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Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha

In the last few years I have attended various conferences that touched on globalisation and terrorism, the twin poles around which international relations now revolve. On both issues I have what I like to think of as a moderate perspective.

In the current context this means that I subscribe by and large to the international consensus on these issues (insofar as there is one, and despite the fact that this often translates into what the Americans want) but with several modifications.

With regard to the first issue I feel strongly that exchange is the key to prosperity and development, social as well as economic. In my Cultural Studies classes I stress the historical evidence for this, with reference to the various civilizations that have contributed most to the modern world.

Starting from the Athenian, we move through the great Islamic entrepots of the European Dark Ages to the Renaissance - and then beyond that, in terms most significantly of the critical changes of the Industrial Revolution.

I therefore welcome the current concern with promoting the exchange of goods and services and even capital. What bemuses me however is the failure to engage with the other area in which exchange has proved mutually beneficial, namely the free movement of peoples.

The restrictions imposed, stringently so by the West, on the labour market seem to me evidence of appalling hypocrisy that we in the rest of the world do not highlight as we should.

It has been comforting to find that others too share this view. The best exposition I heard of it was by the President of the Philippine Senate, Acquilino Pimentel (who was incidentally responsible for a seminal reform of local government in that country).

He pointed out that the West naturally concentrated on exchange of goods, in the production and distribution of which it was especially skilled. It made sense therefore for Asia, which had an abundance of labour, skilled and semi-skilled and unskilled, to push for freeing up those markets too.

In Liberal conferences I have attended, these points are generally accepted, since of course from a liberal perspective they cannot be challenged. Regrettably I do not see many Western liberals, even though they agree with the argument, pushing it strongly enough in fora they could influence.

And even more revealing I felt was the response of the more conservative academic who dealt with the issue at the recent meeting in Sri Lanka of the Mont Pelerin Society. That was set up by Friedrich von Hayek at a time when statism seemed universally accepted.

The society then naturally attracted both liberals and what might be termed neo-conservatives, who are committed to the market but question some liberal tenets, such as the importance of ensuring a level playing field.

With regard to the issue of the free movement of labour however, I found that my conservative friend adopted a paternalistic argument of the sort I think Hayek would have abhorred. He claimed initially that freely permitting migrant labour would unduly burden the social services of his country.

This seemed to me absurd, since obviously employers would be expected to meet the costs of basic services through insurance or similar schemes.

He insisted however that immigrants would bring their families, and these would prove expensive to the state, but he did not think restricting migrant labour to single persons would be humanly acceptable.

His solution then was to scrap social services altogether, which I of course found unacceptable. But what I found worrying was his refusal to advocate market principles on this issue, and to learn from observation of countries that do encourage migrant labour, while imposing strict conditions, and that still find many takers.

For the fact is that, while many decision makers in both his country and mine might not be inclined to labour in the Middle East, the numbers who flock to do this indicate that the conditions are not so very unacceptable after all.

Of course we need to develop safeguards in terms of international norms as to minimum conditions. But it is noticeable that such conditions are violated also, and perhaps more systematically, in Western countries that do officially have restrictions.

The recent tragedy of the Chinese cockle collectors in England indicates that, as Hayek would have argued on first principles, state imposed restrictions contribute to abuse and exploitation.

I don't suppose it will be easy to get reform on this issue put seriously on the international agenda. But there is no reason whatsoever not to try, and to try through developing proposals in consultation with other countries that might also benefit from such openings.

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