4 November 2020

An Open World Is in the Balance—and on the Ballot

Stewart M. Patrick 

As Americans cast their ballots Tuesday, and indeed for the millions who already have, they are voting for the future not just of their own country, but of the open world that the United States helped create. A distinctive element of this global order, particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall, has been the removal of many restrictions on cross-border flows of goods, money, ideas and even people. Under every American president since the Cold War, until Donald Trump, the United States championed global integration as a motor of prosperity, a bulwark of peace and—at least implicitly—a source of solidarity. It is that open world that is on the ropes today, thanks to disillusionment with globalization, Trump’s nativist and anachronistic “America First” policies and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, which has dramatically curtailed cross-border exchanges.

During globalization’s heyday, a new, frictionless world seemed to have arrived, as miraculous as the lost world before 1914 about which John Maynard Keynes famously reminisced in his 1920 treatise, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace.”

“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole Earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep. He could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world…. He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality…. [He] could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person…. But most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain and permanent — except in the direction of further improvement.”

Keynes’ larger point, of course, was that global integration could easily be reversed, as it had been during the Great War and its immediate aftermath. The next two decades would bear this out, as surging populism and nationalism led many nations to tighten their borders and, during the Great Depression, erect discriminatory and protectionist barriers to commerce and adopt beggar-thy-neighbor monetary policies. These actions fragmented the international economy and, ultimately, hastened the world’s descent into an even more destructive war. It was only in the aftermath of these catastrophes that the United States and its partners spearheaded the creation of new multilateral institutions as the foundations of an open world. ...

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