To connect to globalization is to accept change

■"The New India," op-ed by Manmohan Singh, Wall Street Journal, 19 May 2005, p. A14.

■"Dispute Tears at Mumbai: House the Rich, or the Poor?: Plan for Wasteland Ends Up in Court" by Somini Sengupta, New York Times, 17 May 2005, p. A3.

■"A French Region Considers the Costs of a New Europe," by Craig S. Smith, New York Times, 18 May 2005, p. A3.

Great op-ed by India's PM, a brilliant economist in his own right. This guy understands that engaging the global economy is a complex transaction that demands more change from within than can possibly be hoped for from outsideómeaning, you change more than the world does. But if you're willing to make those changes, it's win-win. Singh basically understands that globalization is a challenge but also a choice: embrace it and adjust or stand back and fall behindóinevitably. As he puts it, "we recognize that our real challenges are at home"ónot abroad. What globalization does to you is always far less important than what you are willing to do to adjust to globalization. Trying to stay static or hold onto the past is certainly a choice, but one that involves a diminishment of freedom that's far more profound than that associated with the change necessary to deal with globalization's complex mix of up-sides and down-sides.

Will India be forced to make a load of difficult choices internally as it opens up? Sure. Just watch how Mumbai agonizes over the question of how to improve the city without making it hostile to ambitious people streaming in from the countryside looking for opportunity. India cannot "core" itself only in pockets; it needs to bring the poor along for the ride. Otherwise it cannot continue effectively as a democracy.

These choices are no less difficult in Old Core nations like France, where the "haves" want to keep what they've gotóas isóa whole lot more than face the challenge of moving up the production chain. So when a business wants to relocate to Eastern Europe in search of cheaper factory labor, does France go down the pathway of pricing itself out of the global economy or take up the challenge of moving those displaced factory workers onto some higher rung on the development ladder? Can France only hold onto aging definitions of the good life by denying Romania such opportunity? Is that the best its government and private sector can manage?

This is a huge theme in Blueprint for Action, or the notion that America will naturally gravitate toward the New Core's way of thinking on globalization's promise and peril rather than drift back to the Old Core's tendency to want to hold onto the "golden past."