The US political elite has finally encountered a situation where globalization isn't an unmitigated blessing. President Bush, having used the fear factor to trump every other issue, was caught flat-footed when public opinion recoiled at a Persian Gulf company taking charge of major US ports.
The Dubai case was a genuinely close question. On the one hand, non-US companies already own US port operations. And the US Coast Guard is responsible for port security, regardless of who owns the facilities. On the other hand, it's harder to monitor the executives of a company based in the United Arab Emirates, and Al Qaeda might have an easier time infiltrating a Dubai company than a domestic one. These details got lost in the political uproar.
The Dubai ports affair invites a closer examination of the premise that the freest possible commerce in goods and services is all benefit and no cost. Let's see whether we are ready to take a serious look at complications of globalism.
There have long been national-security exceptions to the supposed ideal of free trade. The effort to contain proliferation of nuclear technologies and materials is one, but hardly the only one. The Defense Department and the corporate community regularly joust over which exports of advanced technologies should be constrained because of potential military uses.
The United States has an entirely schizophrenic view of trade in other weapons. It is the largest exporter of arms; this is presumably good for both business and for the project of knitting together other countries' military establishments with ours. Then US intelligence officials worry about these weapons falling into the wrong hands, which they often do.
However, we are citizens of the United States of America. There is no world government for us to be citizens of. In this country, civic decisions are made by the political process, not by the marketplace. Some of these decisions necessarily constrain the marketplace. To the extent that commerce is privileged over all other values, it erodes those other values.
As Americans, for instance, we have benefited from a social compact of protections enacted by our democratically elected representatives -- minimum wage laws, safety and health laws, social insurance, consumer safeguards, the right of workers to unionize, and so on. When we trade with nations that have no such protections, we run the risk of importing the absence of a social compact along with the products. That doesn't mean we should seal up our borders, but it does mean we should look harder at the terms of engagement.
Shouldn't we insist on certain social minimums in nations that want to trade freely with us? Should we allow the exploitation of foreign labor to lead to the battering down of wages and standards at home?
Business insists that trading nations respect its property rights. What about human rights and social rights?
Not only are we are importing restrictions on rights and liberties. In the Bush era -- witness the US government's kidnapping of terrorism suspects to countries that flagrantly use torture -- we are also exporting despotism. The same thing is happening in the private sector, where software companies have happily exported Internet censorship kits to several dictatorships.
Immigration is also complicated by the ideal of free global trade. Freer movement of products and services invites freer movement of people. Yet America remains a civic community, not just a marketplace; and there is a limit to how many immigrants can be absorbed at any one time.
The Bush administration is completely whipsawed between the desire of its business constituency to have as many cheap, vulnerable workers as possible and the backlash in the heartland, where such nationalists as US Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado are leading a revolt not just against illegal immigration but against all immigration. The United States needs to gain control of its borders, precisely to remain a liberal democracy where the working class gets to have normal rights and to vote. A hugely inflated and undocumented immigrant population does neither.
The question of how to engage with the global economy and remain a secure democracy is anything but simple. The Dubai debate had its share of demagoguery. But maybe it will get us thinking about some long-deferred, hard questions.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. This column originally appeared in The Boston Globe.
