By Barend ter Haar.
Many people are looking with disbelief to what is happening in the Western world. The United States and the United Kingdom used to be the steadfast and reliable pillars of Western cooperation, but now these countries seem to have lost their way. Where exactly they are going is not clear, but it is clear that they want to go there on their own, impeded as little as possible by the restraining straps of international cooperation.
Still, in retrospect, Dutch politicians could have seen this coming, because the aversion of a majority of their own fellow-citizens against ever closer international cooperation had already become clear at the referendum about the European Constitution on 1 June 2005. To the dismay of most political parties, a majority of 61.5 % voted against the Constitution.
How is this possible? The world has never been as prosperous and peaceful as it is today, thanks in large part to ever closer European and international cooperation. So why are enormous numbers of Western citizens revolting against this cooperation?
The short answer is that main stream political parties have too long failed to recognize that for many people the economic and financial benefits of globalisation do not outweigh the psychological and cultural costs.
In the course of the last fifty years almost every Western citizen has become more prosperous. However, what counts is not only the absolute level of prosperity, but also the relative level. When everybody is walking, the owner of a bicycle feels rich, but when all his neighbours buy a car, he suddenly feels poor. Now what has happened is that while outside the West hundreds of millions joined the middle classes and in the West the rich elite became even richer, the position of Western middle classes deteriorated, if not in absolute terms, at least in relative terms.
From an economic point of view, the migration of people from countries with a lack of economic activities to countries with a lack of manpower makes a lot of sense. However, the difficulties of integrating people with a very different cultural background have been gravely underestimated. The people that are confronted in their daily lives with the resulting problems are often the same people that are benefiting relatively little from globalisation.
So what to do?
We have to recognize that the neo-liberal ideal of economic growth and free trade has lost much of its appeal, both because the benefits were not spread evenly and because of the unintended negative consequences for social cohesion and environmental security. But what vision should take its place? Closing mental and physical borders and replacing cooperation by unilateral action might attract some voters, but will eventually only worsen our problems. The paradox of international cooperation is that the most effective way to promote the national interest is not to ignore the interests of others, but to take them into account and find common solutions.
That is the story we have to tell.
