehicle of cyber networks. Others, like some Christian militants in the U.S., are virulently anti-global, and rail against the “new world order.” In each case, however, while activists may disparage the globalization that has weakened the secular nation-states, it is often that very same globalization that has given the ethno-religious nationalists the opportunity to organize on a transnational scale.

Our current global era is full of ironies and ambiguities, and these movements of new nationalisms and transnationalism are good examples. Though they may appear at first glance to harken to premodern forms of provincial politics, they are in fact postmodern creatures of the global age. Sometime they align with parochial nationalism and sometimes with more transnational ideologies. But in both cases, they stand in a very uneasy relationship with the globalizing economic and cultural forces of the 21st century.

The post How Globalization Engenders Ethno-Religious Nationalism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Before the 19th century, most peoples, in most parts of the world, did not live in nations, but in those larger conglomerations of peoples we call loosely “empires”—or as they were often known, “universal monarchies.” Most of today’s nations are the creatures of imperial collapse: Germany, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Norway, Albania, Finland, Ireland, Sweden—not to mention the former settler populations in North and South America and the former colonies in Africa and Asia—all were once part of larger imperial groupings.

Before they became independent, few of the inhabitants of these places had any real sense of themselves as belonging to nations. They took their identity, instead, from what was known in many European languages as “small homelands:” families, tribes, villages, parishes, ethnic and religious communities, etc. Italy, for instance, only came into existence in 1871 after a prolonged series of wars, mostly against its former Austrian rulers and their allies. All that had previously existed had been a collection of duchies, principalities, and city-states sharing a common religion, a more or less common language, and a more or less imaginary common history in imperial Rome.

So when these places became nations, they were compelled to invent for themselves a collective identity, a past, and a role for the future. They also had to lay claim to political legitimacy. This they did through the principle now known as “indivisible sovereignty.” If the nation was, henceforth, to be the only legitimate unit of human association, then the nation’s power to make decisions concerning the fate of its citizens had to be, in Thomas Hobbes’s words, “immortal…incommunicable and inseparable.”

A nation might be prepared to open its borders, share its resources with other nations, make and abide by international treaties, etc. But the decision to do these things had to rest with the nation alone. This is essentially what “self-determination” means; and “self-determination,” which Woodrow Wilson in 1918 called “the imperative principle for action” in the modern world order, has become the defining feature of the modern nation-state.

While this definition of nationalism seems inward-facing, in its earliest forms, it was also paradoxically cosmopolitan. These new nations—unlike the old empires—were liberal and democratic and did not look upon their demand for self-determination as a threat to, or threatening for, that of any other peoples. Giuseppe Mazzini—the theoretical architect of Italian nationalism and one of the most influential political writers (and activists) of the 19th century—forecast that the future would be made up of assemblies of nations, each sovereign and independent in its own right, but each living in harmony with all the others. The new “nationality” was, he insisted, no “bitter war on individualism,” nor was it intended “to foster a new sectarianism.” “Ours is not a national project,” he claimed, “but an international one.”

Not all, however, thought like this. In Germany, in particular, and under the influence of some followers of philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel, an alternative vision emerged of the nation as the creation of a distinction between “friend and foe.” Nations, the neo-Hegelians insisted, were born out of conflict, and could only survive and prosper through conflict. Every nation, in order to become and to remain a nation, required an “other” against which to struggle.

To put it very crudely: If Mazzini’s nation was built upon some species of love, the neo-Hegelian one was built on hate. If the liberal, Mazzini nation aimed for international peace, the neo-Hegelian one could only flourish in war. And with this came most of the vices we currently associate with nationalism: xenophobia; bigotry; the contempt for other cultures, other religions, even other languages; and the belief that “we” are best and that “we” must always be first.

In Europe, the end of World War I, and the subsequent economic and political disorders, made versions of the neo-Hegelian brand of nationalism seem particularly attractive. As many—most notably Madeleine Albright—have pointed out, the similarities between the situation in the 1930s and the one we face today in many parts of the world can seem uncanny. The fault for every national malaise, from the economy to diminished political status, is laid on the international order—today we call it “globalization”—and on the remote indifferent “elites” who govern what the Italian Fascists sneeringly called “the individualistic liberal state.” The solution for every ill is believed to be to return power to the “people,” and not to the so-called “representatives” of the liberal state.

Inevitably, since the “people” are only ever a figment of the political imagination, restoring their power is believed to require a strongman who would not “represent” but—literally—“embody” them, just as he would also embody the nation: a Mussolini, or a Hitler; an Orbán, an Erdogan, or a Putin or a Trump. But strongmen, like the nation itself, can survive only so long as there exists the threat of an “other” for them to be strong with. And if this “other” does not exist, then, like the Jews in the 1930s or immigrants today, it has to be invented.

But history does not ever really repeat itself. The end of World War II led to the creation of a large number of international institutions ranging from the United Nations to NATO to the International Monetary Fund, from the Arab League to the Organization of American States. The most far-reaching and ambitious of them all began in 1952 as the European Coal and Steel Community, and is now the European Union. Although these institutions are very different from one another, they are all based upon international treaties; and they all attempt to solve the one problem that the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 had also attempted, but so spectacularly failed to solve: how to put an end to war.

The international institutions still have not ended that great human scourge. The source of their weakness is that they are constituted of nation-states that are defined by their sovereignty. But international agreements require nations to be bound by international law, which means sharing sovereignty with other nations. This is a difficult juggling act.

Of course, the post-1945 order worked more or less effectively for a while. The long-awaited World War III never materialized. But the order worked only so long as the threat of war these international organizations had been created to avoid remained. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s removed the presence of what had been, even before 1945, the West’s single great “other.”

After 1990, as the threat of war receded, nations began to question the wisdom of having surrendered their sovereignty to bodies over which they have no unilateral control. The new nationalism which has arisen in the past three decades, therefore, found its neo-Hegelian “other” not in other nations, but in the international institutions themselves. People at the local and national levels saw the international order’s devotion to immigration, free trade, and open borders as, above all, a danger to their “indivisible sovereignty.”

This opposition to the concept of an “international community” is what unites all the new nationalist parties of the far right—and the far left—against the European Union. Hence Hungarian president Victor Orbán’s flouting of EU law; Britain’s suicidal attempt to “take back the country;” Turkish leader Recep Tayipp Erdogan’s rejection of any attempt on the part of the “international community” to limit his authority as an affront to his country’s sovereignty; and Donald Trump’s attacks on NATO, on the EU, and on virtually all international trade agreements. All, he argues, challenge the right of what he called recently “this Great Sovereign Nation” to act unilaterally. “Internationalism”—or, as it used to be called, “cosmopolitanism”—is the new enemy at the gates in all its forms, cultural, legal, racial, political, economic.

In a sense, this always has been so. Cosmopolitans have always despised nationalists, and nationalists have always hated cosmopolitans. But whereas liberal nationalism was an attempt by the world’s Mazzinis to replace cosmopolitanism with a new vibrant international order of nation-states, the new-old neo-Hegelian nationalism seeks simply to destroy it altogether. If the cosmopolitan world we unsteadily inhabit is to survive, Hegelian logic would seem to demand that it find itself a new “other”—something which the nations of the world can only face, as they once faced the threat of perpetual conflict, as a cosmopolitan community, in which the self-consuming monster of national sovereignty would, once again, be laid to rest.

Climate change, perhaps?

The post Why the ‘New Nationalism’ Can Only Flourish in Conflict appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But, as a matter of history, the “Silk Road” was nothing like the Belt and Road Initiative. In fact, in its time, there was no “Silk Road” at all. The Silk Road is actually a modern label in widespread use only since the late 20th century. It refers variously and imprecisely to long-distance trade and interactions across Afro-Eurasia.

In reality, the Silk Road was never a formal network directed by one state power, as the Chinese propose with the Belt and Road. To the contrary, there were numerous mutable trading networks over this period. Some of these dealt in silk, raw and woven. Others did not. Some started in China or Rome, some in Central Asia, India, or Africa—and many other places. Journeys were by sea, by rivers, and by land—or by all three. Sometimes governments were involved in trade, sometimes private traders, and sometimes it was both.

Despite these ambiguities, the Silk Road should not be dismissed as a concept. The Silk Road has acquired a familiarity that has real value, because it has brought regions that are rarely covered in modern historical writing to greater prominence and accessibility. As a result, the term’s growing popularity has encouraged a more global historical viewpoint.

Central to the idea of the Silk Road is the interaction across boundaries, be they chronological, geographical, cultural, political, or imaginary. Those interactions, and the effect they had on individuals and their cultures, are the Silk Road’s real legacy, especially since the vast majority of objects of the Silk Road—everyday and luxury, traded or not—disappeared long ago. Food, wine, and medicines were consumed. Slaves, elephants, and horses died. Textiles, wood, and ivory decayed. Glass and pottery were broken. Only in rare cases did objects survive by design or accident, as in hoards of metal or glass, or in burials when objects were sufficiently valued to be interred with corpses.

Nevertheless, the story of a single object can sometimes encapsulate the rich interactions of the Silk Road. Such is the case with a gilt-silver ewer found in the tomb of a sixth-century general and his wife in what is now northwestern China.

The ewer was probably made at the heart of the Silk Road in Bactria (present-day northern Afghanistan), possibly when the region was under the rule of peoples who had migrated from the borders of China and the steppe, the Hephthalites. The ewer, 14.5 inches tall, shows its diverse background. Made with Sasanian Persian metalwork hammering techniques, it features both literary motifs from classical Greece far to the west as well as influences from India to the south. The biography of this ewer, therefore, covers the whole geographical length and breadth of the Silk Road.

In one sense, the ewer spans 3,000 years. The scenes portrayed on it date to classical Greece, 1,500 years before its actual creation. Since its burial, it has spent another fifteen centuries to the east of its birthplace in northwestern China.

Everything about this piece encapsulates Silk Road movement and interaction. Its form and materials, for example: metalware ewers spread from Rome through Sasanian Persia to central Asia, while in China the form is usually emulated in ceramics. Each place gave its own characteristics to the ewer’s basic form: the square handle of the Sasanians (the last Persian empire before the rise of Islam in the seventh century) or the camel’s head on this Bactrian piece. But perhaps its most fascinating features are the scenes from the Trojan War depicted around the ewer.

The gilt-silver ewer found in the tomb of sixth-century general Li Xian in what is now northwestern China. Courtesy of the Guyuan Museum.

Stories of the Trojan War probably traveled eastwards long before the Silk Road, with people, on objects, and possibly in texts. In the fourth century B.C. the Greek world and its influence expanded dramatically, owing to the campaigns of Alexander the Great (r. 336–323 B.C.).

Alexander reached Bactria in 329 B.C., conquering it over the next two years. On his victory in 327 he took a bride, Roxane, who is usually described by historians as a Bactrian. Although Alexander’s rule did not last long—he died in Babylon four years later—the introduction of Greek language, administration, architecture, art, and culture eastwards into Central Asia was to have a significant influence, the so-called Hellenization of this region. And this influence might have spread further east: Some have attributed to it the appearance of life-size realistic statuary in China—exemplified by the terracotta warriors guarding the tomb of Qin Shihuangdi (r. 221–206 B.C.).

While aspects of the Greek legacy were adopted into Roman culture, and while it is plausible to believe that depictions of the Trojan War were readily understood—and used—by many in the Roman Empire, it is more difficult to understand how such images were viewed by the peoples on what was once the fringes of Alexander’s empire in central Asia. The craftsmen of Hephthalite Bactria who produced this ewer were separated from the story and its birthplace by a thousand years in time and over three thousand miles in space. Even if the episodes depicted on this ewer can be traced back to Greek mythology, they might have been incorporated into some other more local narrative by this time and would have been described by their makers and owners in a way that we would not recognize.

The ewer probably did not stay more than a few decades at most in Bactria before being taken east, to Guyuan in the northwest borders of China. Its new owner, Li Xian, was the son of immigrants. According to the biography inscribed on stone inside his tomb, his ancestors were from the steppe to the north and had moved to the border regions some generations before. By the time of Li Xian, they had taken a Chinese surname. We do not know whether they had retained their own language, or even what that language was. But this biography shows that they had not lost the knowledge of their northern steppe ancestry.

In this way, the ewer demonstrates how culturally complex China has always been, with waves of invaders and migrants, especially from the porous and oft-challenged borders to the north and northwest. We should not assume that people living in China at that time were accustomed to being part of a unified empire or that everyone saw this as the norm or ideal.

In the fourth and fifth centuries, northern China, including western areas into the trade routes and along the Hexi corridor, was under the rule of proto-Mongol Xianbei, who also came from the northern steppe. Around the time Li Xian was born, the Xianbei were ruling from Luoyang on the Yellow River, but their empire was in trouble. Rebellions in the north and battles between competing factions led to the empire’s division in 534. One of the reasons given for this was the growing divide between the regional rulers in the north, who still retained their contacts with the steppe, and what these rulers saw as the increasingly distant and sinified Xianbei elite in the Luoyang capital.

As a military commander posted to frontier stations, Li Xian would have traveled considerably, and many of his travels would have taken him along the trade routes of the Silk Road as well as to the capital to give reports and receive orders. In the year 525, a Hephthalite envoy passed through Guyuan en route to Luoyang; he was accompanied by a lion, one of his diplomatic gifts. This was not a unique gift: Lions were presented to the Chinese court by Tocharians in the seventh and eighth centuries, and one sent from Samarkand in 635 received an imperially commissioned rhapsody in its honor. Li Xian would have been only a young man in 525, but given the status of his family, it would be expected that they would have entertained the envoy during his stay and possibly they received the ewer as a gift.

How did Li Xian see and use the ewer? Was it an exotic piece brought out for formal banquets, filled with local grape wine for his guests and intended to reflect his status and cosmopolitanism? Or was it used at less formal occasions—or not used at all?

For all we know, he might have acquired it only shortly before his death and never put it to use.

These are tantalizing questions but ones on which we can only speculate. The same goes for what Li Xian made of the design on the ewer. Did he know anything of the Trojan War story, even if it had become assimilated into local myths? Or was the piece interpreted as depicting another local story? Or not interpreted at all, just seen as an attractive or an exotic design?

Not all people ask questions about the world around them and the objects they encounter. Indeed, perhaps this ewer held more interest and value to his wife: theirs was a joint tomb. But this object and its journey reflects a time of cultural movement and encounters—the story of the Silk Road—which left an imprint on pre-modern society across Afro-Eurasia and still resonates today.

The post The Centuries-Old Silver Jug That Conjures the Mysteries of the Silk Road appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Not long ago, I found myself looking for answers to that question in the busy Manila district of Makati, in an interview with Melvin Legarda and Joseph Santiago, executives at the organization then known as the Business Process Outsourcing Association of the Philippines. The organization’s mission is to entice businesses outside of the Philippines to outsource back-office work like accounts receivable and medical billing and, of course, customer service and technical support call centers, to the country.

Call centers are big business in the Philippines, and while I was a doctoral student at New York University, I spent time there researching the industry between 2008 and 2013. During that period, the small Southeast Asian nation and former American colony became a top destination for outsourced jobs from industrialized countries, the United States chief among them. In 2011, the Philippines surpassed India to become the world’s capital of call centers.

I am a Filipino-American woman, and I received a warm greeting from Joseph and Melvin (both 30-something men in suits), along with the familiar roster of questions about my social location in the Philippine diaspora: Was I born in the U.S.? Are my parents both Filipino? Do I speak Tagalog? As our interview progressed, however, it was clear that Melvin and Joseph regarded it as just another opportunity to market the Philippines as a high-quality source of call center labor for companies looking to outsource jobs to a low-cost, offshore location.

In a small conference room filled with motivational posters and ample air conditioning, Joseph and Melvin enthusiastically explained that it’s their organization’s job to make sure people around the world know that Filipinos are fluent in English, highly educated, and literate in media and technology.

I was not surprised by my interviewees’ approach to our meeting, but one part of the marketing spiel that really caught my attention was their discussion of Filipino identity. Speaking in lofty, almost romantic tones, they argued that Filipinos possess an innate capacity for empathy, compassion, and general “service-orientation” and thus are ideal for call center work. They went on to explain that Filipinos are also quite “flexible” (read: easy to train and able to multitask), a feature that helps in the world of contract labor, where a worker’s job description often changes according to client demands.

The roots of Filipino identity, they elaborated, were grounded in the country’s experience of colonialism, occupation, and debt. After over 300 years of colonization by the Spanish, Japanese occupation in WWII, U.S. colonization in the first half of the 20th century, and the severe debt crisis of the late-20th century, Filipinos had become a benevolent and compassionate people—which made them perfect for serving a wide range of customers over the phone.

This wasn’t the only time these beliefs about Filipino identity surfaced during my research. I heard them from the dozens of workers that I interviewed and throughout the hiring and training I myself underwent in a call center later. The grip these ideas had on people prompted me to think that Filipino identity was not simply affected by the spectacular growth of the call center industry, but actively constructed within it.

Since the late 20th century, the Philippine state has framed labor flexibility as a development strategy for an economy that was devastated by punitive “structural adjustments” imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

State support for overseas labor migration began in the 1970s, with the Philippine government actively encouraging its citizens to pursue work in the United States and oil-rich countries of the Middle East. In recent years, the number of migrants leaving the country to work abroad as domestic helpers, seamen, nurses, or service industry workers has reached one million annually. Meanwhile, migrant remittances—the money sent back home to support loved ones—have grown to make up roughly 10 percent of the country’s GDP, or $33 billion. In the late 20th century, the Philippines’ top export became its people.

When labor becomes a country’s number one commodity, the identity of the people providing that labor becomes an object of marketing rhetoric—something to brand and sell—especially amid global competition with other national, racial, or ethnic groups for the jobs in question. Such competition compels many Filipinos to search for immutable traits that tell potential employers: Hire us, because you won’t get this kind of labor from anyone else.

Take commercial seafaring on container ships or other cargo ships—a common job for Filipino men. In that industry, workers, state officials, and corporate actors alike evoke the long history of Filipino seafaring—as well as the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade in silver and Chinese goods that the Spanish ran between the Philippines and Mexico—as proof of Filipinos’ fit for life and labor on the sea. Similar dynamics apply to nursing and domestic work. According to Philippine-based employment agencies that try to place workers in jobs abroad, Filipinos—especially women—are naturally caring and tender people, not to mention loyal, cooperative, and compliant.

The rise of offshore call center work follows this basic structure of labor migration but with a crucial difference: Filipino workers are not required to leave the country. Instead, they are employed by third-party foreign companies—Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies, who contract with corporate clients, like Citibank or AT&T, that are looking to outsource customer care or back-office processes. When it comes to paying workers, the call centers have a double advantage: Wages are much lower than what American or British or Australian workers would earn doing the same work, but higher than or comparable to what college-educated Filipinos would earn in the Philippines’ own professional sectors, such as banking or education. High wages and corporate culture make the jobs attractive to young Filipinos, while government and business leaders take credit for bringing jobs to the country—foreign jobs, but jobs nonetheless.

The call center industry takes that same identity branding further, with workers and industry leaders alike saying that call center work reveals three special characteristics of Filipino people in the 21st century.

First, since call center work involves engagement with information technology, it ostensibly shows that Filipinos are prepared for knowledge work and thus the future as a whole. Second, since the work requires the use of mental and social capacities, call centers mark the evolution of the Philippines beyond bodily labor, such as the work done by nurses, nannies, or sex workers. Third and finally, many of my research participants saw the country’s burgeoning call center industry as a clear sign of the country’s rehabilitated status. In the global economy, the Philippines, with its role as call center capital, could no longer be dismissed as the “sick man” of Asia. Indeed, it was a business partner to the United States, rather than a supplicant to other countries.

In this light, the Philippine call center industry was not just an economic pivot for the country, but a cultural fulcrum that could redefine Filipino identity for ages to come.

What could be the danger in that? Shouldn’t exploited and dispossessed people have an opportunity to define themselves?

My answer to this question is yes, but my research in the Philippines revealed many nuances and problems when Filipino identity formation is so closely tied to call center work.

There is a back-to-the-future quality to this new identity. The Philippines, in the 20th century, was seen as an easily exploitable source of cheap labor and resources for foreign powers. The heralding of the call center industry to transcend the Philippines’ reputations as feeble and feminized—and to join the ranks of technologically advanced and more male-dominated countries—is too close an echo of that old reputation. Indeed, this new identity seems to perpetuate the same hierarchies and ideologies of race, gender, ability, and labor which lent the Philippines such a weakened reputation in the first place.

Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, left, observes an agent at the Sykes Enterprises call center in Manila on August 25, 2005. Photo by Aaron Favila/Associated Press.

The new identity also makes other distinctions that are problematic. Industry leaders’ assertions that Filipinos are prepared for high-level knowledge work in call centers devalues jobs done at the lower end of the value chain in centers, such as customer care. Consider the commencement speech given by Juan Miguel Luz, a former dean at the Asian Institute of Management, to the graduates of the University of Saint La Salle in Bacolod in 2013. Luz’s address recognized the city’s emergence on the call center scene but also characterized customer service as the “least-skilled” knowledge-based work, since it involved “simple questions or problem-solving [sic].” Bristling at this description, call center workers criticized the speech on social media, explaining that customer service was worthy work requiring a great level of competence. The protest prompted Luz to issue a letter of apology in a national newspaper, in which he attempted to clarify the range of communication, technical, and emotional skills the job requires.

Luz’s speech helps point out that what we consider a good job is often wrapped up in how we judge work done with our hands, hearts, or brains. There are deeply held beliefs that work requiring one’s body or emotions is inherently less valuable than work that draws on the mind, including the use of technology. The introduction of the call center industry in the Philippines reinforces these beliefs, in part by implying that technology has made the Philippines a stronger country. The industry itself is an outgrowth of massive changes made by the government in the mid-1990s to national communications and tech-related policies, which made it easier for foreign companies to invest in the country’s IT systems. Along with these changes came improvements in the Philippine economy overall—including high economic growth, partnerships with regional economic associations, and achieving investment grade status—that supposedly make the Philippines capable of knowledge work and invulnerable to the predations of stronger countries.

Yet this is a dream in which the bullied join the ranks of the bullies (and that’s exactly the dream that has become a nightmare under the current bullying Philippine president). The future of the call center is not different enough from the past; there is no reassessment of the power dynamics that shape economies and lives. The Philippines has long been and continues to be a source of low-cost labor for the world. Call centers, while providing much-needed work, are unlikely to change these dynamics.

Identity construction can sometimes be seen, mistakenly, as an inherently positive process—especially for a postcolonial country like the Philippines. Deeper change in Filipino identity will require changes in the very structure of global institutions and the distribution of power and resources. Perhaps then, the construction of Filipino identity will no longer be constrained by the marketplace, and more Filipinos can define themselves by their own dreams. Economic necessity can’t be ignored, but it should never determine who people are.

The post Are Call Centers Rebranding the Philippines? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

He knew that the venture capital companies would be ready to open the tap again after the economic slowdown. He also believed that Ooyala was ripe for a big expansion. But Silicon Valley was simply too expensive to try to hire a full staff there.

He was more than a little surprised when the colleague he had asked to assess options around the world came back with the suggestion of Mexico’s second largest city, Guadalajara. “I was originally a little hesitant,” admits Lepe, “given that my parents had left Mexico.”

In fact, Lepe’s parents had grown up in a small town not far from Guadalajara and had left the country before he was born to try their luck as farmworkers in the United States. Lepe remembered traveling back and forth to Mexico as a young child, before his parents finally settled down permanently in California, but he had never seen Mexico as a land of opportunity, much less a place to invest.

Even for most Mexicans, Guadalajara was familiar as the source of tequila and mariachi bands, not technology. Its image was stodgy and traditional, not cutting-edge.

His colleague insisted, though, telling him that Guadalajara had a strong talent pool of young programmers and engineers. Its technology ecosystem was not as mature as those of other cities around the world—including some of those in India and Vietnam—but it was developing quickly.

The tech rise of Guadalajara had taken decades to incubate. Starting in the 1960s and continuing through the 1980s, a number of foreign companies—including Kodak, Motorola, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Siemens—placed some of their manufacturing operations in Guadalajara. This was all about finding cheap labor for manufacturing, and Guadalajara developed a cluster of tech companies that made semi-conductors, printers, and photo equipment, among other basic components of the tech industry. “All the directors of the plants were American,” recalls Jaime Reyes, who joined HP’s Guadalajara operation in the 1980s.

By the 1990s, Reyes says, the management began to change, and he himself became HP’s first Mexican manager in 1994. By the end of the decade, most of the managers were Mexican, and there were Mexican engineers, programmers, and designers working at the plants, even though they still mostly specialized in basic tech manufacturing. Over this period, corporations worked closely with local universities to expand their tech-related courses, and the collaboration paid off by generating local talent. It looked like a highly successful model through which Guadalajara would eventually be able to move up the value chain.

Then it all came crashing down.

China’s entry into the World Trade Organization at the end of 2001 devastated Guadalajara’s tech industry. During the 2000s, many factory and engineering jobs moved to Asia, which suddenly boasted lower tariffs to go along with even lower wages than the ones in Guadalajara. The tech industry could have vanished.

But it didn’t. Instead of folding, Guadalajara reinvented itself as a major center for research and development, programming, design, and other high-skilled tech occupations, building on the foundation that had been laid years earlier. Reyes remembers the moment in the 2000s when HP’s Guadalajara operation produced the first printer designed entirely in the company’s Guadalajara offices. “We inverted the model to become the designers—and Taiwan the manufacturer,” he recalls.

Today Oracle, Intel, HP, and IBM all have major R&D and programming facilities in Guadalajara. Amazon also recently set up its own R&D facility there, and Continental Tires, a German company, produces around 20 patents a year from its local research facility. There is still some low-wage component manufacturing and assembly, but the city is now known primarily for its engineering talent and creativity.

Bismarck Lepe eventually came around to the idea that Guadalajara could be the right place to base most of Ooyala’s operations. While he was relocating to Guadalajara, he met Adal Lopez, a young, aspiring entrepreneur in the city, and he asked him to come work for him for a couple of years to lead Ooyala’s Mexican operations. Adal López really wanted to start his own company, but Lepe convinced him that it was worth his while to learn the ropes in a more established startup.

Lepe’s bet on Guadalajara—and López’s management—paid off. The company became immensely successful, and Lepe eventually sold it in 2014 to the Australian telecom giant Telstra for $410 million. The buy-out came about in large part because of the strength of Ooyala’s Guadalajara operations.

By the time of the sale, Adal López had already gone on to start his own company with support from Lepe and other Silicon Valley investors.

By 2015, Bismarck Lepe was back in Guadalajara with his latest startup, Wizeline, a business solutions company that specializes in integrating databases. Today Wizeline has 300 employees in Guadalajara with plans to expand to 1,200 by the end of the year. Meanwhile, the San Francisco head office remains lean with 25 to 30 staffers.

Lepe has become an evangelist for the benefits that Guadalajara offers for America’s tech industry. “You’re starting to get the second or third generation of technologists who have experience build[ing] scalable products,” he says. “And it’s not only the talented people that are there, but the ones we can attract to live there.” Wizeline now has employees from Egypt, France, Ecuador, Colombia, China, New Zealand, and, of course, the United States working at its Guadalajara offices. It’s easy to get them work visas, something that is becoming harder north of the border. And they love the quality of life in a city that is far cheaper than Silicon Valley but still has great cultural and recreational options.

Lepe is so convinced by Guadalajara that he started a nonprofit, Startup GDL, to promote the city as a tech hub to other Silicon Valley startups. Startup GDL currently has a long pipeline of U.S.-based small and medium-sized tech companies looking at putting part or all of their operations in Guadalajara.

But Guadalajara’s future may not lie only in attracting Silicon Valley companies but also in creating its own. Adal López, who ran Ooyala’s operations in Guadalajara, now runs Kueski, his own financial technology startup that provides small online loans—an alternative to both banks and loan sharks. In a country where banks cater mostly to the wealthy and the largest businesses, Kueski fills a niche left unserved by banks by providing fast loans to small businesspeople and the growing middle class. He has found a formula that may well work across many other emerging economies around the world that have similar problems with financial penetration.

Guadalajara is now full of small and medium-sized startups trying to emulate what Silicon Valley innovators once did to build an ecosystem of successful companies and venture capitalists. Among the most consolidated startups, in addition to López’s Kueski, are Sunu, which makes wristbands for the visually impaired, allowing them to gauge the distance of nearby objects, and Unima. Funded by both private investment and the Gates Foundation, Unima’s technology—designed to do medical testing in remote areas that lack doctors—may one day find its way not only into parts of Mexico, but also to Central America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

When you visit, Guadalajara still has the feel of an overgrown provincial town, where you can wander through cobblestone streets past colonial churches on a quiet weekend afternoon. The city—like all of Mexico—remains firmly anchored in its past, at the same time it’s starting to build a new vision of its future. Sometimes it feels conservative and traditional, and at other times, innovative and entrepreneurial, a quirky combination that highlights the underlying tensions as Mexico moves from an inward-looking country to one that is global and outward-focused. And the modern, dynamic economy built on technology innovation still co-exists with massive inequality, pervasive graft, and enduring poverty in many parts of the country—and in Guadalajara, too.

But things are changing. In perhaps one of the signs of the times, Guadalajara three years ago elected a former journalist as the city’s first independent mayor, defeating the traditional political parties along the way, as well as a 26-year-old independent congressman, who mounted his campaign largely through social media. On July 1 this year, if polls are right, the mayor will likely be elected as the state’s governor, and the congressman will become one of its senators, both signs of the willingness to try new paths in Guadalajara and its surrounding area.

Bismarck Lepe has no illusions that everything in Guadalajara is perfect. He knows that corruption and the lack of upward mobility, some of the issues that drove his family to leave, are still a major problem there and throughout Mexico. But Mexico offers more spaces where creativity and innovation can thrive, and he’s willing to bet on these, especially in Guadalajara. “This is definitely not my parents’ Mexico,” he says.

The post Guadalajara’s Transition From Tequila to High Tech appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On this particular day in 2007, a commercial showed a young boy playing soccer at a glittering sports academy called Aspire in the tiny ultra-rich desert kingdom of Qatar. I’ve been a soccer fan my entire life. I started running around the pitch as a five-year-old and had the pleasure of playing at Princeton under future U.S. national team coach Bob Bradley. So when I got home from the gym, I Googled “Aspire Academy” to learn more.

I was surprised to discover that Aspire, a state-owned sports academy built at a reported cost of over $1 billion, had launched the largest talent search in soccer history earlier that year. They were, in effect, looking for unicorns: those rare young players who can excel at elite international soccer. I would eventually join the search and learn much about both the sport and the nature of talent itself.

The program, called Football Dreams, was bankrolled by one of Qatar’s richest men, Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani, a member of the country’s royal family. It was led by Josep Colomer, a former youth director at FC Barcelona who helped launch the glorious career of Argentina’s Lionel Messi.

In 2007, Colomer and his fellow scouts held tryouts for more than 400,000 13-year-old boys in seven African countries as they looked for soccer’s next superstars. Out of this pool, they chose the best two dozen players and flew them to Doha where they were scheduled to participate in a weeks-long final tryout at Aspire. The plan was to select a handful of the best kids and train them to become professionals at the biggest clubs in Europe. Aspire presented Football Dreams as a humanitarian program, but many people suspected the true goal was to lure these boys into playing for Qatar’s national team since the country lacked the population to produce world-class players on its own.

A boy takes a shot at Ibrahima Dramé’s soccer school in Ziguinchor. Photo courtesy of Sebastian Abbot.

Soccer has long been called the global game, but the program took globalization to an almost absurd new extreme. Where else could you find a Spanish scout working for a Qatari sheikh hunting for African players to send to European clubs and possibly one day the World Cup?

I flew to Doha in January 2008 to spend a few days with the African boys while they were at Aspire for their final tryout. I tried to make sense of what I found and wrote an article about the program for the AP.

Years then passed as I moved to Islamabad to cover Pakistan and other parts of the world. I embedded with U.S. troops battling the Taliban in Afghanistan and spent time with Libyan rebels waging war against Qaddafi. But Football Dreams stayed with me. I always wondered what had happened to those talented African boys I spent a few days with in Doha. I was intrigued by whether Qatar would find soccer’s next superstars and what the country’s motivations really were.

In 2014, I decided to leave my job at the AP to write a book about Football Dreams. The program had become even more fascinating over the years as it expanded outside Africa and held tryouts for millions of boys. Qatar also bought a club in Belgium to serve as a farm team for these players as they sought to complete the journey from the academy to the world’s top clubs.

My research turned into a four-year odyssey that took me to 10 countries across four continents. I spent months in West Africa visiting the towns and villages where the boys came from; stood on the sidelines of the same dirt fields where they played growing up and were spotted by Qatar’s scouts; and even hitched a ride with a Nigerian militant to visit a small fishing town where Colomer hoped to find the next Messi.

The inside of a shop that specializes in repairing soccer cleats in Kaolack, Senegal. Photo courtesy of Sebastian Abbot.

In Qatar, I raced across sand dunes in a 4×4 with new Football Dreams recruits while they were in Doha for their own final tryout. In Belgium, I bellied up to bars in the small town of Eupen to hear what locals thought about the fact that their team, the Pandas, was now owned by an Arab country they knew little about and filled with African teenagers.

Along the way, I realized that while the program represented the extreme edge of soccer’s globalization, it was indicative of how much more international the sport has become in recent years. This is especially true at the youth level. When Messi first showed up at Barcelona in 2000, it was extremely unusual for the club to contemplate taking a 13-year-old boy from Argentina into its famed academy. A few years earlier, accepting a kid that age who lived near the club would have provoked debate. But as the hunt for global soccer talent has accelerated, teams have started focusing on younger and younger players all over the world.

One of the other big takeaways was just how difficult it is to identify which kid has the potential to become a star—even for experienced scouts like Colomer, who know what to look for. They understand that physical traits like size, speed, and strength will tell them relatively little about a player’s potential. Even technique has its limits. The most important factors are mental ones, like game intelligence and personality, but these are the hardest to measure. As a result, the success rate of picking kids who make it to the sport’s top level is incredibly low, even at the best academies. Only one-half percent of the kids who join a Premier League academy in England at the Under-9 level end up making it through the years to the club’s senior team. That’s one in 200 players

A player traps the ball during a pickup game on the beach in Senegal’s capital of Dakar. Photo courtesy of Sebastian Abbot.

That hasn’t stopped clubs from aggressively recruiting kids as young as five years old. Much like venture capital investing, the money made from one spectacular success, or saved by not having to buy an equivalent player, can make up for a high number of failures. But kids aren’t companies, and there’s a serious personal cost for the thousands who don’t make it. Plenty of players who are identified as the next big star at a young age dedicate thousands of hours to training and then watch their career prospects peter out over the years. Along the way, players are forced to sacrifice time with family and often end up neglecting their schoolwork. Many struggle to find a new path when a professional career doesn’t work out. Of course, there can be real benefits to academy life as well: camaraderie with teammates, learning the importance of hard work, and so on. But the sting of failure can be painful and lasting.

Unfortunately, that proved true for many of the Football Dreams players. They all believed they were destined to become stars in Europe. After all, they had been marked for greatness in a process that was more than a thousand times more selective than getting into Harvard. They also had a rich Arab sheikh in their corner. But even then, only a fraction succeeded in living out their dream and making it to major European clubs. The game is just that hard. Many of the others ended up playing at low levels in Europe, returning to Africa, or washing out of soccer altogether. Those who watched their dreams fade away often complained that Aspire didn’t do enough to help them find a new way forward.

This is the harsh reality of international soccer. It’s littered with broken dreams. Even so, the supply line of young dreamers will continue, especially from many places in Africa where making it to Europe can seem like the only way up and the only way out. It may be a nearly impossible dream, but for many of them, the away game seems like the only game worth playing. They don’t focus on the 99 percent chance of failure. They see the one percent chance of success.

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These were all challenges of the ancient world—times and places far removed from the 21st-century United States. But on a cool summer evening before a packed audience at the outdoor amphitheater of the Getty Villa, three scholars found some surprising parallels between that distant era and our own, as they pondered the question, “What Can the Ancient World Teach Us About Globalization?”

Leading off the Wednesday night Zócalo/Getty Villa “Open Art” event, moderator Margot Roosevelt, an economy reporter for the Orange County Register, cut straight to the chase, asking the panel of experts what is the single most significant thing we can learn from past civilizations about globalization.

Roger Bagnall, a classics scholar at New York University, replied that, because ancient governments were not democratic, “they had a whole lot less trouble with globalization than we do.”

Grant Parker, a classical philologist at Stanford University, cautioned that, because history tends to be written by the victors, we need to reconstruct more stories of people in ancient times who were unrepresented and oppressed, if we are to make full sense of remote eras.

The hour-long event touched on several issues that were as complex and thorny in the globalized ancient world as they are today: identity and assimilation; the role of language in shaping consciousness and asserting power; and the tug-of-war between emerging global powers, eager to put their mark on the map, and decadent older powers seeking to find (often darker-skinned) scapegoats for their troubles.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse, a scholar of globalization, development, and cultural anthropology at the University of California Santa Barbara, emphasized the importance throughout history of cycles of trade expansion. In the ancient world, empires at the height of their power saw expanding commerce as beneficial, while empires in retreat tended to pull back from trade, he said. That phenomenon can still be seen today: “As America retreats, China advances,” he said.

Back when all roads led to Rome, Carthage, or Constantinople, trade helped speed not only the flow of grain, olive oil, and wine to new markets, but the flow of thought as well.

“Often, ideas went on the same boat as commodities,” Parker said, citing the example of the cult worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis.

But, Roosevelt asked, did circulating ideas across borders sometimes produce a backlash? Bagnall replied that the Romans initially pushed back against some of the new ideologies and new gods. But, in other cases, they gradually ingested and assimilated these upstart deities and newfound ways of doing things, he said.

Mastering the lingua franca of the day was another way to profit from globalization in the ancient world. Parker said that having command of Latin could give a subject of the Romans entry into the empire. Bagnall countered that, while a large part of the Roman Empire actually spoke Greek, the Romans tended to take a dim view of Syrians partly because “they were funny and they talked differently and they ate different things.” Juvenal, the Roman satirical poet, was perhaps the most famous complainer about Syrian migrants.

For Pieterse, one of the essences of globalization is connectivity, which requires both hardware (tradeable goods, transportation) as well as the “software” of ideas. Once upon a time, he observed, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Confucius walked the earth as near contemporaries, spreading philosophies that helped humans to establish “wider identities beyond the tribal and local.”

(You can read more about it in Pieterse’s most recent book, titled Multipolar Globalization: Emerging Economies and Development, which at one point he plucked from his satchel and displayed, to the amusement of the audience and his fellow panelists. “This is a commercial break,” Bagnall deadpanned.)

Long before there was any talk of Brexit, trade deficits, lost domestic jobs, or currency manipulation, some ancients believed that globalization mostly benefited elites.

Yet, Bagnall said, although it’s true that Roman elites benefited considerably from globalization, so did many poor people who migrated to places where they found better work.

“But we don’t hear about them because they didn’t write books,” Bagnall said.

Roosevelt asked whether climate change affected antiquity by prompting mass migrations, as it has begun to do in our time. Is there evidence that climate change might even have sparked wars? Bagnall says it’s difficult to pinpoint whether climate change could have caused a clash between, say, the Greeks and the Persians. But the records do indicate that droughts, which at times prevented the Nile from having its rejuvenating seasonal floods, caused harm to the Roman Empire.

During the question-and-answer period, several audience members probed the panel about additional parallels between ancient times and ours. One man asked what pagans would have to say about the way they were treated by the early Christians.

“Nothing very favorable,” Bagnall answered, “but the Christians could reply that they learned their lessons from the Roman government.”

Even now, Pieterse said, the ancient world still speaks to us through its monuments and its works of art.

“The ancient world is teaching us all the time because the ancient world is part of us,” he said.

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Or, as moderator Steven Greenhouse, a former labor reporter for The New York Times put it to a panel that included an economist, an entrepreneur, a labor law scholar, and a business development leader, “Why does globalization get such a bad rap?”

Jerry Nickelsburg, a senior economist with the UCLA Anderson Forecast, pointed out that the data measuring the effect of globalization “are actually really convoluted,” and that it’s difficult to separate the effect of globalization from advances in mechanization, changing tastes and the overall shift to the information age. We’re seeing much more inequality in terms of income and employment, he acknowledged, but much of that inequality is due to a range of factors, many of which go beyond globalization, such as the replacement of workers by robots.

Nonetheless, said Katherine Stone, an expert in labor law at UCLA School of Law, no matter how you measure it, it’s clear that in globalization, “there are winners and losers, and the losers haven’t been adequately compensated or supported.” That could change, she said, with a shift in social policies and economic programs “that might make them winners as well.”

For entrepreneur Kati Suominen, the solution can be found in the work of companies like her own Nextrade Group, which she founded to help governments and corporations optimize public policy and lending, to support trade and digitization. She argued that the digital economy, which enables anyone to open a virtual shop on eBay, for example, is the path to creating new and sustainable livelihoods for displaced workers, as well as opportunities for people new to the work force. “Do we want an America that protects workers whose jobs have been taken over by robots,” she asked, or an America that supports workers who use their ingenuity to get ahead in the new economy?

Yet, Greenhouse pointed out, in Germany, which is in theory a more globalized nation—with more of its Gross Domestic Product going to trade—globalization is not vilified as it is in America. He observed that “one reason is we do not as a nation do enough for the losers in globalization.” What prevents us from providing more support? he asked.

Part of the problem is America’s wrongheaded assumption that we’re “number one,” said Stephen Cheung, president of the World Trade Center Los Angeles. “Number one in what? Obesity?” Americans who insist on the nation’s primacy when our fate is so deeply intertwined with that of other nations, he said, are chasing a past that no longer exists. In the meantime, he said, we run the risk that “other countries will take off without us.”

Another issue, said Nickelsburg, is that “we treat all industrial workers who lost their jobs the same.” In fact, there is a great difference between a 30-year-old prepared to move into the new economy and other workers who “are like Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath,” Nickelsburg added.

The key to turning around perceptions about globalization is in tending to these displaced workers, said Stone. When workers’ well-paid union jobs vanish in places like Detroit and upstate New York, replaced by low-compensation service jobs, that’s not an acceptable outcome, she said. “There’s nothing in the nature of the universe that says being a home health aide has to be a bad job,” she said. The solution lies in changing labor laws to enhance unionization and workers’ collective bargaining power, and offering substantial retraining opportunities, “so when they get new jobs, the jobs are better than the jobs they lost, rather than a steady decline.”

Whoever the “winners” and “losers,” and whatever the path to a better future, the panelists agreed that America should not turn its back on globalization. “There is no case in the economic history of the world where protectionism has improved the lives of the country,” Nickelsburg said.

During the Q&A, one audience member asked whether globalization had negatively affected access to education, which spurred the panelists to remark on both the value of an educated workforce and to lament the lack of support for broad-based improvements in education.

“The critical issue for the 21st century is workforce development and education,” Nickelsburg said. With technology changing the world, lifelong education—keeping up with the changes in technology—is “the most critical issue for a globalized world.”

Yet, Greenhouse noted, “as inequality has increased, the people on top seem reluctant to fund better education.”

The post Globalization Doesn’t Have to Be a Winner-Take-All Deal appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There have been times over the past few decades when I’ve considered this “gift” a few yards short of insensitive and maybe even borderline teenager abuse. But I’m quite certain Dad’s intentions were no more malicious then than when he took me to see Annie Hall when I was 11.

The essence of Novak’s argument—and to some extent Woody Allen’s classic 1977 rom com—is that individuals can achieve some semblance of wisdom if they stop believing culturally sanctioned sentimental pablum about life (and love) and embrace the essentially tragic nature of human existence.

In my dad’s defense, Novak’s 1970 book was in no way a prescription for fatalism. Rather, it was an exhortation to find enlightenment on the other side of disillusionment. Accepting life’s despair and emptiness, Novak argued, was a prerequisite for becoming a liberated and fully conscious human being.

Novak knew that what he was prescribing was no easy task. “Because it lies so near to madness,” he wrote, “the experience of nothingness is a dangerous, possibly destructive experience.” Having no recourse to the comfort of broadly embraced cultural symbols and benchmarks requires inordinate doses of honesty, courage, and ethical self-reflection.

Novak’s brand of transcendent nihilism was itself a response to a cultural breakdown caused by the rapid social change of the late 1960s. Neither nostalgic for tradition nor putting full stock in the coming of the Age of Aquarius, Novak’s push to accept the void was more a do-it-yourself guide to living in the void than it was a viable call to collective action.

I’ve been thinking a lot about nihilism lately, both because Novak passed away in February and also because I just finished reading Indian writer Pankaj Mishra’s brilliant new book, The Age of Anger: The History of the Present. Mishra offers a sweeping, textured, unified theory of our dysfunctional age and explains what angry Trumpites, Brexiters, and radical Islamists all have in common: an utter fear of the void.

Eschewing facile political or religious explanations for the rise of nihilistic social movements around the world, Mishra points to a crisis of meaning wrought by globalization. He sees the destruction of local, intimate, long-rooted systems of meaning as the opening of a spiritual Pandora’s box within which lies infinite doubt and disillusion. Mishra sees these negative solidarity movements as the psychically disenfranchised targeting what they see as “venal, callous and mendacious elites.” Brexiters railed against liberal cosmopolitan technocrats, as did Trump’s white nationalists. Radical Islamists loathe the hedonism and rootlessness of wealthy Muslims who’ve surrendered to Western consumer society. Rather than advocate for an agenda that would provide them tangible returns, they all cling to nostalgia for simpler times and rally around their hatred for those they see as the winners in a new world order.

In Mishra’s view, this new world order isn’t simply neoliberal capitalism allowing money, goods, and services to flow unimpeded across the globe. It’s also the attendant ideal of liberal cosmopolitanism first advocated in the 18th century by Enlightenment thinkers like Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Voltaire, and Kant. It’s the belief in a universal commercial society made up of self-interested, rational individuals who seek fulfillment.

Theoretically, modern global capitalism liberates individuals from the constraints of tradition, and encourages them to move about freely, deploy their skills, and fulfill their dreams. But the burdens of individualism and mobility can be as difficult to carry for those who’ve succeeded in fulfilling that modern vision as for those who cannot. A decade ago, one study found that a disproportionate number of Muslim militants have engineering degrees, a prestigious vocation in the developing world. So, while accepting the conventions of traditional society may leave a person feeling as if he or she were less than an individual, rejecting those conventions, in Mishra’s words, “is to assume an intolerable burden of freedom in often fundamentally discouraging conditions.”

What concerns Mishra most is that when personal freedom and free enterprise are conflated, the ambitions released by the spread of individualism overwhelm the capacity of existing institutions to satisfy them. There are simply not enough opportunities to absorb the myriad desires of billions of single-minded young people. As Mishra sees it, today’s nihilistic politics are themselves a product of the sense of nothingness felt by growing numbers of uprooted outsiders who’ve failed to find their place in the commercial metropolis. “A moral and spiritual vacuum,” he writes, “is yet again filled up with anarchic expressions of individuality, and mad quests for substitute religions and modes of transcendence.”

Despite his call to harness the experience of nothingness, Michael Novak duly warned of its dangers and potential for destructiveness. Unfortunately, his exhortation to lean in and embrace the void strikes me as about as helpful to frustrated millennials as it was to me when I was an angst-ridden teenager. The answer to today’s nihilistic political movements clearly isn’t more hyper individualism. Nor is a violent return to a traditional past realistic. No one knows how to escape from our current global age of anger. But I suspect that whatever answer there might be will first require us Western liberals to admit that we have finally reached the limits of the Enlightenment’s cult of secular individualism.

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