From Capitalism, Alone (Branko Milanovic, 2019) p157-8
One of the political consequences of the close linkage between the welfare state and citizenship is the antiglobalization stance of certain left-wing parties (such as La France Insoumise in France, and the Social Democrats in Denmark, Austria, the Netherlands, and Sweden). These parties are against both capital outflows (because outsourcing and investments in poorer countries destroy jobs in rich countries, even if they might create many more jobs elsewhere) and migration. These left-wing parties, which played a crucial role in the creation of the welfare state, are thus placed in the seemingly paradoxical position of being both nationalist and anti-internationalist, breaking with a long tradition of internationalist socialism. This change in attitude stems from a change in the underlying economic conditions that has taken place during the past one hundred and fifty years: a movement away from uniformity in economic conditions among poor people regardless of nation, and the construction of complex and comprehensive welfare states in the rich world. The change in policy of left-wing parties is thus not accidental but is a response to long-term trends. Left-wing or social democratic parties have relatively well-defined constituencies of workers in the industrial and public sectors, whose jobs are threatened by the free movement of both capital and labor. By effectively abandoning the tradition of internationalism, these parties have become more similar, and politically closer, to the right-wing parties with which they often (as in France) now share the political space and voters. The residual of internationalism can still be seen, however, in left-wing parties’ antidiscrimination policies, whose main beneficiaries are migrants already living in the countries of reception. These parties’ voters thus display a somewhat schizophrenic attitude of being supportive of the rights of the migrants who have managed to make it into the country, while being against more migrants coming in, and against more capital going out to give employment to people poorer than themselves.
I conclude this section with a more philosophic problem that underlies the discussion of migration. The existence of the citizenship rent implies manifest inequality of opportunity on a global scale: two identical individuals, one born in a poor country and one in a rich country, will have rights to very unequal income streams over their lifetimes. This is an obvious fact, but its implications have not been fully drawn out. If we contrast the situation of these two individuals born in two different countries with two identical individuals born of poor and rich parents in the same country, we notice that in the latter case there would be some concern with inequality of opportunity and an often shared belief among most citizens of the country that such inequalities in starting position ought to be leveled out. But no such concerns appear to exist in the former case. John Rawls’s work provides a perfect example of this discrepancy, or inconsistency. In his book A Theory of Justice, he accords within-nation inequalities a place of highest importance and argues that inequalities between people born to rich and poor parents need to be alleviated or eliminated. But when he turns to the international arena in The Law of Peoples, he completely ignores inequalities between people born in rich and poor countries. Yet in the words of Josiah Stamp (1926), written almost a century ago, “While we may focus on individual inheritance, it cannot be wholly dissociated from the communal aspects. When [a person] comes into the world, he has, as an economic unit, to associate with two types of assistance, i.e. what he individually inherits from his parents, and what he socially inherits from previous society, and in both of these the principle of individual inheritance has been present.”
Global inequality of opportunity is not generally considered a problem at all, much less a problem in need of a solution.
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