The Moral Case for Globalization

According to the far-right French politician Marine Le Pen, “There is no more left and right. The real cleavage is between the patriots and the globalists.” Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, maintains that “conservatives everywhere need to define the choice as what it is—US vs THEM, everyday people vs globalist elites, who’ve shown they hate us.” Thus globalists are alleged to be anti-patriotic and enemies of “US,” that is, of “everyday people,” whom globalists allegedly hate. Another polemical use of the term has been advanced by the left-wing writer Quinn Slobodian, who defines “globalism” as “a coherent ideology” and “a project to restore class power” in Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Donald Trump was more direct, “You know what a globalist is, right? You know what a globalist is? A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much.”

To seriously consider globalization, it’s best to avoid definitions that contain the conclusions of complex arguments. A fruitful discussion of globalization requires a nonmoralized and operational use of the term. The definition is nonmoralized if it does not signal whether we should embrace or reject the term defined and is operational if it identifies uncontested, or at least verifiable, features of the world that people of different moral traditions and ideologies can agree are features of the world. So, this essay’s definition of globalization is the relatively free movement of people, things, money, and ideas across natural or political borders. Thus, increasing globalization means reducing or eliminating state-enforced restrictions on voluntary exchanges or interactions across political borders that would be permitted if the private (nonstate) parties were on the same side of a border. A consequence of increasing globalization is an increasingly integrated and complex global system of production and exchange.

Some critics of globalization include in their definition the existence of certain international organizations, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund, the International Labour Organization, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization. While there are arguments for and against those organizations, none of the organizations are essential to globalization, and some have hindered it. Moreover, none of them are world governments, and none have enforcement powers, armies, etc. They are created by treaties among sovereign states. James Bacchus addresses many myths about the WTO.

Are rights inherent, and thus, do they constitute a presumption of how others should treat individuals, or are rights mere permissions from those with power, dispensations that may be given or withheld by those holding power? Free societies require the equal presumption of liberty, which requires that any prohibitions imposed on the exercise of liberty be justified, whereas the exercise of liberty does not require justification. Just as in a court of law those accused of crimes (and thus liable to loss of liberty) are not required to prove their innocence and the prosecutor must prove that the accused is guilty, restricting someone’s liberty requires justification, whereas its exercise (whether to pray as one chooses or to buy or sell as one wishes) does not. You need not explain to and then request permission from the authorities to realize your choice to wear blue sneakers or brown loafers, to eat potatoes fried or baked, or to listen to classical music, country and western, or Lady Gaga.

The American abolitionist and political thinker Frederick Douglass, in his 1867 “Composite Nation” speech, stated,

The presumption of liberty is embedded in America’s Founding documents. The rights of individuals are, as those documents make clear, unenumerated and thus presumed, whereas the powers of government are expressly stated (i.e., enumerated) and thus limited. The Bill of Rights enumerates certain familiar rights, while the Ninth Amendment makes it clear that those enumerated rights are not all we have, as it would be impossible to “enumerate all the rights of the people”:

In contrast, the Constitution states that all laws must be both “necessary and proper,” and the Tenth Amendment states that the powers of government are delegated, enumerated, and as such, the only powers they have:

The right to come and go, to converse with whom we wish, to exchange with others on mutually agreeable terms, and more are presumed rights of human beings. Any who would restrict a person from interacting voluntarily with people of another religion or language, county or country, must bear the burden of justifying such restrictions. Some restrictions are readily justified, such as restricting divulging or trading in defense secrets that would put all at risk of invasion or prohibiting the exchange of stolen goods or the products of forced labor. But protecting the interests of established producers of children’s socks is not a sufficient justification to restrict people from buying socks for their children’s feet from producers in other cities or countries.

The principles of exchange for mutual advantage do not vary when one party speaks English and another Spanish, or when one is Christian and the other Buddhist, or when one lives in Missouri and the other in Manitoba. They are global. About the year 420 BCE the philosopher Democritus of Abdera wrote, “To a wise man, the whole earth is open; for the native land of a good soul is the whole earth.” The people of Hangzhou, the capital of the Southern Song dynasty of China, had a famous saying: “Vegetables from the east, water from the west, wood from the south, and rice from the north.” People can be attached to places, as most of us are, and still purchase goods and services from outside their localities, as we all do. Some may choose to stay rooted in one place and find happiness there, whereas others choose to travel or to relocate, sometimes to avoid oppression, sometimes to seek new opportunities. Whether one stays or moves from Boston to Los Angeles or from Los Angeles to Tokyo is a decision for the person doing the staying or moving. People can trade goods, services, or ideas with their next-door neighbors or with people who live far away.

Restricting the liberty of people to travel or exchange information, ideas, goods, or services requires justification. The burden of proof lies with the party that would restrict the liberty of another, just as the burden of proof in a criminal case lies with the one making the charge (the prosecutor). In contrast, the immorality of arrogating to oneself the power to restrict the choices of others is more evident: it violates the presumption of equal liberty that is foundational to free, harmonious, and prosperous societies by presuming instead that some people be required to ask permission to act from some privileged class. At the very least, such assertions require more justification than is generally offered by advocates of restrictions on trade, travel, or the exchange of goods, services, and ideas.

There is evidence that our commonly accepted norms of morality emerge from trade, which established the importance of legitimate expectations and reputations, both of which are necessary for the emergence of law and morality. Morality itself is a product of exchange, and the more trade, generally the more humane a society is.

There is a vast amount of evidence that documents the impact of reducing barriers to trade, travel, and other forms of exchange across borders. Much of it is presented in other essays in this series, such as Johan Norberg’s “Globalization: A Race to the Bottom—or to the Top?” Contrary to some critics of globalization, the results have been spectacularly positive for the world’s poor, as wages have increased, jobs have become safer, and the use of children for labor has plummeted. Increasing wealth, in turn, is strongly connected to improving health, and the global spread of improvements in medicines and technologies has improved health outcomes even in regions that have not participated as much in the exchange of goods.

It is sometimes difficult for people living in already wealthy societies to understand economic growth, because the prosperous often take prosperity for granted. I wrote a book with my colleague Matt Warner, Development with Dignity: Self-Determination, Localization, and the End to Poverty, in which we tried to make the matter clearer via a thought experiment:

What country would that be? It would be a good candidate for the very poorest country in the world. In fact, it was the United States of America when my grandparents were born. The growth of incomes and the corresponding improvements in every empirical measure of well-being in just two generations has been astonishing. And if we do not screw things up—by, among other things, reversing globalization—two generations from now, people will look on all of us as desperately poor.

The positive benefits of globalization were felt not only in wealthier countries, such as the United Kingdom, Sweden, the United States, and Japan, but even more in the poorest. In fact, the uplift of the lives of poor people in poor nations has been, if anything, more astonishing. The historically marginalized and downtrodden Dalit people of India, for example, have seen more dramatic improvements in their lives and in their social status since the opening of the Indian economy and India’s embrace of globalization than over the preceding thousand years. Measurement of inequality of income, wealth, and consumption (and they are different) is a complicated matter, but the evidence is that rising incomes in increasingly globalized economies, such as China after 1978 and India after 1991, has led to a dramatic fall since the 1990s in global inequality, that is, inequality between countries.

People agree to exchange because they expect to be better off by exchanging than by not exchanging. Making it possible to exchange with more people is beneficial to those whose range of potential exchange partners has increased. Adam Smith titled the third chapter of his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations “That the Division of Labour is Limited by the Extent of the Market,” a thesis that he illustrated by demonstrating the greater prosperity and progress in the ancient world for those nations with proximity to the sea and to navigable rivers. Due to the lower friction of transportation over water compared to land, that proximity facilitated exchange with much larger areas and with many, many more people. To the extent that policies of governments erect barriers to exchange, it is analogous to making transportation deliberately more difficult, which would generally be understood to be harmful to the vast majority of people. Barriers to trade, of course, are generally imposed to benefit those who wish to charge higher prices for their goods by blocking competitors (i.e., by limiting the extent of the market). A legal monopoly is the extreme case of such limitation of the market, by allowing only one party to provide a good or service to others. Common misconceptions governing trade are readily refuted, and the principles of trade are not difficult to master.

Some note that there may be a downside to reducing barriers to travel, as it may make some infectious diseases spread faster. Examples include influenza and COVID-19. On the other hand, the far greater wealth made possible by the expansion of the market also makes such illnesses easier to combat. Globalization is not limited to the exchange of goods and services across borders; it also encompasses the exchange of ideas, as well as scientific, economic, artistic, and other forms of cooperation. In the case of COVID-19, Hungarian-born biochemist Dr. Katalin Karikó and American-born immunologist Dr. Drew Weissman jointly received the recognition of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research that led to the development of the mRNA vaccines. And two German scientists of Turkish origins, oncologist and immunologist Dr. Uğur Şahin and physician Dr. Özlem Türeci (founders of BioNTech), and a Greek veterinarian, Dr. Albert Bourla (CEO of US-based Pfizer), developed and brought to the market the Pfizer-BioNtech COVID-19 vaccine. The benefits of the medical cooperation entailed by increasing “the extent of the market” deserve to be more widely known.

Among readily justified exclusions from permissible cross-border transfers are stolen goods and products of forced labor, such as goods manufactured by Uyghur people who are forced into concentration camps organized by the Chinese Communist Party. Free countries do not establish concentration camps for the forced production of textiles. Forced labor should be forbidden, and the products of forced labor should not enter the stream of commerce, just as stolen goods may not be legally exchanged. There is no human right to traffic in stolen products or compelled labor. That some stolen goods and products of involuntary labor manage to evade legal restrictions is no argument in favor of imposing restrictions on the exchange of products of voluntary labor and cooperation, any more than people committing fraud is an argument in favor of forbidding honest exchange. The overwhelming bulk of goods and services exchanged across political borders are products of voluntary labor and cooperation and should be permitted. Those that are the products of forced labor (or of theft) should be prohibited from entering the stream of commerce, whether domestically or internationally.

For the same reasons, organized raids of plunder and conquest (e.g., Russian troops plundering Ukrainian homes for washing machines) are contrary to the globalization defended here. Merely happening on the globe is not sufficient to be “globalization.” As Adam Smith noted, imperialism, conquest, and the mercantilistic restrictions on freedom of exchange that followed were both immoral and harmful: “Folly and injustice seem to have been the principles which presided over and directed the first project of establishing those colonies; the folly of hunting after gold and silver mines, and the injustice of coveting the possession of a country whose harmless natives, far from having ever injured the people of Europe, had received the first adventurers with every mark of kindness and hospitality.”

The same medicines can be found in hundreds of countries. Familiar names of hotel companies can be seen around the world. Italy, a country with its own rich culinary traditions, is also the location of Ethiopian, Thai, Ukrainian, and Korean restaurants, while Italian restaurants can be found in those countries. Credit cards and debit cards affiliated with Visa and Mastercard and American Express can be used in most countries. Do longer lives, greater convenience, and more opportunities for choice mean a loss of diversity? If so, would that be a diversity worth preserving?

In a deglobalized world in which only privileged people were free to travel and trade those few privileged people would experience tremendous diversity every time they traveled from one country to another. Most people, however, would experience far less diversity. In a world in which people are free to trade and travel, though, most of us experience far more diversity than we would in a world without such freedom. Wealthy visitors to poorer countries often identify the culture of those countries with their poverty and “quaintness.” That is a mistake. Icelanders, to take an example of a small nation with a distinct culture, maintain their language and way of life not by being isolated but by trading with foreigners and using their resulting wealth to sustain publishing houses, film production, education, and much more in their own language. Economist Tyler Cowen described the forms of variety on page 15 of his book Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures:

Moral opposition to change—to the erosion of cultural monotony—induced by the processes of globalization has deep roots. Plato’s, and his student Aristotle’s, praise of self-sufficiency (autarkia) is at the root of their general hostility to trade, their insistence on the distinction between Greeks and non-Greeks (i.e., “barbarians,” so-called because instead of speaking Greek, their words seemed to sound like “bar bar bar”), and their suspicion of chrematistic, or money-making. Thus, in Book IV of Plato’s dialogue The Republic, it is agreed that a polis (or city-state) should be of a size and so structured as to be “sufficient and one.” Aristotle argued in Book VII, Chapter 4 of The Politics that a state (the translator’s term for polis), “when composed of too few, is not, as a state ought to be, self-sufficient; when of too many, though self-sufficient in all mere necessaries, as a nation [ethnos in Greek] may be, it is not a state, being almost incapable of constitutional government. For who can be the general of such a vast multitude, or who the herald, unless he have the voice of a Stentor?” Interdependence beyond the small embrace of the polis was considered perilous to unity and to autarkia; the extraordinary experience of Greek commerce in the ancient world was upending established moral orders and entrenched ruling classes by introducing new ideas, among them democracy and liberty, even to the point of questioning and undermining slavery, as Karl Popper documents in The Open Society and its Enemies. Plato and his students sought to preserve static social relations—analogous to his theory of unchanging forms—that were being overturned by globalization.

Ever since Plato’s assault on the open society, critics of globalization have tended to view cultural innovation and exchange as a pure loss rather than as the emergence of new forms of human life that increase the available store of possible human understandings and experiences.

The modern form of that yearning for “unity” and the attendant criticism of globalization focuses on “identity.” According to journalist Nadav Eyal in Revolt: The Worldwide Uprising against Globalization, “Economic globalization poses a significant threat to identity. It inevitably injects universal values into the local discourse, because of its need for supranational relations. Prosperity cannot be achieved alone, and the need for the economy to interact globally does not coexist easily with exclusive national power structures and community.” Setting aside the reification of globalization as an “it” that “needs” things, Eyal overlooks the fact that globalization is and always has been constitutive of identity. There are no “pure identities,” just as there are no “pure races” or “pure cultures.” Identities are constituted by the interplay of many influences, the intersections of ideas, trends, customs, practices, and experiences. As Jeremy Waldron asks, “What if there has been nothing but mélange all the way down? What if cultures have always been implicated with one another, through trade, war, curiosity, and other forms of inter-communal relation? What if the mingling of cultures is as immemorial as cultural roots themselves? What if purity and homogeneity have always been myths?”

The anti-liberal writer Patrick Deneen enthusiastically embraces the illiberal ideas of Plato, whom he curiously refers to as “the Greeks,” as if Plato represented them all, including those Plato lambastes in his writings. Deneen blames globalization for the creation of identities that are “globally homogeneous, the precondition for a fungible global elite who readily identify other members capable of living in a cultureless and placeless world defined above all by liberal norms of globalized indifference toward shared fates of actual neighbors and communities. This in turn induces the globalized irresponsibility that was reflected in the economic interactions that precipitated the 2008 economic crisis but which is assuaged by calls for ‘social justice,’ generally to be handled through the depersonalized levers of the state.”

Besides the sweeping economic claims (which notably ignore irresponsible domestic governmental policies in the United States that were ostensibly intended to secure ownership of homes for all Americans regardless of financial capability but instead created a massive real estate bubble, financial contagion, and global crisis), Deneen misunderstands what economic interdependence entails. Trade tends to make people more connected to others and more interested in their welfare, precisely because their prosperity is entwined more when they trade than when they don’t. Indeed, the prosperity of one community is beneficial to that of those with whom they trade, contrary to the zero-sum, beggar-thy-neighbor view embraced by anti-globalization advocates. Deneen identifies as the beneficiaries of globalization not the low-income people who have seen their real incomes rise as prices of goods, telecommunication, travel, and previously unimaginable things have plummeted but instead a shadowy “fungible global elite,” which is an old trope in the repertoire of illiberalism, that of the “rootless cosmopolitans.” As the economist Jean-Baptiste Say noted,

The same is true of nations across whose borders goods and services are freely traded. Peace and harmony are consequences of trade.

Cultural exchange is foundational to living cultures. Pasta, for which Italian cuisine is famous, has origins in Asia, whether it was brought to Italy by Marco Polo, as folklore tells, or earlier, and the tomatoes that form the base of many Italian sauces are cultivated from plants brought from Meso-America by Spaniards. Food has been globalized for millennia, but somehow that has not stopped it from developing an amazing diversity of identifiable cuisines, styles, and dishes with many distinctive characteristics. The same can be said of architecture, traditions, mores, religions, and every other element of human culture.

Some local customs have dwindled or disappeared. Consider the virtual disappearance of human sacrifice and slavery, both of which had long traditions in many cultures. In that respect, all cultures have become more similar over time—and a good thing too. As a political example, if all the countries of the world were to adopt democracy and to throw off autocracies, tyrannies, colonial masters, and so on, there would be less diversity among systems of government, although a wide variety of forms (Westminster parliamentarism, federalism, presidential systems, constitutional monarchies, etc.) would remain. If genocide, ethnic cleansing, and colonialism were to be eliminated and replaced by some form of live-and-let-live mentality, another kind of diversity would be reduced.

But are such reductions of diversity morally objectionable? Some people, such as the influential legal theorist of the Third Reich Carl Schmitt, who posited the distinction of friend and enemy as the foundation of “the concept of the political,” consider the replacement of tyrannies and dictatorships an unacceptable form of political homogenization. However, people who wish to defend such political heterogeneity need to offer justification for their preference for dictatorship and violence and not merely assume that variety is preferable—just as someone advocating disease and suffering should not assume that it’s better for some to be ill and some to be healthy on the grounds of variety. It matters what kind of variety is protected.

In 1901, the first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Frédéric Passy “for his lifelong work for international peace conferences, diplomacy and arbitration.” Passy worked tirelessly for globalization because of its role in making war less likely and peace more likely. As he wrote in Leçons d’Économie Politique Faites à Montpellier, 1860–1861:

Passy’s appreciation of the role of exchange in reconciling people and reducing war has been amply borne out by empirical research. Political scientist Erik Gartzke found that the well-known “democratic peace” is composed not only of the democratic practices of government by discussion, free elections, and freedom of the press (valuable and important as they are) but by the trade and development entwined with such democratic practices. As he found, “Economic development, free markets, and similar interstate interests all anticipate a lessening of militarized disputes or wars. This ‘capitalist peace’ also accounts for the effect commonly attributed to regime type in standard statistical tests of the democratic peace.” In other words, nations that embrace free exchange are more likely to enjoy peace than those that do not.

The key to such peace is not merely the movement of goods and services across borders but voluntary exchange. The study of interstate military conflict by political scientist Patrick J. McDonald came to two primary conclusions, which he notes in The Invisible Hand of Peace: Capitalism, the War Machine, and International Relations Theory: “First, liberal economic institutions promote peace. Second, these economic institutions have historically played a stronger role in promoting peace than democracy.” Trade among private parties—rather than between governments, such as characterized the Communist trade bloc COMECON or today the export of state-owned oil and gas from Russia, which is, in effect, owned by the dictator Vladimir Putin—is essential to peace. Freedom to trade refers to the voluntary transfers of goods and services and not to state trafficking in tanks and missiles, the sale of products of forced labor (such as the products of Uyghur laborers imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party), or the sale of nationalized products (such as the oil and gas resources that were confiscated by Putin). Exchange and transfers organized by conquest are mutually impoverishing, as Adam Smith demonstrated of the British Empire in the second volume of the Wealth of Nations:

Mercantilistic policies impoverish.

Some people, of course, consider the achievement of peace insignificant and focus instead on the moral character of the motives of traders. Although trade reduces war, if it stems from the pursuit of self-interest, they believe, trade should be condemned. Prominent among such critics was the businessman Friedrich Engels, the coauthor with Karl Marx of The German Ideology, The Communist Manifesto, and other works, who attacked the liberal case for peace and free trade in no uncertain terms:

In other words, liberalism and free trade may have “reduced the number of wars,” but it was done only “to earn all the bigger profits in peace.” The point deserves emphasis: Engels found bigger profits, which he abhorred (unless they were his), of far greater concern than reducing the number of wars.

Contrast the bitter disdain for peace of Engels with the liberal and humanitarian approach of Voltaire, who dismissed the pretentions of self-styled superior people and embraced the benefits of trade:

Reasonable concerns about “weaponized interdependence” (e.g., the Putin dictatorship’s use of oil and gas exports to control neighboring countries) have not seriously dented the case for globalization. Tailored responses, principally those initiated by market participants, but also including by governments, may be justified without undermining the general case for globalization and the benefits of increasing the extent of the market. As Daniel Drezner concluded in his study “The Dangers of Misunderstanding Economic Interdependence,”

Increasing globalization makes war less likely and peace more likely. Obviously globalization does not make violence impossible, but it makes violence less likely, and that certainly should count as a strong reason to embrace globalization.

Since the days of Plato, people have denounced globalization as immoral. They have claimed that globalization leads to changes in culture and identity, without grasping that cultures and identities are not ideal forms to be preserved eternally but changing and evolving practices. Since Plato’s time, opponents of globalization have sought to protect established orders from the voluntary choices of those who live in them. Increasing the opportunities for exchange, cooperation, communication, and travel is enriching for the majority, although it may threaten the hold on power of the rulers. Some prefer war over peace, because “making bigger profits in peace” is worse than war. Reasonable people should think before embracing such attacks on globalization, even if they are attributed to “the Greeks,” or at least to some of them.

Rigorous thinking and empirical research refute, one by one, attacks on globalization in the name of morality. The world is better when barriers to free and voluntary cooperation are reduced. The world is better because of globalization.