Looking outward for insights.

• Author: Shreve, David
• Position: NCSL's study tours to foreign countries

Within hours of completing another contentious special session on Oct. 29, Wisconsin Senate Minority Leader Bob Jauch packed his bags as he does every week. But rather than re treat to his hometown and family for a breather, he joined 10 other state legislators on a 12-day study tour to Japan.

The session's long days and exhausting debates were replaced by a 24-hour travel day, grueling bilingual public policy discussions and sleepless nights brought on by the 13-hour time change. In the home state media, Jauch may very well have been identified as another junketeer, off to an exotic vacation at taxpayer--or even worse, lobbyist--expense. What would compel a busy state senator to project himself 8,000 miles from his own district?

"A legislator's responsibilities no longer stop at the district, state or national boundary," says Senator Jauch. "We are global citizens. Every aspect of our daily life is affected by events occurring around the globe. The true benefit of this kind of trip is that you begin to appreciate your responsibility to the future. You begin to look beyond the last session day or the next election day."

Looking beyond tomorrow and the boundaries of one's community can be just as foreign to many Americans as the mysteries of the Orient. Two oceans and a pre-eminent position in the global economy have served to insulate us from events in the rest of the world. Few could imagine or predict, as Marshall McLuhan did in 1967, the concept of the global village, a worldwide economic community where advanced systems of transportation and telecommunications have made puddles of ocean buffers. Few could imagine that the postwar spread of prosperity to other countries, resulting in the relative decline of the U.S. economy, would not just change the rules of the economic game but would start a whole new game.

And few could imagine that the involvement of America's state governments in the promotion of international trade would lead to an active exchange of ideas about policy between state legislators and their counterparts in Europe, Central America and Asia.

In Search of Markets

Economic affairs were where states took their initial steps into the international arena. State policymakers were motivated by the possibility of increasing the tax base, creating new employment and maintaining competitiveness at home and abroad. Beginning with a few foreign trade missions in the late 1960s, states now have over 116 permanent offices and 26 contract representatives in 25 countries. This is in addition to innumerable executive-branch trade missions looking for places to market a state's...