By Matthew Kredell
Academia’s help is needed to figure out an international approach to dealing with the global economic and security challenges of our time, Charles Clarke told students and faculty at the USC Price School of Public Policy on Oct. 4.
“I think USC is particularly well placed to make contributions to international discussions,” Clarke said. “You really do reach across the Pacific and you have a very large number of students from across the world. I think interventions from USC and other universities like this are particularly important.”
Clarke, a distinguished visiting fellow at the USC Price School, has a 30-year political career in England as a former member of British Parliament and cabinet member for then Prime Minister Tony Blair.
His talk centered on President Donald Trump’s comment to the United Nations General Assembly in September that “we reject the ideology of globalism and accept the ideology of patriotism.”
Clarke argued that globalism and patriotism are false opposites, and countered this idea that the ideology of globalism has run its course. However, the sentiment expressed by Trump isn’t limited to the U.S, he said. There’s also Brexit in the U.K. and similar movements in other countries across the world.
He posited that individuals and whole communities — such as those in America’s Rust Belt — who believe they lost out to globalization lost faith in the system’s ability to meet the problems they experience, leading them to turn to Brexit and Trump.
“It’s a new climate we have to deal with and address,” Clarke said. “I maintain the challenge which the center of politics now has to meet is not just to oppose what Brexit and Trump mean, but to come forward with ideas to recreate for the future a national and international system of governance which can properly meet for all the concerns reflected in those votes.”
Clarke noted that the international approach is also the difficult approach, but that the world needs an international framework in the spirit of that which existed post-WWII.
He provided four suggestions for heading down this path:
1) Build a sense of national purpose in each of our countries that defines ourselves as playing a role in the international context, accepting that we bear responsibility for shaping the international future of the world.
2) Define what engaging in the international world really means.
3) Understand what sanctions — economic or otherwise — can and cannot do.
4) Work at better forms of international engagement.
To start it off, Clarke contended that internationalists need some wins, even at a small scale, where international action is shown to succeed and solve a problem or make a difference. The best recent example of international cooperation was the Paris climate agreement.
“Go it alone is a short-term populist slogan which offers no solutions and means the problems that our world faces will never be properly addressed,” Clarke said. “There’s no possibility of isolation from the rest of the world. We have to engage, not walk away. We have to see off those people who say go it alone is the answer, whether in Britain, America or anywhere else. We have to find resolute, enduring solutions for the future.”