![]() ![]() Globalized economic activity and free trade were dominant before the onset of World War I in 1914, trade as a proportion of global GDP stood at 14 percent. ![]() Those who would argue that the inexorable march of globalization cannot be reversed should consider the parallel during the early 20th century. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz described many of these pathologies in his book Globalization and Its Discontents, as did economist Barry Eichengreen, who lamented that “the nation state has fundamentally lost control of its destiny, surrendering to anonymous global forces.” Both noted that globalization was severing a working social contract between national governments and their citizens that had previously delivered rising prosperity for all. To be sure, there were many warning signs that called into question our hitherto benign assumptions about globalization: the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 (during which the Asian tiger economies were decimated by unconstrained speculative capital flows), the vast swaths of the Rust Belt’s industrial heartlands created by outsourcing to China’s export juggernaut, the concomitant rise in economic inequality and decline in quality of life in industrialized societies and, of course, the 2008 global financial crisis. In the words of author David Goodhart, “We no longer need the help of rats or fleas to spread disease-we can do it ourselves thanks to mass international travel and supply chains.” This hollow philosophy’s main claims now appear badly exposed, as the supply chains wither, and the very interconnectedness of our global economy is becoming a vector of contagion. ![]() To the extent that they were needed, small national governments were said to equate to good government. In a globalized world, nation-states were supposedly becoming relics. Governments that wanted to stay on top would have to learn to master soft power to learn to be relevant in a globalized world, mostly acting to smooth transactions and otherwise stay out of the way. To billions of us, it has resembled a looting process, of our social wealth, and political meaning. The coronavirus will eventually pass, but the same cannot be said for the Panglossian phenomenon known as “globalization.” Stripped of the romantic notion of a global village, the ugly process we’ve experienced over the past 40 years has been a case of governmental institutions being eclipsed by multinational corporations, acting to maximize profit in support of shareholders. ![]()
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