[new nationalism] the writing on the wall

There is most definitely a new trend around the world. Actually, the feeling was always there but now it is more articulated at governmental level:

Foreigners go home.

Starting with an extreme example, Burma:

Burma wants supplies but not foreign aid workers, its foreign ministry says, hours after the UN chief urged military leaders to prioritise relief work. Burma was "making strenuous efforts" to get aid to affected areas by itself and was not ready for foreign teams, a statement in a state daily said.

Pleading guilty myself, sitting, eating a Russian breakfast while I posted this weeks ago, there does seem to be a new nationalism afoot, a new withdrawal into the national self. Applying that old chestnut to any country you care to name:

It might be a hopelessly disorganized cesspit but it's OUR cesspit!

So while the whole thrust of the sphere is global - look at the visitors to this site for a start - in RL there is an opposite discernible trend. According to The American Conservative, in a recent piece in the FT , Larry Summers, Clinton's old aide, warns that:

…growth in the global economy encourages the development of stateless elites whose allegiance is to global economic success and their own prosperity rather than the interests of the nation where they are headquartered. As one prominent chief executive put it in Davos this year:

“We will be fine however America does but I hope for its sake that it will cut taxes and reduce regulation and put more pressure on young people to study in the ways that are necessary for it to be able to keep competing successfully.”

The AC goes on:

Similar concerns about the way the “rise of nationalism” frays global economic ties, have been raised by Bob Davis in another anti-business daily, the Wall Street Journal on Monday:

During the long march toward globalization, international borders and trade barriers came down. Communism fell. Protectionist walls in Latin America and elsewhere were dismantled. Governments — long prone to meddling in trade — took a back seat to broader market forces.

In a globalization manifesto, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman declared that the Internet and other planet-spanning technologies were erasing national boundaries. The world, he said in a 2005 best seller, was flat.

No longer. The global economy appears to be entering an epoch in which governments are reasserting their role in the lives of individuals and businesses. Once again, barriers are rising. Call it the new nationalism.

And:

Now borrowers shun the IMF and World Bank. Trade talks are shelved. Barriers to foreign investment are rising around the world. State-owned companies are expanding, particularly in oil and gas. Public support of immigration restrictions is growing in countries from the U.S. to India.

Sovereign wealth funds from Asia and the Middle East are now propping up wobbly financial institutions in the U.S. and Europe, and may hunt next for real-estate bargains. All three presidential candidates say they would pass tougher financial-market regulation and would also boost government programs to retrain workers battered by the global economy.

In rich and poor countries alike, immigration has become a powerful political issue, as improved transportation makes it easier for people to move across borders and compete for jobs with locals.

Where does that leave a person who resides outside his own country? I'd like to think it comes down to how deeply integrated he's become in his host country, what roots he's put down and how committed he is to putting back into that host economy. In the end it is how the host country perceives him and his value.

But other factors come into play as well - the new nationalism, the need for governments to be seen to be working in the best interests of its own natives and the lumping in of all "foreigners" together, irrespective of who they are and what their purposes are.

This spills over into the restriction of foreign influences. The Chinese are not the only ones planning to control the net:

A September 25 statement from the Ministry of Information Industry banned “subversive” material—including pornography, criticism of the government, and sensitive topics like Tibet and Taiwan independence—from the country’s computer networks.

Instead, only “healthy, civilized news and information beneficial to the nation” can be posted, the ministry said. It is already a crime in China to defame government agencies, divulge state secrets, or promote separatist movements.

This plus Tibet, in the lead up to an Olympics which is looking increasingly like 1936. The pornography issue is interesting in itself if you can put the moral aspect to one side for the moment and concentrate on the strategy:

While the rest of the net is reeling from crumbling ad revenues, the sex industry has not even taken a hit because its main revenue stream is subscriptions, not advertising.

Yet companies such as Yahoo! are opting out of the porn industry. Given the demand, the big business and the job security,this seems like a mad decision. Why?

Especially as the slavery issue is closely connected to such big business:

It is estimated that 2/3 of women trafficked for prostitution worldwide annually come from Eastern Europe, three-quarters have never worked as prostitutes before. An estimated 500,000 women from Central and Eastern Europe are working in prostitution in the European Union alone

... Sexual slavery in Pakistan is one of the worst in South Asia. Young girls (sometimes as young as 9 years old) are sold by their own fathers to brothels as sex slaves in big cities. Often this happens due to debt accumulated from gambling, whereby the father has no other way to raise the money than to sell his daughters.

Yahoo clearly reads either the force of public reaction to the glut of porn or else it sees a closed market of high stakes and surmises that there are better ways to turn a relatively safe profit or else it knows something and isn't saying.

Maybe that thing it knows is that morality also pays and will increasingly pay as parents and other concerned citizens turn savage and demand better porn filters but when it is seen that these are useless, in steps a regulatory agency offering a two tier internet - one protected and restricted by the agency and the other free and unfettered, eventually to be closed down, once it's served its purpose.

Meanwhile we bloggers blithely type away and post things like this article, eventually read by 2 or 3 hundred people and we feel pleased that we are doing society a favour. Actually we are pretty irrelevant and riding on the back of a game with far higher stakes. That game is the new feudalism:

The new Middle Ages will be worse for most of humanity than the older ones were for the serfs; the latter were at least needed in productive processes and thus received employment and a certain amount of maintenance.

So-called progress in technology and management methods is reducing this need, a fact currently masked by migration of formerly productive employees to service sectors, which, in the long run, are unsustainable.

In general terms, tomorrow's serf will find himself not only sub- or unemployed, but socially excluded from state-of-the-art living, be it in communications, transportation, health care, education, or recreation.

We're moving to a stage now where people are either integrating fully [i.e. citizenship] or else are being repatriated. The days which Martin Kelly refers to are rapidly coming to a close, the same days Tom Paine refers to here:

100% or more of all my contacts with clients (I am a lawyer) are by phone and email, but it's just not conceivable to execute complex deals without spending time together. If those deals are across borders, that involves travel.

I very much feel these days are rapidly drawing to a close and that if we are propertied, hopefully multi-propertied, we'll be part of the "state-of-the-art living" referred to above but if we are in credit-delusion land, we are the new serfs.

I'm already rapidly adjusting my sights and coming to terms with the future. Here is an old post dealing with this.