The Global and the Local and the Politics of TIme

(A Picture of the United Nations in New York City, taken from Wikipedia)



As one can imagine, being a visiting professor at an internationally recognized university affords one the opportunity to talk with colleagues from around the world.  Such conversations become some of the best one can hope for, as they inevitably become a case of comparative analysis.  They, for example, tell you how things go in their country; you tell them how it goes in yours; and, through such comparisons one begins to note similarities and differences.

Today, finally, a major political similarity emerged for me between the states, the UK, and the rest of eastern and western Europe.  Given that I teach global social problems, it was not entirely new to me, but you know how, sometimes, a thing just suddenly hits you.

Actually, the insight is not mine to claim.  I was having a great conversation during a five mile walk around Durham with four other faculty: German/Polish, German, British and Portuguese.  The question, initially asked of me, is what I thought about the presidential election in the states.  My response, summarized, was that there is a long list of global problems facing the states today, from global markets and international competition for jobs to the Chinese economy and the rise in eastern European manufacturing to the British pound and the struggles of the European Union to the rise of the middle-classes throughout places like India and Australia.  All of these things have significantly changed the economic foundation of the states.  But, you would not know it from our politics: it is as if all the problems are internal, with little discussion to the fact that we now live in a global society that is highly unstable.  As such, I do not think things will get better in the states for a while.  But, we are hanging in there.

No sooner did I finish my argument when each of the other professors, in succession, made similar arguments about their respective countries and those around them, with some situations worse that ours in the states, such as Spain and Italy and Greece and Ireland and Portugal.

Anyway, as we made our rounds of insight, the professor from Germany/Poland summarized it all well.  He said, "You know, I see it like this.  Global problems take a lot of time and effort to solve; meanwhile the political machinery of most countries is much shorter in time and scale and far too local in focus to deal with these problems effectively. Look at how Germany, for example, struggles to manage itself in relation to the EU.  These are very complex problems that the average person needs to become more educated about if there is to be a political will to solve them.  And, as we have seen over the last decade, from the housing crisis to the banking scandal, the less globally informed we, the average people, are, the more unstable the global environment becomes because the political structure necessary to stabilize it, from country to country, is absent."

Well said, I commented back, well said.