World turns, so must South

This is the South, where a tragic, haunted history pervades the air as surely as the pungent smell of pine. So it's not surprising that we must return to that almighty past to understand what's preventing the region from excelling in the 21st-century's global economy.

"The South has long seen itself as a victim," said Jim Clinton, executive director of the Southern Growth Policies Board, which is based in Research Triangle Park. "While clinging fiercely to the past, Southerners have seen history as something that happens to us."

For decades Southerners called the bloody conflict of the 1860s the War of Northern Aggression, he noted. A hundred years later, many blamed the civil rights movement on outside agitators and Northern interlopers who wanted to destroy their way of life.

Time, truth and progress have debunked those understandings, but the victim mentality persists in the region's response to globalization. The South lags behind the rest of the country in exports, foreign investment and other crucial indexes, Clinton added, and "this self-defeating, insular view makes it hard for us to adapt to, and take advantage of, new realities."

Identifying the challenges and opportunities of globalization is the aim of an international conference at UNC-CH this month. "Beyond the Sunbelt: Southern Economic Development in a Global Context" will feature scholars and business leaders who are exploring how the region can take a more proactive role in creating jobs and wealth in an interdependent world.

"The headlines report the jobs we've lost to global competition," said Jesse L. White Jr., director of UNC's Office of Economic and Business Development. "Not enough attention is paid to the jobs we've gained and to thinking about the impediments that prevented us from doing even better."

Forces beyond our control

The basic assumptions that inform the conference dispel two prevalent myths about globalization. First is the idea that a worldwide economy boils down to trade deals cut with other nations, suggesting that the United States can opt out if it doesn't like the terms. Not so, said John Kasarda, director of UNC's Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise.

"Globalization is not an option -- it's a necessity," Kasarda said. "Even the most local events -- how our weather is affected by climate change, the prices our farmers get for their crops, the value of our currency, the streams of new immigrants -- are being shaped by global forces that are too powerful for us to control."

In the face of these powerful currents, efforts to turn back the global tide are a fool's errand, Kasarda said. It is more useful to focus on ways of managing and benefiting from these irresistible changes.

The second myth is that globalization reduces opportunity and wealth. The ongoing process has had winners and losers. North Carolina, for example, lost 315,000 manufacturing jobs between 1995 and 2005, Kasarda said. But during the same period it also gained hundreds of thousands of jobs in fields related to global trade.

Equally important is globalization's effect on Third World countries. In the past few decades, Kasarda noted, India has lifted about 300 million people into the middle class and Thailand's poverty rate sank from 70 percent to 20 percent. From 1950 to 2000, world life expectancy rose dramatically, from 35 years to 56. Given such game-changing advances, poorer nations will continue to embrace globalization, providing America and the South with stiffer competition.

As the South faces these challenges, history might be a burden -- but it also provides valuable lessons. Since the Colonial era, the region has been a laboratory for globalization.