Global CA: Rising to the Cosmopolitan Challenge

Professor Lowenthal discusses his book "Global CA: Rising to the Cosmopolitan Challenge"

Issues:

• California's character, stakes, engagements and ideas that make it an international landscape
• How Californians think about its global interests and what to do to advance these interests
• Proposal that Californians must stop considering international policy as something the federal government and Atlantic coast experts should handle for us
• California’s relationship with bordering Mexico
• California sees China as an economic opportunity while the east coast sees it as a national security threat
• Moving away from the dichotomous view of globalization: support or opposition
• How to equitably expand globalization's benefits and minimize its costs
• Proposition 187
• Strengthening California's influence locally and in Washington
• Call for national integration of immigrants
• Building "cosmopolitan capacity"

Q&A:

• What if California was a sovereign state?
• "California point of view?": where to find it and who can articulate it
• How can we really separate the west coast from the rest?
• Immigrants don’t want to blend in with America?
• Students in California 

Biography: Abraham F. Lowenthal is Robert F. Erburu Professor of Ethics, Globalization and Development at the University of Southern California, president emeritus of the Pacific Council on International Policy, and non-resident senior fellow of the Brookings Institution. A recognized authority on Latin America and U.S.-Latin American relations, he was the founding director of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Latin American Program, the Inter-American Dialogue, and the Pacific Council. He is the author of Global California: Rising to the Cosmopolitan Challenge, published by Stanford University Press in March 2009, and co-editor (with Theodore J. Piccone and Laurence Whitehead) of The Obama Administration and the Americas: Agenda for Change, published by the Brookings Institution in April 2009. His previous publications include twelve books and numerous journal articles, including six in Foreign Affairs and five in Foreign Policy, and more than 150 newspaper pieces throughout the United States and abroad. Dr. Lowenthal received his AB, MPA, and PhD degrees at Harvard University.