Don't Fear the Future; The global economy is disorienting, but full of opportunities, too.

Byline: Gordon Brown (The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown is the United Kingdom's chancellor of the Exchequer.)

In the last year 1 million manufacturing jobs have been lost from America, Europe and Japan, and one quarter of a million service jobs gone offshore. For the first time Asia is outproducing Europe. And driven not just by political uncertainty but by the rising needs of Asia, oil and commodity prices have been rising fast.

These last 12 months have seen the biggest step change in the scale, speed and scope of what is already the biggest industrial and economic restructuring the world has ever seen. And we are seeing not just the ever-faster advance of globalization but of globalization's discontents, too. Last century's interwar years produced protectionist beggar-my-neighbor policies which only intensified the Depression and set nation against nation. Now, in 2006, protectionist forces are on the rise again: "economic patriotism" in Europe, populism in Latin America, anti-immigrant feeling and sullen resistance to change on just about every continent.

Take one example. The European single market aspires to be what it says it is--an open market allowing the free movement of goods, people and capital. But in the last few months, Europe has seen France seek to block Italian utility take-overs, Italy threaten Dutch banking acquisitions, Spain stall German energy bids and Poland resist Italian financial-service mergers. And today an ambitious world-trade deal seems even more elusive than ever, with rich-country protectionism criticized for standing in the way of poor countries' development.

The paradox of today's globalization is that even its winners feel themselves to be losers. Globalization is cutting the price of consumer goods from clothes to electronics, putting what were once luxury goods into the hands of millions of ordinary households. Cheaper products and sometimes services from newly emerging countries create the competition that spurs us on to greater productivity and innovation. And emerging markets are, in fact, expanding markets for us just as we are for them. U.S. and European company brands are emblems all over the world, and their global penetration, as much as homegrown entrepreneurship, is the key to our future success.

Isolationism, partial retreat and protectionism are self-defeating options. By attempting to shelter ourselves--to pick and choose which barriers we raise or lower--we will only fall behind, risk competitiveness and pay a higher price for long-run adjustment. Indeed, the whole success of the American economic experience teaches us that the lifeblood of a market economy is the continuous injection of new competition. It has been the hard work and enterprise of the American people, responding to the new opportunities brought by each successive wave of global economic change, that has been the foundation of American economic progress. And it is when America has shown that same commitment to leading the opening of markets in the rest of the world, such as the dismantling of trade barriers following the second world war, that the conditions are put in place for rising growth and prosperity for all.

So what is the best way of showing a doubting public today that protectionism is no answer to globalization and that, with the global sourcing of goods and services, the world can deliver a far more specialist division of labor and thus a far more efficient allocation of resources to the benefit of all? What will persuade skeptics more concerned about lost jobs that advanced industrial countries can find comparative advantage by moving up the value-added chain and that instead of sheltering our industries, we will all, in the end, benefit by improving their productivity?