So the book is called Six Faces of Globalisation and it goes back to 2016, it's relatively of relatively recent vintage our thinking on this issue.
And for both Anthony and myself. 2016 marked a turning point because we had the election of Donald Trump.
We had the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and both A. and I international economic lawyers.
In my case, it's mostly trade law, and this case must investment law.
And these events really shook the foundation of what we had coming to think about the international economic order you saw.
Suddenly you saw ideas and and views on the international order come to prominence in a way that had never happened before.
You could only find this issue before and the fringes. Maybe you had the protests in Seattle against globalisation.
You had Ross Perot in the United States,
but they were really regarded as fringe views and suddenly you found them at the centre of the political discussion.
But but what spurred us to start working on this project was not only the fact
that we suddenly had these these outsiders coming into the into power centres.
It was also the reaction by the economic establishment, and we felt that some of that reaction was incredibly fast,
very defensive and was very dismissive of these challenges and didn't really address some of the concerns that were raised.
And [INAUDIBLE] want to address a methodological choice that we make in the book and in our engagement with these issues,
which is to focus on narratives about economic globalisation.
And in order to understand why we made that choices, you have to keep in mind that we are not economists,
so we are not really equipped to engage with with the some of the empirical claims that that are made by these challenges to globalisation.
So we we didn't want to talk to weigh in on whether Trump and Brexit was the Brexit supporters were offering accounts that were empirically correct.
Our focus was on understanding where they were coming from.
What are the stories that they're telling? What are the values that they don't see represented and protected in the current order?
And so by focussing on on narratives that gave us a little bit of freedom to talk about these stories that that these
opponents of globalisation tell without necessarily passing judgement on the veracity of the claims right away.
So in a way, it allowed us to bracket the question of whether every,
every story that they tell is empirically correct and focussed more on the values that they were trying to bring to the forefront.
And we have one way of thinking about this mess that we we confronted was was like like in a Rubik's Cube with which is a scramble.
So you have all these different colours.
And the question that one way of framing the question that we asked was could be unscramble this Rubik's Cube,
take all these different arguments and create coherent faces.
And we ended up coming up with six such faces.
The starting point was, of course, what we call the establishment narrative,
and this is the kind of narrative that you would hear from if you got a bunch of trade lawyers and trade economists together and put them on a panel.
And those are the kind of views that they would all agree on. Right.
It's what what Paul Krugman described at the various as the very serious people in the field like they would, they would hold these kinds of views.
And the gist of the establishment narrative is essentially that that everybody ultimately wins from globalisation.
And so we've tried to represent this in this graphic. You see at the top, you can't see it like the owners of capital the rich.
Yes, they went a bit more than those at the bottom. The workers in both developed and developing countries.
But ultimately, everybody wins.
And the key message of the establishment narrative is that the gains from trade can be redistributed so that everybody becomes better off.
So even though those at the top may be winning more initially from globalisation,
you can take the gains from trade that those at the top bribed and redistributed to them,
to those at the top or even those who have, like, maybe temporarily lost from.
The message that comes out of annexation, such as a trade organisation, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,
if you look at some of the reports that these organisations published. The election, it was a message that trade works for all and all.
Adjustment by those who have temporarily lost out.
Perhaps the most striking graph that the narrative uses is this so-called hockey stick of global prosperity,
which shows where GDP over the last two millennia, and we see that we're basically at subsistence level for for thousands of years.
And then it shoots up once the word and phrases embraces technological change and an international free trade.
Because at that point, you create use technology to create huge markets, allowing people to specialise become way more productive.
And as a result, we have this hockey stick of global prosperity. But it's not just in the developed world.
The other fact that proponents of this narrative always point to is that globalisation has helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
So we have that. The striking fall in the share of people living in absolute poverty,
which is mostly due to to the to the development of China and India, of course, which embraced globalisation.
Well, what about all those in the developed world who have lost their job?
Are two messages that we hear from this narrative. The first one is that it's mostly about technological change.
So agree. A number that's often cited by proponents of the narrative is that probably about 80 percent
of dislocation and job losses in manufacturing are due to technological change and innovation,
the adoption of new machines and so forth, rather than at two to international trade.
And so this graph helps to make that argument because it shows that even if you had
this massive fall in manufacturing employment in the United States around 2000,
you see that manufacturing output was still going up.
So it's really the the argument is, you know, it's not because stops have jobs have been stolen and moved in move to China and Mexico.
It's because manufacturers are able to produce more with fewer people.
That's why we see massive job losses in manufacturing.
And the message that comes from this as well is that yes, while the way to deal with that is to retrain those workers,
make them move into the cities that are prospering and make sure that they that they are thriving as well.
A final comment I wanted to make about the establishment narrative,
it's it's probably not an accident that it is promoted and embraced by international
economic organisations because it's almost a and allows him to take an apolitical posture.
It can say, Well, we may be in the business of making everybody richer or removing barriers to trade,
and it's therefore domestic politics to deal with the distributive issues.
And so so that allows these organisations to get kind of pretend that they're staying out of distributive questions.
Of course, the challenge, how is it how does the picture painted by Trump and the Brexit proponents differ?
Well, it's essentially saying, well, we don't necessarily agree about the numbers about the absolute gains,
but but they point to this relative shift that you see in this graphic from workers in developed countries to workers in developing countries.
And you probably all remember the rhetoric of Trump and Peter Navarro,
his his trade guy as he described himself that China and Mexico are stealing are stealing US jobs.
So the idea here is that that is not really about comparative advantage and who does things more efficiently.
It's it's what is at the heart of this redistribution.
And the International Division of Labour is as cheating on the on the side of of Mexico and China,
which has allowed them to steal the jobs which you see here on this boat being shipped to China.
So this is a screenshot from a movie by Peter Navarro called Death by China.
And what what struck me when I first saw this picture is that he sees jobs as as as billiard balls,
like as something that you can that has like a physical manifestation.
And that's a that's a huge difference to the establishment narrative for the different narrative.
Jobs are simply just an economic activity that you engage in.
And then if somebody else becomes more productive in that or better, then you just move on to do another activity.
Whereas for the for the this right wing populist narrative,
they see jobs as something that has this is almost like something that you can own and it's like your property.
And that can be stolen from you and shipped away. And why might this conception of jobs resonate?
Well, it might resonate because for for people who have worked in a particular job for four decades, maybe even for generations,
their fathers and grandfathers has already had already had that job and for whom it's central to their livelihood,
central to their status in the community, central to their identity.
And I'm thinking here, particularly of the steelworkers or the manufacturing workers of mining workers in the United States,
which this narrative focuses on. For them, losing that job may actually feel like they've been robbed.
It may be. It may actually feel like they've been deprived of something that was their property.
And so this rhetoric that the right wing populist used about stolen jobs might
capture something about this reality that this government narrative misses.
And so this is was and a sense that you should be shouldn't be asked to trade off.
The benefits of globalisation are cheaper products and so forth for for these jobs, which are so important to our our identity.
Another key difference between the establishment narrative and the right wing populist narrative is the level of analysis that they focus on.
And you see, for example, if you look at the change in furniture employment in the United States,
which is one of the industries, was most affected by competition from China.
If you look at the United States as a whole, the loss in furniture, employment and it's minuscule, it's hardly perceptible.
And that's the typical perspective that the establishment out of takes it looks at the U.S. economy is that while this doesn't matter,
look at the same time who created this many jobs in another area.
But if you then if you look at the impact in North Carolina and even more in Hickory,
one of the manufacturing towns in North Carolina, you see that has a massive, massive impact.
And so what the right wing populist narrative does, it leads us to focus on particular locations and show how the how globalisation has had this
disproportionate impact on particular locations and really hollowed out manufacturing communities.
And another point about these manufacturing jobs that are lost is that they are often what economists describe as multiple.
They have high multiplier.
So when you lose manufacturing jobs, you typically lose four to five service sector jobs as well, which are supported by that manufacturing income.
So when the factory goes and the factory leaves town or shuts down,
it's not just the manufacturing workers who lose their job is also that the movies, the the the restaurants in the area that also suffer.
So you see the entire community being sucked into this black hole.
And particularly in the United States,
we have the striking effects of a graphic which shows which is potentially an effect of this of this development,
which is the rise in so-called deaths of despair, which and deaths by drugs, alcohol or suicide.
And you see, it's particularly affecting white non-Hispanics in the United States in a way that you don't see in other developed countries.
So it's a quite different story about globalisation that this might bring, populist perspective tells.
But of course, we also had people like on the left who had quite different critique of of globalisation.
They, in their view,
it wasn't so much the case that that the workers in other developing countries were in developing countries were gaining at the expense of workers.
And it was the rich, the elite that was gaining at the expense of workers in all these countries.
And partly that argument was that the key to that argument was that, yes,
we have productivity gains facilitated by technological change and and specialisation in international trade.
But the gains these gains are appropriated by by the elite and not kind of trickling through to the workers.
And the most important graph of this narrative is this one which shows that around 1970, in the mid-1970s,
we have this decoupling of productivity growth and wages so that at that point, yes, productivity keeps rising.
But it this is not reflected in compensation of of workers, and there are lots of parts of why that is one of the crackdown on unions.
The decrease in unionisation is often identified as a key factor,
but also all kinds of ways in which the elite rigged the market in order to benefit the richest.
As a result, we have this develop this striking development in the United States that the top one
percent now owns more a greater share of the national income than the bottom 50 percent.
And this view was, of course, most prominently advanced by by Bernie Sanders and people like Ocasio-Cortez in the United States.
But you also see it in many other developed countries. In the last couple of years, we all in a yet entirely different perspective come up,
which is somewhat related to the right wing populist view, but it's still different.
This one doesn't focus so much on workers in the U.S.,
in particular communities losing out its focus more on the United States as a country losing
out to its China in this process of great power competition and the emblematic firm.
And that's that's it stands for that, for that development, probably Huawei. Huawei,
which has become the that that was on track to become the largest telecommunications company
and had in many ways overtaken U.S. companies in terms of technological sophistication.
This is the focus he has not so much. The concern is not so much that we losing Steve Jobs or auto manufacturing jobs is that the US,
as the U.S., is losing its status as the supreme technological and economic power.
We see that China has, at least in purchasing power terms, has overtaken the United States in terms of its share of world GDP.
And this comes comes hand in hand with a with whole range of change in attitudes towards globalisation.
And just to give you one example, foreign direct investment was seen on the establishment narrative as something positive.
I did something you're bringing money into the country, you're creating employment.
But if you're starting to see your your economic rival through a security lens, as someone who is who is probably going to overtake you and might,
might really put you into your spot, you become more sceptical, you become more worried about about the implications of that foreign investment.
And so the suffuse is the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which which scrutinises investment that comes to the United States.
And we see a huge uptick investigation in investigations of incoming foreign investment around 2008,
which is when this narrative really starts taking off.
And so the concern with investment is that that the foreign competitor in this case,
China is getting ever more control of the United States companies is giving it a more potential to to sabotage and spy on the United States.
And so this infusion of security concerns into into the trade debate is really what what makes this geoeconomic narrative?
It's not solely about jobs, it's also about security.
We also see with the Trump administration and increasing concerns about the resilience of supply chains right there.
The Peter Navarro was one someone who was obsessed with dependence of the United States on supplies from China.
He would always point out that, for example, medicine,
so many of us medicines are imported from China and and he was really worried about what that would mean if there
was a conflict between the United States and China and all the leverage that China was gaining as a result.
We have a fifth one where we're almost we're almost done here, which is really the narrative that you see most prominently,
both on the European left and also in amongst the labour units in the United States.
And we often criticised that this is actually very similar to the left wing populist view that I described earlier.
But we still see a difference because this particular narrative takes a transnational perspective.
And it says that labour,
if you want the best perspective to look at who wins in the midst of globalisation is to look at labour and workers collectively.
If you look at them collectively and show how they are losing out against the elite and particularly here, international multinational corporations.
One striking example of this narrative is the protests that you saw in 2015 2016 in the European Union.
And these protests were directed against the TTIP agreement, the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership between the United States and Europe.
And also this agreement an agreement between the European Union and Canada.
And you might wonder, well, why are people protesting these agreements given that Europe and particularly Germany,
where these protests were the most forceful, has a huge trade surplus?
So we don't have these manufacturing job losses to the same degree or they don't have the same impact as in the United States.
And the explanation is that what they were protesting about the agreements was not any trade liberalisation.
They were not concerned about trade liberalisation.
They were concerned about elements of these agreements, which they thought would increase the power of corporations.
And their two particular examples of that one is investor state dispute settlement.
So the concern that U.S. corporations would gain the right to sue European governments over regulatory measures that decrease their profits,
but also regulatory cooperation, which seems sounds innocuous.
But the concern here was that U.S. corporations would use these agreements to soften
and undermine regulatory standards in the UK and European Union that protect,
for example, that that prohibit hormone treated beef or chlorinated chicken or genetically modified organisms organisms.
So how is this perspective different from the left and populist view?
It doesn't focus so much on on the share of national income that goes to the top and the bottom in individual countries.
It looks at how the labour share of income has been decreasing in many different countries,
whereas the share of corporate profit has been has been going up.
And one explanation for this for this development is essentially that international trade facilitates a race to the bottom right.
For me, this narrative became most prominent in the context of the negotiations around a new NAFTA,
which I'm going to talk about later here in North America, where where the Canadian unions and the US unions friends were saying that the
problem with these trade agreements and NAFTA is not so much that Mexicans and
Chinese workers have been able to steer our jobs is that the corporations have
been able to take the good jobs with benefits and high wages in North America,
in the US and Canada, and take them to Mexico and make them into bad jobs.
So it's not so much that the Mexican workers are benefiting because they are not getting paid good wages.
They are being paid poverty wages, they're not even able to buy the cost that they produce.
And it's the corporations that are reaping all the benefits.
The area where you actually see the most striking evidence of this race to the bottom is the area of corporate taxation.
So this graph shows you the decrease in corporate tax rates in all major developed countries over the past couple of decades.
In recent years, this narrative has also taken aim, particularly at the large tech companies.
So there's a focus on how globalisation has allowed these companies to to to attain dominant positions in their respective fields,
and how globalisation also frustrates attempts to to take effective action against tech companies.
And we see some attempts now by the opinion in the United States, in the Trade and Tech Council to try to address these concerns.
Finally, there's a finite perspective which doesn't focus so much on in on on relative winners and losers,
but rather says that if we go on on our current path, we are all bound to lose.
So yes, some people are going to lose more, and the poor and developing countries are going to be the worst off.
But if we if we change our metric and don't just look at our GDP figures, but look at overall well-being and life chances,
then we see that on elkhorn par three, always going, we are all going to lose.
The prime example of that is, of course, the climate crisis and which has also become to new prominence in the last couple of years,
mostly thanks to the work and Fridays for Future. Probably.
And what it points out is that this hockey stick of global prosperity that I
showed you earlier is also reflected in a hockey stick of global emissions.
So the very dynamics that allow us to become ever richer and enjoy the Senate of living are
also the ones that are driving us towards the twisty abyss and why we were working on the book.
There was, of course, another development the COVID 19 pandemic, which which has this had had some similar dynamics.
On the one hand, you have much more severe impacts on the on the on the poor parts of the population.
But there's also a a part of this threat, which means that nobody is safe until everyone is safe.
So there is the same collective prospect of collective loss that we see with risk with climate change.
And so the two narratives that be grouped together in this global threats.
Now it is a.
It's not just getting sustained and that focus on resilience that we have to be resilient to shocks such as those that are being caused by the.
One author who has written very eloquently about this is a caterer both.
That was this what we have to make sure that we don't overshoot our logical ceilings.
We have to somehow constrain, restrain ourselves to it so that we stay in the safe and just space for humanity.
But at the same time, you also make sure that we have to make sure that we supply the social foundations.
We have to make sure that everybody has housing and adequate health care and so forth.
And these are arguments that have come out in the in in response to the pandemic very strongly way the resents narratives, that's what we have.
In order to be resilient, we have to make sure that everybody has a paid leave,
has health care in order to make sure that we can deal with these threats.
OK, so if we take these six narratives together, we can see that they're broadly fall into these three categories,
we have the win win narrative that I began with the establishment narrative at the top.
We have different types of win lose narrative, focussing on different groups of winners and losers.
And finally, we have this lose lose perspective that we're all going to lose out if we don't change our ways.
We also see these narratives reflected in the news.
These are just a couple of economist covers, so we have the positive view of the establishment narrative,
the idea that there's this increasing divide between the rich and the rest,
the concept that people are left behind by globalisation, which as it gets to the right wing populist view.
Although I want to say that when we looked at these narratives and I spent a lot of time looking at interviews
with supporters of the AfD in Germany or Brexit supporters and in the U.K. and Trump supporters in the US,
you see that they would actually reject this idea that they've been left behind.
It's not so much that they've been left behind and not want to catch up.
It's more that they mourn what has been left behind.
They don't want to go back to the way things were, or at least don't want things to change further.
So, so this describing these people as left behind is actually adopting the establishment's perspective of what the problem is.
We have, of course, increasing attention to the China and to the competition between the United States and China,
and that is particularly prominent in the United States, it's almost inescapable these days.
The diskette does any trade issues in the United States without running into this private rivalry.
And finally, the the idea that corporations are the ones who are taking taking all at the expense
of everyone else and the sustainability of global threats narrative at the end.
So we see these all reflected all over the media.
One interesting aspect of looking at these narratives is that you could see how how actors were taking the same facts and giving them interpretations.
So this is the famous elephant grass created by Branko Milanovic and spoke of global inequality,
and it shows the relative rise in income over the past two decades.
So at the bottom, you see essentially where people fall in the global income distribution from the world's poorest to the world's richest.
And then you see how their income has changed over these two decades of globalisation from 88 to 2008.
And at point one, you have the middle classes in the developing world and China and India.
At point two, you have middle class and working classes in in the developed world in the West,
and at point three, you have the richest people in the world.
And so the right wing populist you focus is on the movement from or essentially the redistribution
of gains from the working classes and in the in the West and the loving countries,
according to to the working class middle class in the rising middle class in Asia.
Whereas the left wing populist takes the same picture but draws attention to a different movement,
namely from from the middle classes and working classes in the developed world towards the the richest one percent.
On how what can we do with these narratives? And of course, as we as international lawyers, we were interested to see, well,
what can we actually how can these narratives actually help illuminate what's happening in international law?
And so in the second part of the book, which is called Working with Globalisation Narratives,
we try to use these narratives to illuminate debates and international, not just international,
but in international relations more generally and are our preferred tool for that purpose is
then diagrams because they help us to map the overlaps and differences between the narratives.
And I just given that my background is in trade,
I did want to take a an example from the trade field to to show how these narratives can show us and can help us understand what has happened.
And the example that I'm going to use today is the renegotiation of NAFTA.
So Trump came to power with as a huge opponent of NAFTA as what was one of his favourite arguments
against Clinton that her husband had had been the one who had overseen the the conclusion of NAFTA.
And so he it was clear that he wanted to reopen NAFTA.
And when when he said that when it was clear that there would be a new NAFED of some sort.
The proponents of the establishment narrative, which was essentially the business community most of us Republicans,
but also parts of Canadian and Mexican government, essentially wanted to continue on the old path.
They wanted to do more of the same, which is to to keep the existing levels of liberalisation to modernise the agreement,
but also especially in the US to to increase further increase protection for intellectual property rights,
address digital trade, expand free movement and have stronger dispute settlement.
So there was there was a real push to go further on the old establishment path of further liberalisation,
further international legalisation, essentially an opportunity to modernise and fix the old agreement against that.
The Trump administration had very different ideas.
They agreed that there was some need for modernisation when it came to digital trade, particularly particularly.
And they also were happy with the additional IP protection because it was mostly down to the benefit of U.S. corporations.
But the primary objective of the Trump administration was not to have further liberalisation,
but to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States.
And they tried to do that in the most heavy-handed fashion initially by saying, Well, we want to have a.
And often after so I said, for those of you are not try trade lawyers rules of origins,
of the rules that govern when a good has access to a true market under a free trade agreement.
Right. So for example, in the United States, in the if a 50 percent domestic content requirement would.
A good would only be able to be imported in the United States duty free under
NAFTA if 50 percent of the value of the good had been added in the United States.
The Trump administration also wanted to have a short sunset period.
It wanted to make sure that the agreement was not going to be in time for in place for a long time.
And really, the aim here was to create uncertainty.
It wanted to create uncertainty that businesses wouldn't feel confident that they could move the objection
to United States and still be able to to export to the United States to buy it by creating that uncertainty.
The hope was that businesses would decide manufacturers would decide to produce in the
United States so that they could be sure to have market access in the United States.
Interestingly, the Trump ministration wanted also wanted to abolish investor state dispute settlement for the same reason, it said, Well,
if we give U.S. investors the ability to sue Mexico's government,
if the investment is somehow somehow infringed or diminished in value, that makes them more confident about investing in Mexico.
And we don't want them to be confident about investing in Mexico like we want them to invest in the United States.
There was also a third perspective, which at the beginning of the negotiations wasn't all that strong.
It's partly held by by the Canadian and Mexican governments, but also particularly by organised labour and the Democratic Party in the United States,
and it has made agrees with some of the aspects of the narrative.
It also likes stronger dispute settlement,
but the primary reason it likes stronger dispute settlement is because he wants to be able to enforce labour rights.
In Mexico, it wants to hold the Mexican government to account if the Mexican government does not protect labour rights.
The this corporate power narrative also agrees that abolishing investor state dispute settlement,
but not because it wants to create uncertainty necessarily for U.S. corporations in Mexico.
It's because it's generally concerned about the power of corporations to sue governments, including the U.S. and Canadian government governments.
And in a similar vein, it opposes the additional protections of property rights.
And this was a particularly strong point for Democrats in the United States who wanted to reduce the price of medication.
And one way to do that was to actually dismantle some intellectual property protection for medicines.
So what's interesting is to see how these how these different priorities came together in in different versions of the agreement.
Because the first version of the agreement, the so-called USMCA, US Mexico Canada Agreement, you see,
the free trade has been removed from the title was signed in November on November 30th, 2018.
And it shows that it was very much dominated by the protectionist narrative of
the Trump administration and has the elements that defined in the agreement.
Additionally, IP protection modernisation rules are in the areas of overlap with the other ones,
but we don't find any elements which are not within this protectionist circle.
And the most interesting aspect, I think,
from the perspective of the narratives is what happened to that U.S. domestic content requirement that was unpalatable for Mexico and Canada.
Obviously, they wouldn't accept that the US would get this priority status in the agreement,
but the negotiators found a way to reformulate this requirement in a way that made
it palatable to those in who will subscribe to the corporate power narrative.
And so what they did instead was to create something called a labour content requirement.
And what this requirement says is that up to 40 40,
at least 40 percent of the value of the of the car has to be made by workers making at least six dollars an hour.
And you can see why this compromise would appeal to both proponents of these protections.
Narrative and the corporate power narrative for the protection side of it could say, well, wages in Mexico are around $4 an hour.
So if 40 percent of the car has to be manufactured by workers,
making $16 now is that means the production is going to come back to the United States and Canada.
Whereas for proponents of the corporate power narrative, you could say well, well,
that at least holds the promise that companies are going to increase the wages of at
least some of the workers in Mexico in order to meet that 40 percent requirement.
So the corporate power narrative saw a potential here to boost worker power vis-a-vis corporations, and that allowed this compromise to happen.
Interestingly, in that very month and when this agreement was signed,
the Republicans lost majority in the House of Representatives in the United States and the Democrats,
once the Democrats took that took their seats, they demanded changes to the agreement.
And those changes really decisively shifted the balance of the game and towards the corporate power narrative.
So about one year later, we had a amended version of the USMCA.
And just let's look at the changes that happened to the agreement. Well, the additional IP protections were gone.
And this is the first U.S. trade agreement in decades, which does not further increase intellectual property protections.
Instead, we have no additional protections for intellectual property rights.
We also have a strengthened labour standards and labour rights enforcement in Mexico.
They've even created so-called Rapid Response Mechanism, which allows allows the US government and the Canadian government to block imports from
specific from specific factories in Mexico if they are labour rights violations there.
And it also beefed up dispute settlement again with the same goal of strengthening labour rights enforcement in vis-a-vis vis a vis Mexico.
So the narratives help us understand how shifting power between different proponents
of the narrative changed the content on centre of gravity of the agreement.
Another example where the narratives help us make sense of what's happening is the semiconductor shortage,
as you probably all have seen headlines about the chips crisis,
the fact that car comment car manufacturers had to close factories because they didn't have sufficient semiconductors.
And I'm just going to check on the time here.
OK. And. And these different policies,
we can always make sense of all these different policies that are that are influencing this crisis through the narratives.
One of the first actions on ships that we saw was was the Trump administration's tariffs on all things Chinese, including on Chinese semiconductor.
So a contributor to the top guys in the United States was actually the fact that the United
States put tariffs on Chinese semiconductors in order to bring jobs back to the United States.
And that led to a fall in imports of chips from China.
And this can only really be explained from the perspective of the protectionist narrative that was that Trump was trying to do at the same time,
also still during the Trump administration. We also had the imposition of export restrictions on export restrictions on semiconductors,
and the attention here was to hobble strategic competitors of the United States and particularly the Trump administration,
want to make sure that Huawei and other Chinese companies didn't get hold of most advanced semiconductors.
And for the Trump generation,
that was not simply a national security issue is also a concern of Huawei obtaining being able to become the most advanced American company.
It's a very radical company to just. To just make changes to to destroy your competitors company is a very radical policy.
We also saw export restrictions due in pandemic, of course.
So just just to highlight the contrast between these two policies, this action to impose export restriction, of course,
didn't make sense from the protections narrative because the protectionist narrative is about creating good jobs for your people.
Right. If you if you restrict exports from your company, you're eliminating employment and your you, you, you destroy jobs.
In fact, so we can't really make sense of these two different policies without ActionScript,
without understanding in the context of that particular narrative.
Of course, during the pandemic, we also saw export restrictions imposed on stuff like personal protective equipment and vaccines.
But there's a real difference between the export restrictions that imposed on resilience grounds
and on geoeconomic grounds because when you impose export restrictions on resilience grounds,
what you're trying to do is to make sure that you have enough domestic supply and that's different from trying to destroy your competitors a company.
And that also explains why many of the export restrictions imposed in the course of the pandemic were temporary restrictions.
What's interesting when you look at these three narratives that were playing the chips have been obtained
just by that they all can agree for different reasons on the need to invest in domestic manufacture.
And that's why we have seen a big push towards industrial policies that create manufacturing capacity at home for the protectionists.
It's about jobs. You want to have high quality manufacturing jobs for the geoeconomic narrative.
It's about making sure that you're not dependent on a strategic competitor.
And for the United States, that has been particularly acute because 90 percent of advanced semiconductors are manufactured in Taiwan.
And there's a real concern that China will actually invade Taiwan in the next couple of years,
and that the US will thereby lose access to the two most advanced semiconductor manufacturing.
So there's a real geo economic imperative here to invest in manufacturing.
From the perspective of the president's narrative, it's simply a question of being able to withstand shocks in supply and demand.
So the union just can't tolerate that.
Car manufacturers are not able to produce because they don't have access to these chips, so they all overlap in this area.
But again, in other areas, we see we see differences. So for example, if our perspective is primarily concerned about resilience,
our ability to withstand with withstand shocks, then our imperative is to diversify sources of supply.
But that could be include strategic competitors, right?
So it might make sense to do so as not just amongst Chinese companies, but from different Chinese companies and also companies from other countries.
If we primarily take a geo economic perspective where we don't want to be dependent on a strategic competitor,
then diversification has to happen amongst allies and sometimes referred to as allies shoring.
Right. So bringing Chinese companies into these supply chains that we're trying to to build would not make sense from that perspective.
In other policy that that we see as investments in stockpiling for, so for example,
a Toyota was able to withstand the crisis for a long time because it had learnt its lesson from
from the earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan and make sure that it had an adequate supply and.
In final contrast between them, the two narratives is that in the case of a Djukanovic perspective, you are sceptical of inbound fund act investment,
and I showed you earlier the stock price in investigations of inbound foreign investment and the surface in the United States.
Whereas in the from the perspective of the protectionist narrative, what you're really concerned about is outbound investment.
You want to make sure that companies invest at home rather than abroad.
What's common to the protectionist and the economic narrative,
and that's really unites these different factions in the United States is a zero-sum conception of international trade.
It's a China spin is the US is lost. Whether you care about advanced manufacturing or whether you care about, like old style manufacturing jobs.
Whereas what's common about the protectionist and the resilience narratives is this concern about the well-being of the domestic worker workforce.
So that's a real difference between the two narratives.
If you listen to Trump, you'll see that he mostly talks about white men, mostly talks about autoworkers miners.
He never talks about like the textile industry where you have primarily women and minorities are primarily employed.
And he, of course, also never talks about there the service sector.
Whereas for the resilience narrative that emerged in response to the pandemic,
the focus was very much on the on the plight of service workers like the
essential workers who had precarious jobs and were doing incredibly dangerous,
important work. So the left wing and right wing populist there there's there's there's a concern about the domestic workforce,
but there's a deep focus on different parts of that workforce.
So this gives us a picture of how all the different policies that are in play in the chips crisis.
So we we we don't stop in the book. We don't stop at the van.
We actually go further and apply this metaphor of of a kaleidoscope because when we look.
Draw lessons from our analysis for policy making.
What really struck us is the need to to see the kaleidoscopic complexity of these issues and what do we mean by that?
It's really an ability to not just see the different narratives and what they say,
but try to integrate insets insights from these different narratives.
So Sudfeld has this concept of integrated complexity, which has two steps.
The first step is to differentiate the different perspectives, but then to somehow integrate them.
Consider the sea where the trade offs are between them, where there are commonalities, where their income answerable,
and then try to work out how we can design policies that take into account all of these different perspectives.
And one example that I wanted to give where that wasn't done was was McCall's diesel taxes tax on on diesel, which prompted the yellow vest protests.
If you look at that policy from the perspective of the establishment narrative or the sustainability narrative,
it makes perfect sense, like the establishment narratives like Market-Based solution.
These two sustainability narrative wants to combat climate change.
But what Macron ignored was how this same policy that this policy looked from the perspective of other narratives,
such as the right wing populist or left wing populist narrative one right for the right wing populist narrative.
What the diesel tax was doing was just punishing people living in the countryside people,
whereas it wasn't doing anything about the elites, the city dwelling elites who were taking flights to their vacation, right?
So it was burdening a particular part of the population that is particularly in rural and conservative areas.
From the perspective of the left wing populist narrative, it was also further promoting the inequality that we're already seeing in French society.
So essentially, if you the message here is that if you don't try to see policies from perspective of all these narratives,
you're bound to risk that your policies are going to go up in flames because they are going to
people who are going to see these policies in completely different ways than than you are doing.
Adopting all these different perspectives, so trying to integrate them also helps us to make better predictions about the future.
So Philip Tetlock has has this metaphor of dragonfly eyes that if you look at these the eyes of the Dragonfly,
you see that it has thousands of lenses that essentially give it a 360 degree vision of the world.
And what he has found and touched on in his research is that if people adopt this driving fight thinking,
they may be able to make much better predictions about the future than if they just focus on one one perspective.
Well, of course, it's difficult as an individual to always do that to be able to integrate all these perspectives.
The one way of achieving that goal is to build diverse teams.
And we have that. I got that idea from side. If it shows that even if you have lots of intelligent people, so we have like David,
yet intelligent guy and then but but then we get a whole bunch of other intelligent people,
but they are intelligent the same way as if they have the same perspective of saving and put them together.
Then we actually may have a a team that is composed of smart people, but it's collectively stupid because it doesn't.
It reinforces people in this group. They reinforce each other's biases and they don't don't come at the issue from different perspectives.
So what we need really is is diverse teams. And to just give you an example again from international law, where that may have been a problem.
Before I joined Queens, I used to work at the World Trade Trade Organisation, at the WTO, at the body.
And you may have heard that the head of the body is defunct.
That is no longer working because the United States has been blocking appointments to the appellate body.
So obviously, having worked in the Secretariat,
I I've been thinking about that a lot and I've been wondering whether one problem of the of the team that was supporting the upper body,
but also the upper body itself was a lack of diversity.
And what do I mean by that? Obviously at that, at that until we were, we were incredibly diverse.
We came all came from different countries. We spoke different languages, different cultural backgrounds.
But none of us was really in a position to fully understand the US perspective
because none of us came from the from the trade remedy side in the United States.
So I don't want to get too deep into the matters entered into the issue here.
But the reason why the US is so upset about the appellate body is because the appellate bodies,
because of the appellate bodies jurisprudence on trade remedies. So we had to you as American and the other party secretary.
But he came from the State Department, not the Department of Commerce.
And so maybe it was because of we didn't have someone who who really represented that U.S. perspective, that protectionist perspective amongst us,
that we couldn't really fully grasp the US concerns about what the arbiter of what it was doing and what was
interesting is that the US always had an appellate body member itself and always had an upper body member itself.
And us could would know that whenever nominated appellate body members and the membership would choose at least one U.S. Apple Party members.
But what the US did in order to be nice to them plus of the membership,
it would typically nominate one appellate body member who was very controversial.
Well, we held very strong critical views of the appellate body and then one who was a bit more mellow and a bit more mainstream.
And on each of these occasions when the membership had the choice between these two, a different matter.
But remember, it shows the momentum one more mainstream one.
And I'm just wondering, I think that that was a mistake.
I think if there the membership had chosen the after party member who was more critical of the of the party, a bit like Lincoln's team of rivals,
it would have potentially protected the everybody because that member could have told the court his colleagues it was.
All men could have told his colleagues that what really the US concerns with the appellate body
were and the danger that the party was running in in pursuing the course that it pursued.
So this this these diverse perspectives that we're talking about here,
the importance of having diverse teams is something that's acutely relevant for international law.
I would say. So I don't know how I'm doing for time.
Let me just. I think I've run over.
It's absolutely fine, because if you if you could sort of pull things, get a little moved some questions, but it's so fascinating.
So please do. One I just want to mention one limitation of the book,
which is that as you may have noticed that I've noticed is I've been speaking
primarily from the from the Western perspectives about debates in the West.
And we we are very conscious of the fact that we are not giving the same in-depth treatment to narratives from outside the West.
We have a chapter in the book where we talk about blind spots of narrative and blind spots and
biases in the Western narratives where we try to address some of the non-Western perspectives.
But I think I'll stop here and I'm happy to get back to these two to the non-Western narratives in the debate and the discussion.