Ep 07 – World Politics with Chapman and Wolford, Part 2

[0:00:01 Speaker 0] What are the broader implications of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union? Does the Brexit vote suggest a major transformation of the car in international order? Will the countries such as Russia recalibrate its analysis of the global security architecture? What is the relationship between international economics and international security? Welcome back to the connector, where we bring together innovative, groundbreaking and collaborative research inside the U. T. Austin political science universe. I’m your host, Stewart Tendler. In this episode, Terry Chapman and Scott Woolford take us into a further discussion of the post Brexit world. Scott ponders how Russia might interpret the vote and moving to international economics. Terry draws comparisons between Brexit voters in the UK and Trump supporters in the United States, drawing historical comparisons between current events and the interwar period leading up to the outbreak of World War Two.

[0:01:01 Speaker 1] So if we think about the security consequences of this right on the one on one hand, it’s easy to kind of worry because the US has had this interest in European unity since the end of World War Two, because European disunity has been epically bloody right for a long time. Um, and you know, Maybe you can kind of you can read the willingness of a lot of people to have a protest against the unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels as being a product of the EU’s own success. But I just feel so safe right to leave. But you can also look at what’s happening to the broader security architecture in that post World War Two global settlement that you mentioned earlier Stuart Right, where countries that do profit from disunity in Europe, countries that are currently, you know, sitting on top of parts of Georgia and annexing peninsulas on the Black Sea and things like that care about European disunity. And they will draw inferences right about European foreign policy. Their ability to work together on linked issues and security and economics are inherently linked, right? Um, and we should right, we should see a revision of how people believe or what countries believe about the stability and viability of the Postwar deal right between the great powers, um, the UK threatening to leave, you know, that’s it’s bigger and in a military sense, more important than say, you know, other rejections of, say, the Maastricht Treaty that we saw what the late nineties, I think 07 await another country kind of rejected parts of the EU structures, but they’re always kind of brought back, right? Seeing a big principle, being willing to play with fire here will change how other countries view the kind of the coalition that protects the status quo. Right. The countries that should be happy with the current global system are the principles in the U, the United States, you know, when they show that their houses not in order. House is not in order that that strong right. But when you see fissures and cracks, it’s hard for me not to think that other countries Russia right, won’t try to take advantage of it, you know? Now does that mean anything immediately dangerous? Can’t. Probably not, right? Like the one other thing about being an academic is that we’re were inherently unlikely to believe that tomorrow’s gonna look much different than today. Right? Um but I think you can still see the Brexit decision in the context of a sequence of other recent challenges to that global architecture. Right words Russia, a member of the P five forcibly changing an international border which they got away with it. Right? But that’s

[0:03:54 Speaker 0] a

[0:03:54 Speaker 1] big deal. Like that was it was kind of Ah, clear if implicit bargain between the great powers. Just these borders are fixed, right? They’re not going to be involuntarily changed. Um, you see competing development banks in East Asia. You see China announcing that if the this International Court of Arbitration decides against it, it’s just not gonna care. And you’re seeing the British playing fast and loose with, ah, Western and Central European unity, Right? Whether those add up to the kind of moment that looked like the pre World War era, I don’t know, But the I don’t know that we can know, right? Like if you can. If you can anticipate World War Three, you’re really gonna try to avoid it, right? So big conflagrations like this are almost always going to be unpredictable. By definition,

[0:04:44 Speaker 2] it’s still in building up a Scots last comment about the historical analogies here, you’d mention that Ah, um, Professor McDonald was, uh, you know, saying the sky is following. We like to make fun of Professor McDonald. First does

[0:05:01 Speaker 0] conjecture just for the record. No, I hope

[0:05:04 Speaker 2] he hears this, you know, uh uh,

[0:05:06 Speaker 1] Wait. We’re on the air, right? We have a hint at something. Let’s speculate wildly.

[0:05:11 Speaker 0] Yes, let’s go. Definitely. I like it. I promised a freewheeling conversation so

[0:05:16 Speaker 2] well, I think the world war analogy. It may feel like that. It’s a bit unclear to me whether it’s the most appropriate. I actually think the 19 twenties and 19 thirties is what this evokes on a lot of people’s minds, including Professor McDonald, simply because of the populist economic politics of all this. So if we think about the people that have voted for Brexit have been compared to supporters of Donald Trump in this country. So what do these people have in common? They feel disaffected by immigration, by globalization, by large and long shifts in the underlying structure of their economies. That’s been caused by globalization, right? So these people, some of them actually, you know, Trump said in Scotland that Ah, this will be a good thing for for Britain. And that’s true. Anything like this has distributive consequences. It’ll be. It’s true in the sense that will be good for some people, right? So let’s think about what’s happened Well, The markets downgraded the credit rating on British men. The pound is his tank, right? So that’s actually good for some people, right? It’s good in the sense he’s right, that it will attract tourism. Toe Britain. If people can. Can you know, Europeans swallow their pride and want to go visit there for the

[0:06:31 Speaker 1] cheap? It’s like resort. It’s like rubbernecking, like paying to rubberneck at car crash.

[0:06:36 Speaker 2] Yeah, yeah, and we know people with people will probably would say that if it wasn’t free for the pain to do that. But it’s also good for British exports that have failed and failed to compete under, you know, with foreign products under globalisation. But the big problem is that the share of the British economy, accounted for by exports that have been harmed by globalization at this point, is an increasingly small. So what is Britain, a chief exporter of? It’s a chief exporter of of things that make, as we know, from political economy. This will sound like mawr academic jargon. But it’s a chief exporter of things that make intensive use of the factors of production that it has in abundance. So it has capital has high and labor, so financial services. Things like that, right? So this is why I love you know, people in London oppose it, and that’s why the financial markets oppose it, because this will be bad. For if this has trade implications and implications in terms of monitoring financial cooperation, this will be bad for the segments of the British economy that make the most money, right? Sure, it

[0:07:44 Speaker 0] will be good

[0:07:44 Speaker 2] for some people, you know that have worked in the manufacturing sector that saw that have seen their wages drop steadily over the last 40 50 60 years as a result of changing trade patterns of the world. But the problem is that that’s overall, not gonna be good for the country. So you’re trading off economic stagnation potentially, potentially. It remains to be seen how bad things will get, and it’s hard. It’s hard to predict for a number of reasons there a number of government interventions that could help ameliorate the slide. But it’s good for a few people, but it won’t be good for everybody again. Kind of a classic tradeoff in political economy that we frequently see this when it comes to international trade. You know all sorts of political issues that their distributive consequences and the groups that are harmed if they’re concentrated can often times get their way, even if the collective outcome a suboptimal going back to the analogy to the interwar period. Right? So the reason why a lot of people have become alarmed about this is that things were starting to look an awful lot like the early thirties when you know the United States passes the Smoot Hawley Tariff Act. Smoot Hawley Tariff Act. Anybody seen Ferris Bueller? Ben Stein, High school teacher Smoot Holly largest across the board tariff increase in U. S. History, which starts off around of responses by neighbors. Right, So the details of this exit haven’t been worked out, but it looks as if the European Union is not gonna look so kind on giving trade concessions to remember that says, we want to exit the union, but we want to keep all of our privileges, economic privileges with the union, right, and it makes sense for them to do that. They want to deter other countries from following suit. But if that exit has trade consequences, that sets off a reduction and trade cooperation, then all of a sudden, we start to see countries facing harder times this coming just not even 10 years after the 2008 financial crisis. There’s still a lot of ramifications of that echoing throughout Europe, and we start to see wages and countries go down. Unemployment go up, and that starts to look a lot like the domestic politics of some countries that became very belligerent during the 19 thirties. So this is the analogy, and I think this is again a spot. We’re understanding something about international history and its connections to politics and how institutions operate would serve policymakers. They’re looking at potential things to do now. In the in the wake of this, there have been analogies made between the Brexit voters and Trump supporters in this country there similarities. I think our ah lot of their similarities are that they’re people that have become disaffected by globalization. They’re probably making less than their parents were 50 years ago, probably barely able to afford, you know, raising a family, whereas they had a comfortable living growing up and things like that and those people you know, it’s natural, they’re angry and they’re looking for a different way But the problem is that pursuing these strategies of becoming more insular and retreating from integration is sort of like sticking your head in the sand when there’s a bunch of elephants running at you. You know you’re not gonna get out of the way of this to mix my metaphors. Where I thought there was a dune reference coming. I really did think your head in the sand when a bunch of sand worms air rolling your way, right? You’ve been We don’t want to do that. The fragment and doing No, that you don’t do that. You ride the sand worms, right?

[0:11:12 Speaker 1] Yeah. This would be like walking with a very clear rhythm. Yes. Stopping putting your head in the sand, Right. Decapitation? Yeah. You

[0:11:20 Speaker 2] want to take advantage of the wave, get on top of the grand worms now. We totally lost Stuart, right? I have the whole doing. See? All right. No,

[0:11:28 Speaker 0] I read it, but it’s all there. Watch the movie.

[0:11:33 Speaker 2] He could have stopped just saying at the series of books. Looks like it’s OK. We forgive you

[0:11:45 Speaker 0] if nothing else. I hope this episode has shown you our faculty have at least a unique sense of humor are well read not only in political science but science fiction to and have culturally dated themselves as I have given up, assuming anyone currently in college has even heard of Ferris Bueller more seriously, this episode has set the stage for the two episodes to come. Next time we get significantly more in depth about the complexity of navigating international politics in a world lacking clear answers or simple solutions. Just how do we make sense of persistent questions about war and peace? I hope you will join us. Until then. You can find me at Gov dot utexas dot edu