Braude on pluralism.
Joseph Braude has a great piece on "the national-security case for pluralism" at TNR:
[T]hose who blame pluralism for making us vulnerable are missing an important point. They are right, of course, that a small number of Muslims living in the West pose a security risk; no one would argue that a liberal society benefits from the presence of radical sheiks and their followers. But diaspora Muslims may, in the long run, be doing more than any government policy possibly could to undermine Islamist terror. That's because Muslims living in America and Europe are a key conduit for the diffusion of Western cultural values to North Africa and the Middle East. Chief among these values are family planning and the education of women. In the course of traveling to and from their countries of origin, keeping in touch with friends and family by email and phone, and remitting billions of dollars in cash to the region annually, Muslim expats are steadily, quietly influencing the life-cycle decisions of their extended families; and there is strong evidence that this has already translated into lower birth rates in most Arab countries.
...People traffic means idea traffic. This simple point informs a landmark paper released at a U.N. conference last month by population studies scholar Philippe Fargues. The paper uses statistical data from the Middle East and North Africa to demonstrate convincingly that "international migration has contributed to contain the demographic explosion ... increas[ing] global security through demographic change. ... [B]ecause international migrants adopt for themselves, and send back to their home countries, models and ideas that prevail in host countries, they are susceptible to be agents of the diffusion of demographic modernity."
Access to birth control is absolutely the lodestone of female empowerment and self-determination. Sure, reducing fertility rates in the Middle East through Western contraception methods is a case of spreading Western values on non-Western culture, but what's beautiful about the effects of the Muslem diaspora as Braude describes it is that the decisions to adopt certain Western mores are individually voluntary, the results of personal experience and experimentation. Similar arguments can be made for opening up Third World and developing nations to the Internet and to other kinds of Western-originated media. It's a question of choice. One of the fundamental ideas of microeconomics (usually though not always true) is that any time an individual's choice set increases, he is unambiguously no worse off. While other aspects of globalization, like FDI and imports of goods, have the potential to actually limit the available employment and consumer choices in developing economies by driving local alternatives out, human mobility fundamentally enhances the choice set of the migrant (and, through him, his contacts back home) through experience, just like spending a year abroad in England increased my understanding of different kinds of Western culture and widened my effective choice set over where I might want to live and how I might want to behave in the future (like, say, leaving the eggs on the shelf if there's no more room in the fridge.)
Voluntary migration to the West allows non-Westerners to see for themselves what they might choose to emulate (and what they might reject) in Western culture. To the extent that we're willing to acknowledge that we believe certain Western practices (like allowing women easy access to birth control) are normatively better than the alternative, this is unambiguously a good thing. Pluaralism widens choice sets and creates effective demand for better ways of life. That's, afterall, why the Soviet Union worked so hard to keep society closed to images of the West; the socialist experiment relied on people not seeing the alternatives, not knowing about others' effective choices.
This is the good side of globalization. And it's one more good reason not to listen to the James Pinkertons of the world.
[T]hose who blame pluralism for making us vulnerable are missing an important point. They are right, of course, that a small number of Muslims living in the West pose a security risk; no one would argue that a liberal society benefits from the presence of radical sheiks and their followers. But diaspora Muslims may, in the long run, be doing more than any government policy possibly could to undermine Islamist terror. That's because Muslims living in America and Europe are a key conduit for the diffusion of Western cultural values to North Africa and the Middle East. Chief among these values are family planning and the education of women. In the course of traveling to and from their countries of origin, keeping in touch with friends and family by email and phone, and remitting billions of dollars in cash to the region annually, Muslim expats are steadily, quietly influencing the life-cycle decisions of their extended families; and there is strong evidence that this has already translated into lower birth rates in most Arab countries.
...People traffic means idea traffic. This simple point informs a landmark paper released at a U.N. conference last month by population studies scholar Philippe Fargues. The paper uses statistical data from the Middle East and North Africa to demonstrate convincingly that "international migration has contributed to contain the demographic explosion ... increas[ing] global security through demographic change. ... [B]ecause international migrants adopt for themselves, and send back to their home countries, models and ideas that prevail in host countries, they are susceptible to be agents of the diffusion of demographic modernity."
Access to birth control is absolutely the lodestone of female empowerment and self-determination. Sure, reducing fertility rates in the Middle East through Western contraception methods is a case of spreading Western values on non-Western culture, but what's beautiful about the effects of the Muslem diaspora as Braude describes it is that the decisions to adopt certain Western mores are individually voluntary, the results of personal experience and experimentation. Similar arguments can be made for opening up Third World and developing nations to the Internet and to other kinds of Western-originated media. It's a question of choice. One of the fundamental ideas of microeconomics (usually though not always true) is that any time an individual's choice set increases, he is unambiguously no worse off. While other aspects of globalization, like FDI and imports of goods, have the potential to actually limit the available employment and consumer choices in developing economies by driving local alternatives out, human mobility fundamentally enhances the choice set of the migrant (and, through him, his contacts back home) through experience, just like spending a year abroad in England increased my understanding of different kinds of Western culture and widened my effective choice set over where I might want to live and how I might want to behave in the future (like, say, leaving the eggs on the shelf if there's no more room in the fridge.)
Voluntary migration to the West allows non-Westerners to see for themselves what they might choose to emulate (and what they might reject) in Western culture. To the extent that we're willing to acknowledge that we believe certain Western practices (like allowing women easy access to birth control) are normatively better than the alternative, this is unambiguously a good thing. Pluaralism widens choice sets and creates effective demand for better ways of life. That's, afterall, why the Soviet Union worked so hard to keep society closed to images of the West; the socialist experiment relied on people not seeing the alternatives, not knowing about others' effective choices.
This is the good side of globalization. And it's one more good reason not to listen to the James Pinkertons of the world.
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