Uneasy access

How seriously must India take the sparring in the spotlight on offshoring and immigration in the US political arena? Or would it be better o...

How seriously must India take the sparring in the spotlight on offshoring and immigration in the US political arena? Or would it be better off keeping its eye on the warning signals offstage, of a protectionism generally on the rise?

This week, in Britain8217;s Financial Times, an editorial lashed out at the mounting restrictions on the immigration of skilled workers to the US. A combination of 8216;8216;ignorant protectionist nativism, the aftereffects of the technology bubble, and new fears about national security8217;8217; threaten to irretrievably undermine the famed US receptiveness. The FT pointed out that recently, the entire year8217;s quota of HIB visas for skilled workers was allocated on the first day they were made available. That quota, at 65,000, is one-third of the level it reached during the technology boom.

The FT quoted India8217;s commerce minister Kamal Nath who told the paper in an interview why it makes no commercial sense for either the US or a country like India to prevent the inflow of skilled workers: 8216;8216;Stopping the highly educated from coming to the US will only drive more business offshore, further encouraging the growth of wrong-headed protectionism8217;8217;.

But getting back to Bush versus Kerry, the Economist compared their trade policies and concluded: 8216;8216;Neither candidate seems wildly keen on free trade 8212; or on protectionism either.8217;8217; The magazine explained why the popular perception of a race between a protectionist and a free trader may not be entirely sound. Kerry has not actually proposed any real protectionist ideas and his Senate record is that of a 8216;8216;firm free-trader8217;8217;. And Bush has 8216;8216;not shied from crude protectionism8217;8217;. He slapped safeguard tarrifs on steel imports in March 2002. He signed the farm bill which pledged a large increase in America8217;s trade-distorting agricultural subsidies.

World8217;s candidate

It is the done thing to talk about a 8216;8216;50:508217;8217; America in the run-up to the presidential vote. It is equally uncontroversial that it will be Kerry by a wide margin in November, if only the rest of the world could vote. This week, a poll conducted by 10 of the world8217;s leading newspapers 8212; including France8217;s Le Monde, Japan8217;s Asahi Shimbun, Canada8217;s La Presse, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Guardian 8212; confirmed that Kerry does have the world8217;s vote, two to one. And that 8216;8216;on balance, world opinion does not believe that the war in Iraq has made a positive contribution to the fight against terror8217;8217;.

The poll found that public opinion in 10 leading countries, including some of the US8217;s closest allies, has become more hostile to the US while Bush has been in office. And that this is a more sophisticated reaction than it is painted to be: a majority of the voters in Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Japan, Spain and South Korea make a clear distinction between a rejection of the Bush administration and anti-Americanism. On average, 68 per cent of those polled said they have a favourable opinion of the American people.

Beyond belief

The death of Jacques Derrida was occasion to revisit the often vicious derision of his powerful work, mainly the philosophical method he promoted 8212; deconstruction.

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In the Guardian, Professor of Cultural Theory at Manchester University, Terry Eagleton, took on Derrida8217;s critics, with a little name-calling of his own. They were 8216;8216;stuffed shirts8217;8217; he said, probably envious of the radical and photogenic philosopher, hugely popular with his students. Academics who saw him as a man out to destroy philosophy were only thinking of saving their own means of making a living.

But Eagleton8217;s was essentially a passionate defence of the joys of deconstruction. It means not destroying ideas, but 8216;8216;pushing them to the point where they begin to come apart and expose their latent contradictions.8217;8217; It means 8216;8216;reading against the grain of supposedly self-evident truths8217;8217;. And prising open canonical ideas and classical texts to the marginal and the aberrant. For the philosopher, it means, as Derrida once admitted to, wanting to 8216;8216;write like a woman8217;8217;.

In the NYT, Mark C. Taylor also rose to defend Derrida, not from his critics on the right, but from his most influential followers on the left. Many of them, he wrote, have manipulated his analyses of marginal writers, works, and cultures and his emphasis on the importance of preserving differences, to work up an identity politics that promotes the very oppositions Derrida sought to break down. Taylor berated Derrida8217;s supporters for fueling the culture wars that have been raging for more than two decades now.

Taylor urged the necessity of reading Derrida in times when the longing for simplicity and certainty has fueled the rise of cultural conservatism and religious fundamentalism around the world. Derrida understood religion to be impossible without uncertainty. His work can remind us, wrote Taylor, that the great religious traditions are deeply disturbing because they call all our certainties into question.