When teaching the “low politics” of international relations, I used to begin with infectious diseases and the need for the WHO. Diseases do not respect borders; their control therefore cannot be limited to what goes on within national borders. Nation states need to cooperate. Therefore the justification for WHO. In its peculiar way, COVID-19 highlighted how connected the world has become.
Everyone who stops to think knows that trade in services is under-counted. Services do not go through customs points in ports and airports and do not have measurement systems honed over centuries. But like the drunk who was looking for his keys not where he dropped them, but where there was light, we all have a tendency to talk about trade using only data on goods trade, because that is what is available. I’ve done it myself, despite having worked on services trade since the 1980s. That is what caught my eye in this little piece on how to explain why international trade (in goods) appears to have flattened out.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso was a dependency theorist of a different kind. Not the whiny, it’s all the fault of imperialists kind, but one who saw local agency in the creation of the status quo and who clearly understood that poor countries would get out of their condition only through the actions of their own people, defined by local circumstance. He was a formative intellectual influence on me. His writings on globalization and marginalization have defined LIRNEasia’s outlook. The Library of Congress will award the $1 million John W.