On October 19, the United States and Mexico announced that they had formed a panel to review an ongoing dispute over corn. Though drug trafficking and migration tend to take center stage in the relationship between the two countries, for months, they have been engaged in another type of conflict—a food fight.

In 2021, Mexico’s Supreme Court outlawed genetically modified corn seeds, constitutionally enshrining the argument that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) permanently damage biodiversity, that genetic diversity within crops is indispensable for responding to climate change, pests, and disease, and that corn’s diversity in particular is vital to food security for Mexico and the globe alike. In February of this year, the country followed the ban with a decree outlawing GMO corn for human consumption.

In response, the U.S. has argued that Mexico is violating the updated North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, now called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). Trade officials, Congress, and lobbyists from the U.S. and Canada, anxious over the prospect of lost exports, have painted Mexico’s decree as protectionist and emotional. But Mexico’s insistence on its right to regulate GMOs isn’t just about corn. It’s a major step for rolling back free trade’s homogenization of farming, food, and culture worldwide.

GMO foods became commercially available in 1994, the year that NAFTA took effect. In GMO crops, genetic material from a different organism is inserted into a host plant’s DNA. Biotech firms use the technology to produce desired traits in crops, such as resistance to pests or chemical herbicides.

The overwhelming majority of U.S. corn is genetically modified. GMO methods typically increase harvest outputs, and have helped the U.S. become the world’s leading producer and exporter of the grain. Simultaneously, free trade policies that favor GMO crops have turned Mexico—corn’s place of origin and the center of its genetic diversity—into one of the world’s largest importers of the grain.

Mexico has at least 59 distinct corn races, providing genetic reservoirs that are unmatched anywhere else in the world. For Mexicans, maíz (corn) is the most important food item for calories and household budgets. Maíz is central to tamales, pozole, huaraches, and more, but its importance also goes beyond meals. Corn is a cultural inheritance. Indigenous communities see it planted into origin stories like the Mayan text Popul Vuh and represented in Aztec gods like Cintéotl, who rose from under the ground to protect maíz.

In 1994, however, NAFTA eliminated tariffs protecting Mexican corn farmers, arguing that everyone would benefit from lower-priced U.S. corn.

The reality was different. After NAFTA was enacted, nearly 5 million Mexican farmers—most of whom grew at least some corn—lost their rural livelihoods. At the same time, the agreement opened the door for processed imported corn products in junk and fast food, causing dramatic rises in obesity and diabetes.

Then, in 2006-2007, corn prices skyrocketed when energy markets drove up demand for ethanol, the corn-based energy source, to offset high oil prices. Because Mexico was reliant on imported corn by this time, the country experienced a “tortilla crisis,” with consumer prices for the staple spiking.

The GMO ban was put in motion in 2021, when Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced a phase-out of GMO corn, to be effective by February 2024. Conceding to U.S. pressure, this year’s decree limited its ban to corn for human consumption, such as that used for tortillas or masa (dough). Mexico will still import corn-based animal feed, the primary American export, and can still import other GMOs, like cotton and canola.

In their ongoing and aggressive opposition to the decree, U.S. trade and agriculture officials have argued that there is no scientific basis for banning GMO corn. But the truth is there is no international consensus on GMO safety.

For years, Mexican scientists have raised concerns about multiple types of dangers from GMO corn. For instance, recent research found significant amounts of glyphosate—a herbicide used to farm GMO crops that a World Health Organization agency has determined likely causes cancer—in the urine of Mexican children, including newborns. This is expected to be from consuming GMO corn, either through direct consumption or exposure to the mother’s diet through breastfeeding.

The scientists have also shown that GMOs damage the plants themselves. GMOs disrupt plants’ natural growth processes and their gene sequencing, which determine their morphology and physiology. Because corn is fertilized through open-air pollination, it’s particularly vulnerable: just a light breeze can blow pollen from GMO plants into fields of non-GMO corn, or maíz nativo. Recent plant gene and data research into maíz nativo has shown that the non-GMO crops now have a reduced capacity to respond to threats like drought and invasive species.

Even as Mexico believes it has good reasons for outlawing GMOs, the U.S. says it does not have the right to do so. But there are multiple legal avenues for Mexico to argue that its ban is allowable under the USMCA.

First, the free trade agreement does not require Mexico to import GMOs. Chapter 3 expressly states that the agreement does not mandate any “authorization for a product of agricultural biotechnology to be on the market.” Second, Mexico can point to the treaty’s allowance for domestic controls over food safety. Chapter 9 allows each country to adopt measures it “determines to be appropriate” for “protection of human, animal, or plant life or health.”

Finally, Mexico can point out that Chapter 24 specifies that environmental issues—including “conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity”—are matters of national sovereignty.

In fact, environmental controls were one of the key selling points for the trade treaty to be approved by U.S. Congress. American legislators worried that if Mexican businesses did not comply with environmental regulations, such as over clean air or clean water U.S. exporters would be undercut.

Unfortunately, in the current dispute, the trade pact’s environmental clauses risk being subject to a double standard, with enforcement sought when environmental protections serve U.S. exports but ignored when they seek to safeguard access to a daily staple and maintain the health and safety of Mexican people.

But even as the countries treat these issues as questions of national sovereignty and economics, the ability to regulate GMOs is also of global concern. Corn is the world’s most grown crop, and maintaining its genetic diversity is crucial for food security worldwide: If a bacteria or fungus evolves to wipe out GMO corn, for instance, it’s crucial that there are other strains still available to grow. To preserve the biodiversity of corn—and of other crops—trade agreements must allow governments to craft and enforce policies that promote sustainable farming and safe food.

In this light, Mexico’s decree is an example for trade officials worldwide. After three decades of prioritizing commerce, it’s time to prioritize other aspects of cross-border coexistence and conviviality, like biodiversity, food security, and public health.

The post The U.S.-Mexico Corn Conflict Is Popping Off appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The event, titled “What Would a New Cold War Mean for the World?” and part of a series on global challenges called “The World We Want,” offered a fast-paced look at dozens of aspects of the Chinese-American relationship, from their economic interdependence to their 5G networks, and from their military competition to the mutual hostility between countries that shows up in public opinion surveys.

The conversation also turned repeatedly to the possibility of military conflict of Taiwan, with two panelists suggesting China could move to reunite the island by force with the mainland in the next few years.

The event’s moderator, New York Times associate managing editor Philip P. Pan, who spent much of his career reporting in China, started the conversation by asking to what extent the features of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union can be seen in conflict between the U.S. and China today.

Margaret MacMillan, the distinguished University of Toronto historian and author of War: How Conflict Shaped Us, said that the two conflicts both involved two large powers with global ambitions and reach. “The United States and the Soviet Union claimed to be speaking for a better part of the world,” she said. “We have elements of that in the current tension between China and the United States.”

But, she suggested, it is the differences that matter more. The U.S.-China relationship, MacMillan said, is not as ideological as the old Cold War, and the U.S. has a much closer relationship with China, especially as a leading trading partner, than it did with the economically isolated USSR. Another crucial difference: The U.S. and the Soviet Union were such dominant superpowers that they were able to pressure other countries in the world to take their side, while today’s world is more multipolar, with other major powers having enough autonomy and weight not to be drawn in.

Still, MacMillan cautioned, the fact that the U.S. and China are inherently closer to each other might actually produce more friction.

She recalled that before World War I, Germany and Britain were each other’s largest trading partners; four members of the British cabinet had been educated in Germany, and the British royal family’s lineage was quite German. Despite these elite connections, MacMillan said, public opinion turned hostile in each country against the other as war broke out.

“That is what concerns me today,” said MacMillan, nodding to the increasingly negative public sentiment in China and the U.S. toward the other at present. “The historical record isn’t that reassuring.”

Another panelist, Oriana Mastro, an FSI Center Fellow at Stanford University, warned that popular comparisons of the U.S.-China conflict to the Cold War could produce flawed strategies for dealing with today’s problems.

China, she said, is a profoundly different rival than the Soviet Union in that it is not trying to turn democracies into autocracies, and is not perceived as a military or security threat to other countries. Because China is in Asia, the most dynamic and populous part of the world, “China doesn’t have to be a power elsewhere to be a superpower; dominating Asia is enough, and that’s where it is focusing its energies and its military.”

But that focus on Asia might make this conflict more dangerous in some ways than the Cold War. “The military confrontation between China and the United States is going to happen in Asia,” said Mastro. “This competition is much more likely to turn hot than it ever was with the Soviet Union.”

After Pan asked whether countries would be pressed to choose sides between two superpowers, as in the Cold War, Mastro, who is also a Defense and Foreign Policy Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said that China is not going to form its own bloc because it does not want a coalition forming against it. She referred to writing from Chinese strategists noting that the U.S. already has locked up the best partners—the world’s democracies, and richest nations.

Instead, she said, China is turning its lack of coalition into an advantage in its contest with the U.S. While the American government makes heavy demands of partner countries (such as economic or democratic reform, or providing military bases), China typically asks other nations merely to choose neutrality in the U.S.-China conflict, and to avoid talking about sensitive topics like Hong Kong or Taiwan.

“When countries choose neutrality, when they choose not to take a side at all, in effect, they are choosing China,” Mastro said. “It’s very hard for the United States to build coalitions against China … because we ask so much more.”

Meanwhile, while China is more focused on economic issues than military ones, Mastro warned that the country is using its extensive economic and technological expertise to enhance the lethality of its military. And China’s ability to gather a lot of data through its technological expansion could allow it to target elites in other countries.

For instance, she said, “They could use targeted cyberattacks to disrupt someone’s life who says something bad about Taiwan.”

Striking a much more optimistic tone than the other two panelists, the third panelist, UCLA Anderson distinguished professor Christopher S. Tang, argued that China’s new trade agreement with the European Union—in which China expressed new willingness to cooperate on technology transfer and meeting international labor standards—might provide an opening for less conflict, and more peaceful cooperation between the U.S. and China.

Tang said the U.S. and other countries should say to China, “We embrace you, we recognize your success, but if you want to win respect in the world, you need to become a leader” in protecting the environment, workers, and intellectual property.

More broadly, Tang argued that the rest of the world needs the U.S. and China to set a strong example of peaceful cooperation. He cited four major global problems that threaten both countries that would be easier to solve if the U.S. and China worked together: COVID recovery and global public health, combating climate change, reducing poverty, and caring for the rapidly aging population

“I think there is a window,” said Tang, pointing to President Xi Jinping’s stated commitment, at last month’s World Economic Forum, to solve global problems. “Why not leverage this moment?”

He described the U.S-China rivalry as primarily economic, and compared it to a 50-year-long chess match. He described President Trump’s trade war as a middle game of this chess contest, which had failed to advance American economic interests, and suggested that President Biden could work to “keep it to a draw … so there will be no winners and no losers.”

The Zócalo/University of Toronto virtual event drew a global audience, and it concluded with questions from the YouTube chat room about whether the Cold War strategy of containment applies to China (not really, panelists said), how Canada should deal with China (carefully and in partnership with other countries, MacMillan answered), about technology’s role in the rivalry, and about how the U.S. should respond to any Chinese military aggression, especially against Taiwan.

On that last subject, both MacMillan and Mastro were emphatic that the threat of conflict over Taiwan is more serious and urgent than generally understood, in part because Chinese leadership is losing patience. Mastro pointed to opinion polls showing that a majority of Chinese citizens support armed reunification with Taiwan—and expect it within three to five years.

That could mean we’re heading toward a very hot U.S.-China war.

The post The U.S.-China Rivalry Isn’t a New Cold War; It’s Bigger Than That 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.

Hilarious as this scene may be in the film, it recurs frequently in real life, not simply in classrooms but in many other settings, whenever the subject of tariffs comes up. It is both ironic and unfortunate that many Americans find tariffs too boring to care about when, as our history shows, their most critical consequences—nationally and globally—are often wholly unanticipated.

One of the first major pieces of legislation enacted by Congress after the ratification of the Constitution was the Tariff of 1789, which, with import duties averaging about 8 percent, was meant to raise revenue for the new republic while safeguarding New England’s nascent manufacturing economy. But even then, rumblings in the Southern states about protecting one regional economy to the detriment of another showed that tariffs could become a serious source of sectional friction, and so they did, as overall tariff rates shot up to roughly 25 percent by 1820.

At that point, Northern manufacturers were clearly benefiting from protections against competition with foreign imports, while the Southern cotton, rice, and tobacco planters who accounted for more than two-thirds of the value of all American exports were doubly disadvantaged by the tariffs. Not only were they paying tariff-inflated prices for the implements and supplies needed to produce their crops, but they were also forced to sell them in foreign markets depressed or rendered hostile by American import duties.

The controversy came to a head after the Tariff of 1828 jacked up rates to 50 percent on certain goods likely to compete with New England manufacturers. Though he was then serving as Vice President of the United States, South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun was so outraged by federal laws that blatantly protected the interests of a single region at the expense of his own that he moved to have both the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 declared “null and void” within his state. There were even threats of secession if federal authorities sought to enforce the tariffs. But when President Andrew Jackson secured congressional authorization to take military action, if need be, to ensure collection of the import duties, South Carolina backed down.

At that point, sectional clashes over tariff policies seemed more of a direct threat to the Union than disagreements over slavery. This had changed by the election of 1860, when Republican opposition to further expansion of slavery was the critically polarizing issue, but the party’s platform also promised formidable tariff protections for industry and trade that were likely to benefit the North more than the South. The Republican commitment to tariffs did not falter during the Civil War and became a staple of GOP politics well into the 20th century.

Though proponents lauded tariffs as forces for prosperity and stability, rising rates helped to spark third-party insurgencies by American farmers in the 1880s and ‘90s. U.S. tariff policy also sowed the seeds of revolution abroad.

When the McKinley Tariff of 1890 removed duties on imported raw sugar and granted subsidies to domestic producers, it destroyed the advantages enjoyed by Hawai‘i’s sugar planters under previous preferential trade agreements. In response, the powerful American owners and investors who dominated this industry began to agitate for U.S. annexation of Hawai‘i, which would automatically qualify their sugar for the subsidy and immunize it from future tariffs. Formal annexation would not come until 1898, by which time American-led insurgents had succeeded in overthrowing the indigenous Hawaiian monarchy.

Meanwhile, the stage had been set for the Spanish American War by Spain’s attempts to quash a popular uprising in Cuba. That uprising had been fueled in no small part by the economic hardships imposed by the Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894, which cut sharply into American purchases of Cuban sugar by abruptly restoring import duties of 40 percent.

The Democratic resurgence under Woodrow Wilson between 1912 and 1920 brought lower tariffs and an income tax that made tariff duties less critical to federal revenue. When Republicans regained power after World War I, however, protectionism was again the order of the day.

The Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 was supposed to stimulate recovery from a postwar economic downturn. In reality, its extended duties on agricultural imports actually cost American farmers dearly in already depressed European markets. At the same time, its higher duties on many other imports denied war-ravaged European nations precious income from trade that they needed to boost their economies and repay the U.S. for loans and credits issued during World War I.

The new tariff law made recovery doubly difficult for Germany, which bore the additional burden of making punitively high reparation payments to its former adversaries. The Fordney-McCumber Tariff was hardly responsible for all of Germany’s woes, but it exacerbated the sustained economic distress and public discord that paved the way for the ascension of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party a decade later.

Things got no better at home or abroad when Congress reacted to the onset of the Great Depression with the record-high rates of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930, which confronted already struggling American farmers and manufacturers with yet another round of retaliatory tariffs and depressed overseas markets. Meanwhile, as the value of American exports to Europe fell by 67 percent between 1929 and 1932, a proportional drop in the value of European exports to the U.S deepened the economic uncertainty that made fascism seem less threatening than communism to many, and heightened the political risk of diverting scarce government funds from welfare programs to national defense.

If it was difficult to foresee all the potential ramifications of tariffs nearly 90 years ago, it’s even harder in today’s more complex and intertwined global economy. The increasing mobility of industrial capital and technology and the segmentation of production have substantially reduced the significance of national boundaries or affiliations for major manufacturers. President Donald Trump now proposes to reverse this trend—or at least shake his fist at it—by espousing an aggressive economic nationalism that has already left some corporations pinned down in a tariff crossfire.

The nation’s leading automotive exporter by value is a BMW manufacturing facility that opened in 1994 near Spartanburg, South Carolina, where it now accounts for 10,000 jobs and 1,400 vehicles (primarily SUVs) per day, roughly 70 percent of them destined for foreign markets.

After flourishing for a quarter-century, BMW’s South Carolina operations now seem to face cloudy future. Trump’s threatened tariff on imported auto parts, which account for roughly 70 percent of what goes into BMW’s SUVs, would inflate production costs. Also, roughly one-third of the BMW vehicles assembled in Spartanburg go to China, which has boosted tariffs on American-made vehicles to 40 percent in retaliation for Trump’s increased duties on Chinese imports, forcing the company to announce 4 to 7 percent price increases on some of its China-bound SUVs.

China has long maintained a trading advantage over the U.S. by strategically devaluing its currency in order to hold down the prices of its exported goods. Ironically, since Trump announced tariffs on Chinese imports, the yuan has fallen to an 11-year low against the dollar, helping to keep those imports cheaper for American consumers and, temporarily at least, blunting some of the effects of Trump’s tariffs. The yuan cannot be allowed to fall forever, of course, especially with China’s massive debt bubble threatening to burst. Beyond that, a sustained trade war featuring higher U.S. tariffs on more Chinese goods would take a much bigger bite out of China’s GDP and dampen its growth rate significantly.

What is bad for China isn’t necessarily good for the U.S. or the rest of the world, however. As the largest national consumer of foreign-made products, China has been projected to account for nearly one-third of all economic expansion between 2016 and 2021; so if it should sink into a major recession, the effect on the global economy may be more toxic than salutary.

Smaller “emerging market” economies around the world can be affected more critically by tariffs imposed by major trading nations. President Trump’s ostensible effort to force the release of an American hostage by doubling tariffs on steel imported from Turkey has dramatically accelerated the decline in value of the Turkish lira. This has rattled many emerging market investors, including the Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System for public employees, which is the largest institutional shareholder in a Turkey Exchange-Traded Fund that has lost half its value since the year began.

If Trump’s tariffs are more than a temporary ploy and really here to stay, a depressed market for exports and higher prices for U.S. consumers are the devils we can expect. But, as our history with tariffs makes abundantly clear, it is the devils we don’t expect that might do the most damage, both at home and abroad.

The post Why Tariffs Have Backfired Throughout American History appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Chicago’s rise was so sudden and so astounding that many observers concluded it must have been predestined by nature or God, a view that echoed the 19th-century belief in the inevitability of American expansion and progress known as Manifest Destiny. In 1880, for instance, the former lieutenant governor of Illinois, William Bross, told members of the Chicago Historical Society that, “He who is the Author of Nature selected the site of this great city.” In 1923, in an address to the Geographical Society of Chicago, a University of Chicago geographer, J. Paul Goode, argued that the city’s location made its growth inevitable. His talk was titled “Chicago: A City of Destiny.”

Nature had, indeed, endowed Chicago with a crucial locational advantage: The city sits between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds, making it possible for people working or living there to travel by boat all the way to the Atlantic Ocean or to the Gulf of Mexico. But geography alone would not secure the city’s destiny: Chicago’s growth, like that of many other American cities, was also predicated on government-led engineering projects—and the mastery of our most essential resource, water. Between the 1830s and 1900, lawmakers, engineers, and thousands of long-forgotten laborers created a new, manmade geography for Chicago—building a canal and sewers, raising city streets, and even reversing a river. These monumental feats of engineering—as much as nature—spurred Chicago’s miraculous growth, and provided a model for other American cities to engineer their way to success.

The promise of Chicago’s geography was immediately obvious to the first Europeans who passed through the site in 1673. Fur trader Louis Joliet and Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette paddled up the Illinois and Des Plaines Rivers, crossing a short, but sometimes terribly muddy land route, or portage, to the Chicago River—which, in turn, flowed into Lake Michigan. Marveling at the route’s imperial possibilities because it connected the Gulf of Mexico to territories north of the Great Lakes, Joliet reported to the governor of French Canada, “we can quite easily go to Florida in boat” by building only one canal. Such a canal would link Quebec to the fertile lands of the continental interior where, Joliet advised the governor, there would be “great advantages…to founding new colonies,” thereby expanding the reach of its lucrative fur trading operations.

The French never undertook the canal or fulfilled their imperial vision. But even without a canal, the portage remained a vital, if often unpleasant, route for fur traders. In 1818, Gurdon S. Hubbard, an employee of the American Fur Company, paddled from Lake Michigan up the Chicago River to its source about six miles inland. At that point, their boats had to be “placed on short rollers…until the [Mud] lake was reached.” For three days, the men slogged through the portage. “Four men only remained in a boat and pushed with…poles, while six or eight others waded in the mud alongside…[and still] others busied themselves in transporting our goods on their backs.” All the while, the men were beset by leeches that “stuck so tight to the skin that they broke in pieces if force was used to remove them.”

By the 1830s, Illinois officials, inspired by the success of New York’s Erie Canal (1825) and the Ohio and Erie Canal (1832), began construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which was designed to harness gravity to siphon water out of the Chicago River—effectively reversing the river’s flow so that it went away from, rather than into, Lake Michigan. The bold, costly plan called for making a “deep cut” channel through very tough clay called hardpan. The state began construction in 1836. Within a year, though, the Panic of 1837 struck, and by November 1841, Illinois had largely stopped work on the canal. By 1842, the state’s debt was $10.6 million and annual interest payments were $800,000. The canal—along with spending on a railroad and the failure of the state bank—had plunged Illinois into ruin. In 1843, the state abandoned the canal project, having already spent $5.1 million dollars.

The Chicago River in 2015. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Real estate investors, who had a lot to lose if Chicago’s growth stalled, urged the state to resume canal construction. New York City land speculator Arthur Bronson and a group of Chicago boosters found lenders who were willing to provide the state with an additional $1.5 million to complete the canal. The lenders had one condition, however: To cut costs, the state had to abandon the deep cut for a cheaper, shallower channel. Instead of using the “deep cut” channel and its gravity-fed system to reverse the flow of the river, engineers would use pumps to push a smaller volume of river water into the canal without forcing the river to reverse its course. Crews began digging again in 1845, completing the project in 1848.

Just as Joliet had imagined, the canal transformed Chicago into a major center of trade. On April 24, 1848, the first cargo boat to arrive in Chicago by canal, General Thornton, hauled sugar from New Orleans through the city on its way to Buffalo. In its first decade of operation, the canal carried a staggering amount of freight: 5.5 million bushels of wheat; 26 million bushels of corn; 27 million pounds of pork; 563 million board feet of lumber. With the canal—and later the railroads—Chicago became an increasingly attractive location for manufacturers. Cyrus McCormick, for example, moved his mechanical reaper factory from Virginia to the banks of the Chicago River less than a year before the canal’s imminent completion.

While the canal established Chicago as a major city, it also created problems whose solutions required still more engineering. One such issue arrived on April 29, 1849, when the John Drew, from New Orleans, carried cholera into the city. Within hours of the boat’s arrival, its captain and several passengers died. The disease spread rapidly throughout the city, sending physicians rushing from patient to patient to soothe fevers, cramps, and diarrhea. One-tenth of the city’s 29,000 residents contracted the disease and 678 died.

In swampy cities like Chicago, waterborne diseases like cholera thrived. By 1854, the city had survived epidemics of cholera, typhoid, and dysentery, killing as many as 1,500 people at a time. Though scientists had not yet identified the germs that caused these diseases, even casual observers understood that illness spread in places with poor drainage. In 1850, the newspaper Gem of the Prairie observed, for example, that parts of Chicago were “quagmires, the gutters running with filth at which the very swine turn up their noses.” From the “reeking mass of abominations” beneath the plank streets, the paper contended, “miasmas wafted into the neighboring shops and dwellings, to poison their inmates.” The only solution was “a thorough system of drainage.”

So, in 1855, officials mounted a dramatic attempt to rescue their city with another massive engineering project by hiring Ellis Sylvester Chesbrough, an engineer renowned for his work on Boston’s water system, to raise Chicago out of the muck. First, Chesbrough laid the sewers above the streets, positioning them so that gravity would carry their contents into the Chicago River. He then filled the streets with dirt, covering the sewers and elevating the city’s thoroughfares as much as eight feet above the buildings that flanked them. Many Chicagoans built staircases from the street down to their front doors. Others raised their structures—more than 200— using jacks.

As Chicagoans hoisted their buildings and the city began growing anew, Chesbrough’s sewers flooded the river with waste, causing new problems. The Chicago River flowed directly into Lake Michigan, the city’s source of drinking water. Initially, the volume of sewage was small and lake water diluted its polluting effects, as Chesbrough had calculated. But, when Chicago’s population tripled from 100,000 in 1860 to 300,000 in 1870, the amount of feces, chemicals, and decaying animal matter making its way into the waterways multiplied. The putrid smell of the river became unbearable and pollution began to flow into the city’s drinking water.

It was time for more engineering. In 1865, Chesbrough and state officials decided to manage Chicago’s water pollution by enacting an old proposal: making a deep cut through the Illinois and Michigan Canal and, this time, actually reversing the Chicago River and sending the city’s sewage down the canal, away from Lake Michigan. After six years, on July 15, 1871, throngs of people crowded the riverbanks to see workers chop down a temporary dam separating the river and the canal. The onlookers threw pieces of straw on the river and watched as they slowly began to float toward the canal, and away from their drinking water.

Ever since, Chicago has continued to grow, and most of the time, its river has run backward. In 1900, the Sanitary District of Chicago, a regional government agency, completed the new, deeper Sanitary and Ship Canal, which has largely kept the dirty Chicago River running away from the lake, even as the metropolitan area has grown to 9.5 million people today.

The reversal of the river marked a crucial juncture in the story of Chicago’s miraculous rise. It was the culmination of a series of great engineering projects orchestrated by the state that created the conditions—sewage, drinking water, and a route between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins—for Chicago to become the great industrial metropolis Carl Sandburg described in 1914: “Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.”

Chicago’s history confirms the old adage that geography is destiny. But the city’s experiences also suggest that geography is not just a fixed fact of nature, as Bross and Goode had implied; geography is also something continually made and remade by people and governments, a thing as fluid as water itself. Chicago’s model of growth—based on government-led water engineering projects—was duplicated by other cities—such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas—in the 20th century. This history of engineering-led growth in Chicago and other cities is both inspirational and a cautionary tale for our current age, when climate change demands that we engineer our cities to keep rising seas at bay. If geography is destiny, Chicago’s history offers the hope that fate is still partly in our hands.

The post How Chicago Lifted Itself Out of the Swamp and Became a Modern Metropolis 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.

“So, let’s cook him,” the men declared.

Tall Boy, who worked as a cook out in the mining camps, persuaded the rum shop owner to let him use the kitchen in back. He softened onions in coconut oil while he slit the belly of the iguana, cleaned out its guts, and chopped up the carcass. After sprinkling a generous helping of curry powder over the onions, he threw the meat in the pot followed by a glug of cane spirit to counter its musty odor. He set a pot of rice to cook while the curry was simmering and the men drank yet more rum. When the food was ready, they eagerly wolfed it down and then sauntered off to doze away the afternoon.

The story of how a group of Afro-Guyanese diamond miners came to be making a bush-meat version of an Indian curry begins in 1627, when a band of 50 British men founded the colony of Barbados, on the uninhabited island.

These colonists experimented with growing tobacco, cotton, ginger, and indigo as they sought to make their fortunes. But it was not until James Drax returned from a visit to Portuguese Brazil with sugar cane in 1640 that the settlers found the cash crop of their dreams. An acre of land planted with cane earned Drax four times more than an acre planted with tobacco. Within a decade, every scrap of land on the 169-square-mile island was planted with sugarcane, and Barbados became the wealthiest colony in the British Empire.

Imperial Federation map of the world showing the extent of the British Empire in 1886. Image courtesy of Boston Public LIbrary/Flickr.

The planters initially employed white indentured laborers and convicts to do the back-breaking and dangerous work of cultivating and processing the sugar cane. In Britain under Oliver Cromwell, to be “Barbadosed” was to be transported into servitude on the West Indian plantations. But white men were gradually replaced by West African slaves, as English ships tapped into the trans-Atlantic slave trade already established by the Portuguese to supply workers for their South American sugar plantations.

At the end of the 18th century, on a tour of the West Indies, which included Barbados, ship’s purser Aaron Thomas was so shocked by the conditions in which the slaves lived and worked that he wrote in his sea diary, “I never more will drink Sugar in my Tea, for it is nothing but Negroe’s blood.”

The British dissolved most of the sugar they consumed in tea. Over the 100 years after Drax sent home his first consignment, sugar poured into Britain in unprecedented quantities and its consumption rose in tandem with that of tea. The price of both commodities fell until even the poorest could afford them. A late 18th-century survey found that rural laborers spent as much as 10 percent of their annual income on tea and sugar; while Friedrich Engels noticed that tea was “quite indispensable” to the inhabitants of Manchester’s slums.

Social commentators condemned the poor for wasting their money on these “luxuries.” But tea-drinking was a symptom not of extravagance but of workers’ impoverishment. Rising food and fuel prices meant that they could barely afford to cook a warm meal let alone simmer the wort to brew their own beer. As a consequence, they turned for sustenance to shop-bought bread washed down with tea sweet enough to provide them with energy as well as the illusion that they were eating a warm meal. One family of ironworkers dissolved four pounds of sugar—enough to fill 10 teacups—in their weekly half-pound of tea. Britain’s Industrial Revolution was fueled by tea and sugar.

During the Napoleonic Wars (1803−15), Britain acquired two new sugar-producing colonies: French Mauritius and British Guiana. But when slavery was abolished in 1838, more than half the West African slaves turned their backs on the sugar plantations, resulting in a drastic fall in production.

The planters searched for a replacement workforce and found it in India, where a growing number of impoverished laborers were seeking work. Britain’s Industrial Revolution had sent India’s economy into turmoil. In the 1820s the British imposed protective tariffs closing the British market to Indian textiles; instead, cheap, machine-made Manchester cottons flooded into India. Millions of Indian artisans went out of business and joined the growing number of landless laborers pushed off the land by debt.

And so the resources of the British Empire, which had been channeled into the slave trade, were redirected into moving hundreds of thousands of Indians to work on plantations around the globe. Between 1838 and 1916, about 240,000 Indians were taken to British Guiana.

This was how curry came to the northern coast of South America and the country now called Guyana.

Indian indentured laborers were given rations of rice, lentils, coconut oil, sugar, salt, and curry powder, all of which allowed them to make a semblance of Indian meals. The one ingredient that they would not have used in India was curry powder. This was a British invention. The Victorians usually would mix cayenne pepper, cumin, coriander, lots of turmeric (Indians tended to be more sparing in their use of this spice), and fenugreek, which was a commonly used spice around Madras, where the first curry powder factories were set up.

When the British had first settled in India as merchants and traders they had loved Indian food, and brought cooks and recipes back to Britain with them when they retired. The first cookbook to include a recipe for “how to make a curry the India way” was Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy published in 1747. In Indian kitchens the spices were freshly roasted and ground each morning before they were added to the dishes at different stages in the cooking process. Glasse’s recipe attempted to replicate Indian practice by instructing the cook to first roast the spices on a shovel over the fire before beating them to a powder.

However, as the British grew accustomed to making Indian food, they took shortcuts, and over time Victorian cooks transformed curries into spicy casseroles. An essential element in this transformation was the use of standardized, pre-mixed curry powders that became commercially available in the 1780s. The Victorians would use a spoonful of curry powder to curry anything from periwinkles to sheep’s trotters. British curries became unrecognizable to Indian visitors who were dismayed when they were confronted with these hashes “flavoured with turmeric and cayenne.”

Even though it was Indian indentured laborers who first taught the Africans in Guyana how to cook curry, Indian food there was diminished by the forces of Empire. Limited rations meant that the indentured laborers struggled to replicate Indian home cooking. There were only two types of pea available to make dhal and everything had to be cooked in coconut oil. The biggest handicap was that, instead of the plethora of different spices and herbs available to an Indian cook, the laborers were only given a pre-mixed curry powder. This meant that, in Guyana, the panoply of different styles and types of dish were replaced by one simplified version of a curry. Although there are distinctively Guyanese combinations, such as shrimp and pumpkin, Indo-Guyanese dishes are all variations on one theme.

The meal of iguana curry eaten by a group of Afro-Guyanese diamond miners on a Sunday morning in 1993 carries within it the story of how Africans and Indians were brought to the Americas by the British craving for sweetness.

These two groups of arrivals and their progeny developed different relationships with their new homeland. The Indo-Guyanese tended to stay close to the coast within the orbit of the plantation world. Once freed from slavery, the Afro-Guyanese had made their way into the interior to tap rubber, and prospect for gold and diamonds. Here they interacted with the Amerindians who taught them how to hunt and cook the forest animals. And so the Africans applied the currying technique they had learned from their Indian neighbors to bush meat.

The British Empire was a powerful force for spreading new foods and new ways of eating throughout the globe. And yet it was also a powerful force for homogenization. Through the collisions of history, middle-class British housewives and South American descendants of African slaves both ended up eating a similar version of Indian food: a curry of peculiar meats, made with curry powder.

The post What the Path of Curry Tells Us About Globalization appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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.

The post Your Complaints About Globalization Are Old News appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Which is the world you want to live in? One where low-skilled, disillusioned factory workers call for protectionist barriers? Or one where entrepreneurs—using their ingenuity, state of the art technology, and the open market access that American trade negotiators have secured over the past eight decades—sell to customers across the planet, and grow their businesses, hire new people, and realize their full potential?

If you choose the latter world, that’s great. But we will need a new roadmap to navigate it.

The image of globalization, imprinted on many minds, is of American factories fleeing to Mexico or China. But here’s what globalization really is: the voluntary, mutually consenting exchange of goods and services between a buyer in one country and a seller in another country.

More important, here is what globalization is becoming: cross-border sales of goods and services among small businesses—like Travis’s motorbike gear venture—that are selling online, and foreign buyers who are finding them there. Why would we want to shut down such globalization?

E-commerce is breaking what seemed to be an “iron law” of international economics: that exporting was possible only for large companies. Today, while fewer than 5 percent of U.S. companies export, 97 percent of U.S. eBay sellers do. In a new survey of more than 3,000 developing country companies, my firm Nextrade Group finds that half of small online sellers export (while only 20 percent of small offline sellers do), and that more than 60 percent of online sellers export to two or more markets (as opposed to offline sellers, who tend to export to only one market).

Workers manufacture car dash mats at a maquiladora belonging to the TECMA group in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Dec. 27, 2013. Photo by Ivan Pierre Aguirre/Associated Press.

Companies today are born global because they are born digital. Which makes this a historic time. We are at the verge of creating a global equivalent of a medieval town square where small sellers and buyers come together to transact. It is a market where anyone can sell to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

While e-commerce enables developing countries to leapfrog to the 21st century’s technology-powered world economy, countries like the United States are particularly well-placed to benefit. We already have the connectivity, logistics, online services from payments to finance to cutting-edge online services, intellectual property, and people with wide-spread digital skills, which developing economies lack.

But we are not optimizing this opportunity. If we were, we would be celebrating free trade and open markets as enablers of our small businesses and online entrepreneurs, not bashing them as enemies of our factory workers whose time has passed. McKinsey Global Institute—which uses dozens of indicators to create an index of digital assets, usages, and workers—finds that the United States is using only 18 percent of its full digital potential; Europe is at just 12 percent. In a survey I recently conducted, U.S. middle market companies graded themselves C- on digital readiness. And more than 50 percent of developing country small businesses rate as poor or very poor in a number of areas in their economies needed for e-commerce to work, such as digital regulations, e-commerce logistics, access to online finance, and their own capacity for cross-border e-commerce.

Policymakers who aspire to empower small businesses to thrive in the global online marketplace need to think outside the box. To name five ways how:

• Microloans for micro businesses. Export credit agencies have traditionally provided trade credit insurance and guaranteed exporters’ working capital loans issued by banks. E-commerce presents a new challenge: Micro and small online sellers often need much smaller and faster working capital loans than banks are able to issue. At the same time, FinTech and online lending companies are on a tear, literally making up for lack of bank lending for small business. Online lenders offer a huge opportunity for export credit agencies like Export-Import Bank to guarantee diversified portfolios of microloans for export-driven online sellers, thus lowering their cost of capital.

• Export promotion for online sellers. Getting online is one thing; successfully exporting online is another matter. Cross-border e-commerce requires keen know-how about export promotion that smaller countries and even government agencies (like the export-promoting Commerce Department) don’t have—such as how to create an international multi-channel shopper strategy or build savvy online advertisement strategies for different markets.

So who knows how to promote e-commerce exports? Global e-commerce platforms do, and they have a keen interest in cultivating new e-commerce users. One innovative model for e-commerce capacity-building is a social impact bond, whereby private foundations, social impact investors, and commerce platforms make the initial investment in promoting exports and get compensated at a premium by the government and development agencies if the project meets certain pre-established metrics that governments value, such as the number of e-commerce-related jobs created, or the amount of new exports. Social impact bonds have been used to cure malaria and save rhinos. So why not to promote e-commerce?

• Customs procedures for small business. Customs regimes in many countries are still tailored to the needs of traditional traders and large companies, rather than to small businesses with limited compliance capabilities. Study after study show that complex customs requirements are a top concern for small exporters and importers in the U.S. and worldwide. The silver bullet for getting rid of these barriers and fueling small business trade is raising de minimis levels—the value of shipment below which goods enter duty- and tax-free. High de minimis creates free trade for small business. In a major service to small foreign businesses selling to U.S. consumers, and to U.S. consumers and companies buying from abroad, the United States raised its de minimis to a very respectable $800 per shipment in 2016. However, de minimis is in many countries laughably low, such as $15 in Canada and $150 in the European Union).

One solution is to launch negotiations on de minimis among a “coalition of the willing.” In such an agreement, each member government might commit to ratcheting up the de minimis level over a period of five to seven years to, say, $1,000, in exchange for a similar commitment from the other members. In other words, each member government would give a little market access at the lower rungs of trade in order to gain a lot more market access in return, just as in a tariff reduction schedule in a trade agreement.

• Digital regulations. My new survey shows that even small online merchants often struggle with digital regulations when seeking to export. For example, in the United States, small financial services companies report suffering from stringent consumer data privacy and protection rules in foreign markets, and from uncertain legal liability for internet intermediaries for user content on their sites. In a survey of Latin American companies, I found that one-third of online sellers viewed uncertain legal liability rules as “very significant” obstacles, while one-quarter were negatively impacted by foreign data localization and data privacy rules.

This is an area where the United States has gold standard rules, and needs to drive trading partners to adopt measures that are interoperable with ours. The Trans-Pacific Partnership was just that vehicle, and its killer, the Trump Administration, has to come up with a new and better one. A pilot could be run with the United Kingdom, whose officials have stressed digital trade as a path to competitiveness.

• Trade adjustment. The giant question mark in tomorrow’s economy is adaptability of labor—whether workers like Nicole and Jennifer could be retrained to take advantage of the seemingly limitless possibilities opened by the global online marketplace.

The answer to this question is not at all clear. Existing tools—such as the Trade Adjustment Assistance that helped retrain more than 230,000 workers impacted by trade over the past decade—will not be enough. The policy question should rather be how to equip tomorrow’s workers to thrive in the global digital economy, one where the pace of change is very fast and competition is ubiquitous. One place to look is at Singapore’s model of active retraining of workers. Another solution: create public-private partnerships between the government and the resented “tech elite” companies such as Facebook to deploy corporate PR and social responsibility dollars to fuel the retooling and rehiring of digital-era workers, in exchange for lower payroll taxes.

Globalization as we’ve known it is coming to a close. It’s time to stop chasing its ghosts—and to start crafting creative policies to empower workers and businesses so that they can leverage the 21st century tools for growth: e-commerce and open markets.

The post How the Internet and E-Commerce Are Hacking Protectionism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Economics has since gone well beyond Ricardo’s analysis. But it remains instructive when it comes to agricultural products. And that brings me to strawberries.

Everyone loves strawberries. They are sweet, they go well on ice cream and sponge cake, and, when covered in chocolate, they are a perennial favorite on Valentine’s Day. There is even a website called strawberries-for-strawberry-lovers.com. The red fruit, a commercial hybrid of the genus frageria, is primarily produced for U.S. markets in two states, California and Florida.

In my part of the country, the Southern California coast, the strawberry fields seem to stretch forever, running inland from the ocean onto the Oxnard Plain. As an economist, I look at the fields and think, “There is Ricardo’s comparative advantage.” Southern California has a mild climate, moist sea breezes, and fertile soil: perfect for strawberry production.

The climate that makes Ventura County, California ideal strawberry territory does not end at the Mexican border (and that won’t change even with a big beautiful wall). On the Baja California Coast near San Quintín, you also find strawberries. With the expansion of cultivation in Baja, Guanajuato, and Michoacán, states, Mexican production and Mexican exports have been increasing in recent years. One reason is the climate allows for Mexican produce, like its Californian counterpart, to mature through the winter.

The consequence of being blessed with good soil and weather for strawberries is that both countries are major exporters of the crop. According to the California Strawberry Export Report, farmers in the Golden State exported about $400 million of fresh and frozen strawberries in 2016. Mexico exported approximately the same amount as California.

Here’s where things get interesting. Mexican exports tend to be to the United States; the United States exports to Canada and other countries. Why does the United States both export and import strawberries? One reason is the different harvesting season in Mexico, and the perishability of fresh berries.

But there’s another defining quality of strawberries: they are hard to harvest. Any hiker who has come across the wild version knows you have to stoop down and remove each fruit one by one. Machines, now used to pick some other crops, would damage the delicate berry and fail to separate ripe from budding fruits. So it is up to people, typically immigrants, to pick strawberries.

According to the Los Angeles Times, a good strawberry picker in Southern California can earn $150 per day during the harvest season. That translates to $18.75 per hour, well above California’s current $10 per hour minimum wage. According to the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, between 25 and 30 percent of all non-strawberry pickers in the same region earn less than $12.50 per hour. So why are these less well-paid folks not clamoring for jobs in the strawberry fields?

They have good reasons. First, strawberry picking is seasonal labor and must be pieced together with other fieldwork, sometimes involving travel to nearby counties. Second, and more important, it is back-breaking work. So the higher wages earned by today’s strawberry pickers are not nearly high enough to attract other low-income earners.

Down in Baja, strawberry harvest workers—no surprise—make much less than they do in Southern California. Even after a successful labor action last year, strawberry pickers’ wages are a little less than 200 pesos, or about $11 USD, per day.

So if labor is cheaper in Mexico, why doesn’t more of the strawberry business move south across the border? Soil and climate quality in California are a factor. And the labor price differential isn’t yet so much as to force the move south. Strawberry farms here can still find people to work in the fields. But there is an issue: The people willing to pick strawberries in Ventura County for $18.75 per hour are not Americans. They are Mexicans willing to brave the hazards of slipping across the border and living in the United States undocumented.

But the United States is changing. And so the delicate balance that allows both Southern Californian and Mexican strawberry operations to prosper is under pressure. The issue? The Trump Administration has vowed to deport undocumented residents. And where more effectively to deploy the limited resources of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) than where there is a concentration of the undocumented: in the strawberry fields?

Whatever one thinks of Trump’s change in policy, it’s inarguable that it will impact both California and the U.S. economy.

The immediate impact of deportations will be a shortage of labor. This is what was experienced in Georgia when an employer verification law went into effect in 2012. According to separate analyses by Forbes and NPR, farmers left up to 30 percent of peaches and blueberries unpicked in the orchards; farmers also engaged in a failed attempt to enlist prison labor to replace what was estimated to be up to 11,000 fewer agricultural workers. So, California and the United States will have fewer strawberries picked and the berries in the market will command higher prices.

But this is just the initial impact. In the longer run, farmers will either pay pickers more, perhaps much more, or they will plant something else, specifically crops like wheat and corn that can be harvested by machines, And these mean even fewer strawberries and even higher prices.

But that is not the end of the story. The same people who have been picking strawberries up and down the California Coast will still be picking our strawberries. They just will be doing it south of the border.

Let’s summarize the costs and benefits. The shift of the strawberry business further south should be a real boon to Mexican agriculture, food processing, and trucking. For the agricultural sector here in the United States, profits will be lower as land ideally suited for strawberries will be used to grow feed corn. There also will be less demand for goods and services in the U.S. communities now serving the undocumented, and the juicy red fruit will take more of our personal budgets at the checkout stand.

Finally, there is the unintended consequence of a larger trade deficit. President Trump campaigned on closing the deficit with Mexico. The deportation policy moves in the other direction as more profits from the strawberry trade accrue to Mexican land barons rather than California farmers.

So by itself, it is a policy of “choose your poison.” You can engage in mass deportations with consequent lower income for American farmers and their Mexican farm workers, and increase the trade deficit. Or you can forego mass deportations, thereby increasing the income of American farmers and their Mexican farm workers, and keep the trade deficit with Mexico no greater than it is today. But you can’t do both.

If you’re willing to think beyond deportations, you’ll find other options. One option would be to normalize the status of undocumented farm workers, perhaps via a new version of the bracero program of 1942 to 1964 that permitted U.S. farmers to recruit temporary agricultural help from Mexico. If lessons from that program’s history were kept in mind, a new guest-worker regime could correct the flaws of the previous program. It also would have the side benefits of reducing illegal border crossings—U.S. farms would not be providing jobs to newly arrived undocumented immigrants—and this would allow undocumented immigrants already here to come out of the shadows.

Or there might be something akin to the 1981 Voluntary Export Restraint (VER) program between the United States and Japan that established a quota on Japanese exports of cars to the United States. A VER for strawberries from Mexico would take care of the trade deficit consequence of deportations, through limits on Mexican strawberry imports. But these limits on imports of Mexican strawberries would exacerbate the shortage of strawberries in our supermarkets and would make St. Valentine’s Day even more expensive.

And this is just strawberries. In 2015 Mexico exported almost $22 billion of agricultural produce to the United States. Strawberries are just the tip of the iceberg.

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