"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.
Early on, the South's fortunes were inextricably tied to global trade. For labor, it relied on imported slaves; for wealth it depended on the income produced by its exports of cotton, rice and other products.
The South continued to depend on agriculture until the mid-20th century as planter elites thwarted most efforts at industrialization. During the Depression, Southern states began offering the rest of the country the type of competition it now faces from developing nations. By promising cheap, nonunion labor, they prompted many businesses to relocate their factories in the South.
Can we shift gears?
This strategy helped the region gain jobs, but it did little to generate the real engine of wealth -- new businesses whose highest-paid employees also called the region home. It's good to have assembly line workers; it's even better to have the people who design the cars and run the business.
(The situation was slightly different in North Carolina. Because the state never had a dominant planter class, it was quicker to develop locally owned industries, especially in textiles and furniture. Still, their success also hinged on rich supplies of low-wage workers.)
"As long as we were the place to do low-cost manufacturing, this strategy had some upside," said Clinton, of the Southern Growth Policies Board. "But beginning in the 1980s, when technology and globalization became larger forces, the South began to suffer as jobs went abroad and the South failed to take its place at the forefront of efforts that would help it succeed."
In the past, the South succeeded by racing to the bottom. In the future, its economic success will hinge on whether it can reach the top, developing the cutting-edge industries and skilled workforce that have enabled Research Triangle Park to thrive and helped Charlotte become a banking center.
The effort will depend on improving infrastructure, sparking entrepreneurship, educating local businesses about global opportunities, and managing growth so that the South is a place where people want to live and do business. But above all, education is the key, for both retraining displaced workers and building elementary and secondary schools that match the quality of the South's first-rate colleges and universities.
"Knowledge is the most powerful tool for success in the global world," Clinton said. "I don't think we value knowledge culturally. It irritates me that Southern comedians like Jeff Foxworthy always make jokes about how dumb Southerners are. We buy into that idea, and we pay for it."
It is these residues of the past that the South must overcome if it hopes to take control of its destiny and thrive in the years ahead.