Openness has been the key to long-term U.S. success. This quality is being threatened the most in the 2016 presidential election, and by all the candidates: if this reading of U.S. history is accurate, the most open candidate will be the most likely to succeed in November.
Within this context, openness is being treated in terms of the "policy-making" approach; but it is hard to expect such an approach from someone whose "mindset" is not more open than closed. Whereas policy-making appraisals inform us about short-term dynamics, a mindset measurement exposes a longer view. In neither is it picture perfect: humans that we are (rather than angels), we toss from full to partial or zero openness as and when it suits us, leaving, when the dust settles, for others to configure the general tendency in their own subjective way.
No other country's constitution begins with such openness as in the United States: the first three words, "We the people . . . ," marked not just the start of modern democracy in 1776, but when this resonated with shouts of "liberté, égalité, fraternité" in Paris thirteen years later, the United States had "opened" up to the very "Old World" that almost everyone from the time of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620 to the Founding Fathers in the 1770s were determined to forget immediately. That openness translated into the country's first trade agreement (the Alliance Treaty) in 1788 with, and the 1803 Louisiana Purchase from, the only friend the United States had in the "Old World" (France). Both helped "open" the west for 20th Century consummation.
Even the barricaded 1823 Monroe Doctrine conception reflected openness: open to the rest of the Americas (where similar independence movements were in full sway), but not elsewhere. Alexander Hamilton's protectionist "Report on Manufacture" in 1792 and Kentucky's Henry Clay's stout defence of the "American system" (against South Carolina's John C. Calhoun's compromise proposal in 1833) became the sine qua non of U.S. infant-industry development, serving as the building-blocks of a longer historical streak of trade openness later. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act (RTAA) in 1934, inaugurated trade openness institutionally to the rest of the world. After the devastating 1929 Wall Street crash and the most formidable protectionist measure, the Hawley-Smoot Tariffs of 1930 (making tariff-levels equal to two-thirds of the value of every imported product), had reduced all countries to a deprecating "beggar-thy-neighbour" plight, the ingenuity that made the United States a world power was unleashed upon the RTAA fulcrum. Donald Trump might keep that in mind in pursuing his "America First" goal (as he declared in his major foreign policy address, to "The National Interest" invitees on April 27, 2016), that it not degenerate into Fortress America,
Openness was most vivid in the Statue of Liberty, gifted to the United States in 1886 by no other country than the other pioneer of democracy, France. Its blessed "huddled masses" reference made the United States what it became in the 20th Century, a world power: the Irish knew that even before with their own 1845-9 potato famine; the Germans got to know it better with their own unification wars, which pushed many to the United States during the late 1850s and 1860s; Italians trod the same pathway as Germany in early 20th Century; and so forth, until in 1965, through one of the most open immigration legislations in human history, the United States abandoned the Caucasian-based country-specific quotas on immigration for good (the Immigration and Naturalisation Act): Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans could now get their own share of the "American pie" while also chipping in, like the Europeans before them, with the blood, sweat, toil, and tears that working for a resurging market-economy draws. Openness explains why, in the 2010 Census, 15 per cent of the people identified their ancestry as German, almost 13 per cent as Afro-Americans, about 12 per cent as English, over 10 per cent as Irish, about 9.0 per cent as Mexican, almost 6.0 per cent as Italians, and, curiously just under 7.0 per cent as "Americans."
Slavery was a sad issue everywhere, in home, host, and particularly perpetrating countries; yet, in no affected countries have slave descendants found as much freedom and opportunities as in the United States: be it Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, or any other country that minted a fortune out of this depraved trade, and in spite of the huge and deep racial echoes still lingering today (again spot-lighting Trump). Yet, without the African slaves cultivating cotton, tobacco, sugarcane, among others (crops that bred some of today's significant U.S. industries), the pathway to U.S. independence might have been a lot more uphill.
The Chinese came, built the railroads that connected one coast to another when only the Pony Express prevailed, long, long before Federal Express (FEDEX) arrived. They went on to farming until the 1883 Exclusion Act (a Trump-like initiative that failed). Businesses turned to the Japanese instead, before the Asiatic Exclusion League produced the Japanese Exclusion Act in 1905; and the same for Italians, South Asian Indians (British empire residents), Portuguese, and others from the Mediterranean until World War I ended, much before the Mexican wave began in fits and starts. Only with the 1942 Bracero arrangements could the United States prosper agriculturally on the back of seasonal Mexican workers. This reached a peak with the 1986 IRCA (Immigration and Reform Control Act) amnesty, leading to a swarm in the 1990s, ultimately breeding the reaction of which Trump and Ted Cruz are a part. Without foreign labour to do the work U.S. citizens would (and will) not do, the country would have been in a quagmire; but how their work buttressed the U.S. world leadership claim has been an egregiously neglected discussion on U.S. power.
Without openness, not only would U.S. trade have suffocated in the 1930s Depression, but the many refugees and migrants fleeing Adolf Hitler, containing some of the brightest minds of the time, enriched U.S. innovative capacities. Only through those innovations could it become the largest market in human history (and the most open among all the industrialised countries), produce the very multinational corporations helping developing countries through foreign direct investment today (fully acknowledging many of their founders were immigrants themselves), and create the great international institutions the rest of the world still rallies behind. Not every development went picture-perfectly; and neither will Trump's plans to recreate the United States: no one person has been able to reverse heritage in the unique way s/he plans to.
Trump faces competition from candidates with their own blemishes. After Trump, Cruz is perhaps the most restrictive in living up to that open heritage, if his election rhetoric is any guide. Bernie Sanders means well, all too well, in fact, but there is no history of reining in big businesses in the way he is advocating; and, though Hillary Clinton retreated from openness with her questionable Trans-Pacific Partnership campaign position, her Achilles heel may not be this issue, but trust. Voters will have to judge if trust is more important than openness for themselves. In the long run, openness has prevailed longer and more robustly than trust (a black spot can be found in almost all recent U.S. presidents, some concurrently, others retroactively, with even many of the Founding Fathers not exempted, given their own retention of slaves): it is another way of saying pragmatism intervenes when principles collide. We shall see the outcome in November.
Openness, more than trust, has been the motor of U.S. competitiveness and leadership. Top students from all over the world go to the United States for their training because of that openness (no other country invites so many students, caters to their needs, and even helps them find a job to settle down with). This train cannot be stopped; and neither the increasing flows of U.S. students going abroad. Not many of them return with happy memories, but the increasing trend of those who do is another reason why the United States cannot live in Trump-like isolation in a rapidly integrating world.
It might not take this 2016 presidential election to permit the logic of this openness to sink in; but it is unlikely to fail over the long haul if the past 240 years are any guide. Any presidential candidate who understands the high-tides and low of that history would be well qualified to run to win. This year might be a bad election year, but it is ripe for the trials and errors needed to lubricate the U.S. machine. The sooner the lessons get learned, the quicker the United States can return to a welcoming international comity whose patience is running thin.
Yet, openness works in mysterious ways. How the United States has evolved so far this century, and particularly what this election entails, is undoubtedly calibrating much more abroad than sending students for education. The final piece of this series brings to bear the consequences of all these U.S. developments abroad, particularly on the one issue the United States has sought leadership over: democratisation.
Dr Imtiaz A Hussain is Professor, International Relations, formerly Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City.
