When Marmelade Goes Sour

“Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one”

John Lennon – Imagine

There is a certain irony about being a conservative and fighting to preserve the status quo. Conservative in the broad meaning of the word is a completely unsustainable ideological approach. Time flows, time flows freely and constantly. It cannot be stopped. Conservatives nonetheless try to achieve that, freeze time; they want to capture something ephemeral like a photograph.

What are some of the most ridiculous attributes of conservatives? Nationalism is one that always puts a cynical smile on my face. Nationalism is a pure synthetic and transient human construct. It is not based on anything tangible and is not rooted in any historical characteristic of a people. Nations come and go, just like civilizations; they are not immune to time like some would like to think. Likewise the people who constitute such nations are not immortal and are in fact specs of dust on top of a museum piece, one that is regularly cleaned. What is there to protect in a nation? Sovereignty, culture, commonness, all these things will disappear over time, but that does not mean that nations should go unprotected. It is not the nation that should be protected however it is the balance that reigns within and without, in other words, peace inside and between nations is crucial not because it allows a nation to prosper but it allows the people who are part of it to thrive. However in recent times a lot of these concepts have been challenged as the world shrinks to the size of one big nation. People are no longer limited to prospering within their nation, they can now extend worldwide and rake profits manifold. Likewise nations are not closed entity to outsiders but have become a maze with magnets, funnels, barriers and traps. Why is that? Because we want to cling to what we know, we want to be conservative, quite the irrational choice.

To better illustrate that let us look at the O so controversial subject of migration. I love these rare coincidences when you think about something and happen to read or hear something about it shortly after. Today I happened to read an article by Keith Griffin, Economic Globalization and Institutions of Global Governance, which completely agreed with what I wrote in this entry, so I felt a little bit less delusional Migration is a phenomenon that has been going on for as long as humans have existed, and for almost as long humans have also tried to resist it. Migration simply means leaving one place for another, usually the rationale behind this choice is to leave one place for a better one. In today’s world this tradition of moving has become one of the hottest issues. The vast and crippling imbalance between nations has created incentives that are equally out of balance. Some have riches that even the most fantasist myths could not imagine and some are so poor that even the most pessimistic could not imagine (they probably would have predicted the end of humanity before such a point would be reached). Therefore migration in our time consists in large part in people leaving decrepit nations for ones that have considerable levels of wealth, although migration between wealthy countries is also common especially the known as brain drain. Of course the wealthy nations fear that these people will only munch away the share of the pie that would otherwise go to their people. Not only that, they will also spoil the purity of a nation. In the end it becomes a power struggle for domination.


The best way to establish a balance is not by bringing everyone to the lowest common denominator; it is by bringing those who are furthest away from the top closer. Most nations are far from running at full potential and are not trying to; in fact they often bridle themselves. So much more could be achieved by extending the reach of such basic amenities as education to the full spectrum of a population, and one of these would be to produce surpluses of skilled labor and intellectual. But doesn’t that create unemployment and drive wages down? Not if we balance the supply of labor. The global market for labor is painfully out of balance. We have mostly free trade, and free movement of capital, this should be extended to free movement of labor. We are so afraid of foreigners coming to our nations to work because we do not provide them with the necessary means to integrate for one, but even more importantly because we do not give them any incentive to return to their nation or stay there. One way of doing that is by truly welcoming them and offering real opportunities. A less common action would be for people to go the other way. Rich countries have relatively scarce low skill labor whereas poor countries usually have scarce skilled labor therefore the free movement of labor in BOTH ways is a win-win situation. But people are so stuck up with their conservative ways, everywhere, so unwilling to change in an impermanent world where nothing will remain the same. For those who think it is wrong to intervene so directly in the economy of developing countries, is it really that wrong? Does it mean taking anything away from them, or in the long run does it ultimately mean giving them more freedom.

What about traditions? They don’t mix so well together. There is an inevitable mixing and homogenization going on in the world, but we cannot expect it to go smoothly. There are flagrant differences in traditions religions and cultures, however we co no bridge the gap by exacerbating these differences. We create tolerance by uniting not by discriminating, humiliating, and force-feeding ideologies. Moreover, this process does not equate a disappearance of cultures. Well it might be in a way, cultures that are alive today are likely to disappear, but they do not vanish from the surface of the world. We are fortunate to live in a world where thousands have the resources to record many aspects of the lives of humans all over the world. Of course this task dwarfs Hercules’ and probably will never be completed. It is simply the fate of everything human; none of it is permanent, because we live in an impermanent world. Has Ancient Greece, Egypt, China, survived? Have the Vikings, Samurai, Incas, and thousands of small tribes all over the world survived? No!

In conclusion is it viable to try to close our borders? I strongly believe the opposite; immigrants will pour in as long as they have the incentives, that is as long as “the distribution of world income is grotesquely unequal” to borrow Griffin’s words. Is there the slightest possibility of that happening? Not in the foreseeable future at least. As long as niches with vested interest that are dependent on the status quo for preserving their legacy of world dominancy exist it is very unlikely to happen. As Griffin justly noted we need better global, democratic institutions which represent not only the wealthy, but before that we need to give up some things. We need to give up our privilege of having been born in the right place, give up the hypocrisy of wanting to keep people equal but separate, give up our egoistic notion of nationality, and finally accept that humans can live together.