“I can remember a time - about a quarter-century ago - when the world seemed to be coming together,” wrote NY Times columnist David Brooks in a recent essay, Globalization Is Over. The Global Culture Wars Have Begun. “The great Cold War contest between communism and capitalism appeared to be over. Democracy was still spreading. Nations were becoming more economically interdependent. The internet seemed ready to foster worldwide communications. It seemed as if there would be a global convergence around a set of universal values - freedom, equality, personal dignity, pluralism, human rights.”
“We called this process of convergence globalization,” he added. “It was, first of all, an economic and a technological process - about growing trade and investment between nations and the spread of technologies that put, say, Wikipedia instantly at our fingertips.”
The 1990s ushered a golden age of globalization, when the world seemed indeed to be coming together. Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat became an international best-seller in 2005 by nicely explaining what globalization was all about, including the key forces that contributed to flattening the world, - from the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989 and the Netscape IPO in August of 1995, to the rise of outsourcing, offshoring and global supply chains.
But, ever since the 2008 global financial crisis, globalization and global trade started to slow down. “Globalisation has slowed from light speed to a snail’s pace in the past decade for several reasons,” wrote The Economist in a 2019 article. “The cost of moving goods has stopped falling. Multinational firms have found that global sprawl burns money and that local rivals often eat them alive. Activity is shifting towards services, which are harder to sell across borders: scissors can be exported in 20ft-containers, hair stylists cannot.”
Three major shocks have further reshaped globalization in the past few years: the increasing trade wars and tariffs of the past five years, especially between the US and China; the disruptive impact of Covid-19 on global supply chains; and most recently, the war in Ukraine, which threatens to further decouple the world’s economy into a Western and a Chinese trading bloc.
Many believed that the end of the Cold War would usher a vision of global progress and convergence. As nations developed around the world, they would strive to become more like the West in order to achieve their economic success. “Unfortunately, this vision does not describe the world we live in today,” said Brooks. “The world is not converging anymore; it’s diverging.”
“Looking back, we probably put too much emphasis on the power of material forces like economics and technology to drive human events and bring us all together,” he added. “The fact is that human behavior is often driven by forces much deeper than economic and political self-interest, at least as Western rationalists typically understand these things. It’s these deeper motivations that are driving events right now - and they are sending history off into wildly unpredictable directions.” Let me summarize the four such powerful forces cited in Brooks’ essay.
Humans need to be respected and appreciated. If people feel disrespected and unappreciated they will become resentful, vengeful, “and respond with aggressive indignation.” Over the past few decades, we’ve already seen important reasons for concern, especially the rising polarization of employment and wage distribution, which has disproportionately benefited highly educated professionals while reducing opportunities for less educated workers.
This has led to a major increase in economic and social inequality. Highly educated urban elites enjoy significantly higher incomes and job opportunities and have come to dominate media, universities, culture and often political power. But less educated groups, often living in former industrial cities, midsize towns, and rural areas, have seen their incomes and job opportunities decline, risk falling further behind, and feel looked down upon and ignored.
“In country after country, populist leaders have arisen to exploit these resentments: Donald Trump in the United States, Narendra Modi in India, Marine Le Pen in France,” noted Brooks. “Meanwhile, authoritarians like Putin and Xi Jinping practice this politics of resentment on a global scale. They treat the collective West as the global elites and declare their open revolt against it.”
Most people have a strong loyalty to their place and to their nation. “In the heyday of globalization, multilateral organizations and global corporations seemed to be eclipsing nation-states.” Major advances in communications and information technologies made it possible for global enterprises to operate across national boundaries in an increasingly integrated world, while multilateral organizations like the World Trade Organization, the European Union, and NAFTA aimed to reduced barriers to global trade and investment.
The scope of governance has always grown with the size of problems to be solved. Climate change, immigration, global pandemics, and other existential 21st century problems can only be effectively addressed through global action. Some have argued that nation-states may be doomed over time because they’re not up to the necessary global action. But, it hasn’t quite worked out this way.
“In country after country, highly nationalistic movements have arisen to insist on national sovereignty and to restore national pride,” wrote Brooks. “To hell with cosmopolitanism and global convergence, they say. We’re going to make our own country great again in our own way. Many globalists completely underestimated the power of nationalism to drive history.”
People are driven by their attachment to their own cultural values, which they fiercely defend when they seem to be under assault. As Western culture spread around the world through movies, music, websites and social media, many assumed that the values of Western culture would be embraced around the world.
“The problem is that Western values are not the world’s values. In fact, we in the West are complete cultural outliers,” - highly individualistic, nonconformists, and focused on our accomplishments and aspirations rather than on our relationships and social roles. “Despite the assumptions of globalization, world culture does not seem to be converging and in some cases seems to be diverging,” added Brooks, citing recent findings from the World Values Survey:
“Norms concerning marriage, family, gender and sexual orientation show dramatic changes but virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving in the same direction, at roughly similar speeds. This has brought a parallel movement, without convergence. Moreover, while economically advanced societies have been changing rather rapidly, countries that remained economically stagnant showed little value change. As a result, there has been a growing divergence between the prevailing values in low-income countries and high-income countries.”
People are powerfully driven by a desire for order. According to Freedom House, an organization that surveys political freedom and civil liberties around the world, the number of nations considered free or partially free increased significantly following the end of the Cold War. The world didn’t just seem to be converging economically and culturally but also politically.
But, its latest survey paints a very different picture: “In countries with long-established democracies, internal forces have exploited the shortcomings in their systems, distorting national politics to promote hatred, violence, and unbridled power. Those countries that have struggled in the space between democracy and authoritarianism, meanwhile, are increasingly tilting toward the latter. The global order is nearing a tipping point, and if democracy’s defenders do not work together to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will prevail. The present threat to democracy is the product of 16 consecutive years of decline in global freedom.”
“This is not what we thought would happen in the golden age of globalization,” noted Brooks. “Today, many democracies appear less stable than they did and many authoritarian regimes appear more stable. American democracy, for example, has slid toward polarization and dysfunction. Meanwhile, China has shown that highly centralized nations can be just as technologically advanced as the West.”
“I’ve lost confidence in our ability to predict where history is headed and in the idea that as nations modernize they develop along some predictable line,” wrote Brooks in conclusion. “I guess it’s time to open our minds up to the possibility that the future may be very different from anything we expected. But I have faith in the ideas and the moral systems that we have inherited. What we call the West is not an ethnic designation or an elitist country club; … it is a moral accomplishment, and unlike its rivals, it aspires to extend dignity, human rights and self-determination to all. That’s worth reforming and working on and defending and sharing in the decades ahead.”
Very good reflexions. I am missing some comments about the role media and technology (social networks) are playing.
Posted by: Alberto Gimenez | August 24, 2022 at 04:58 AM
Thanks for sharing this Irving. Largely agree with the core premise. However, I guess I’m fundamentally an optimist and view the past 15 years mostly as a reaction to the forces that were unleashed by globalization. This was bound to happen. And though it does appear we could be entering a period of two or three dominant trading blocks, I can’t help but think that the underlying forces and shifts unlocked by globalization will continue unabated or even accelerate even across a variety of (largely hi-tech based) services - ie, remote telemedicine. What gives me this confidence is talking to many in the next generation who completely reject the reactionary threads we’re living with today! They’re the ones who will untangle the mess we are in today!
Posted by: Bill McNee | August 24, 2022 at 10:25 PM
The world is complex and I believe we have to work a lot harder for change than we initially imagine. Not all things related to globalization are good but the urgency and complexity of global problems demands global solutions that cannot be accomplished by nation states alone. Before giving up on globalization we should work to solve its weaknesses first. More people need to benefit and inequality needs to drastically decrease. We have to be much more open to the fact that globalization doesn’t need to be synonymous with westernization. Additionally, I think the divergence is often caused by people pushing back on change and unfortunately their inability to find their place in a changing world.
Posted by: Yolanda L Comedy | August 28, 2022 at 02:09 PM