By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript
Three years into the Ukraine war and months into Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, a new world order is emerging. As progressive-liberal norms are breaking down, the world is redividing into competing geopolitical power blocs.
U.S. Vice-president JD Vance shocked his audience at the Munich Security Conference last February by stating these views. The country that had laid the foundations of the postwar multilateral order was now itself calling it into question.
Whatever its limits, liberal elites in the western world contended multilateralism represented a step forward for international relations, and that in a similar fashion, the same held true for globalization in world trade.
Despite ongoing conflicts that began with the Cold War and decolonization, institutions had emerged that encouraged the nonviolent resolution of disagreements over everything from nuclear proliferation to human rights, finance, trade, culture, health and the environment.
By the 21st century, Communism had collapsed and the European Union expanded. Soon, China joined the world trading system. Many people believed this kind of internationalism was irreversible, and the interdependence of the global economy would guarantee peace and prosperity.
Even at that, however, the UN’s legitimacy and effectiveness remained severely hampered, with the composition of its Security Council reflecting the dynamics of 1945. After all, several permanent members had carried out unilateral military interventions, with the United States invading Iraq, and Russia attacking Ukraine.
The anti-global moment took time to grow. “One of the first signs of trouble was in 1999, when the World Trade Organization held its ministerial conference in Seattle. The delegates were confronted with tens of thousands of anti globalization demonstrators,” wrote Tara Zahra, a professor of history at the University of Chicago and the author of the 2023 study Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars.
The end of hyper-globalisation was triggered by the 2008 financial crisis. It “devastated individual livelihoods and challenged people’s faith in the stability and fairness of global capitalism.” The COVID-19 pandemic followed. It killed millions of people and disrupted global trade and migration. “The pandemic revealed the fragility of economies dependent on imports for basic supplies.”
Shortages and snarled supply chains prompted governments and companies to consider moving operations closer to home, onshoring rather than offshoring production. This helped anti-global populists gain further traction around the world.
American foreign policy has always been swinging between messianic idealism and the temptation to unilaterally withdraw. Yet never has a break within the Western alliance been put so plainly as since Trump’s 2024 re-election. Today’s world – divided by geopolitics – looks closer to the one conceived by political scientist Samuel Huntington in his famous 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
When did this great era of globalisation end? In “What Comes After Globalization?”, his May 24 essay in the socialist periodical Jacobin, the economist Branko Milanovic advances as symbolic endpoints either Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Chinese imports in 2017, or Trump’s second accession to power this year.
Milanovic asserts that the losers in globalisation were the middle classes of the Western world, squeezed between, in his words, the growing wealth of their financial overlords at home, and the newly affluent workers of Asia.
Now all this is in danger of disappearing in a new world-historical context. Today’s demand from voters isn’t for the kind of globalised openness provided by free markets, lax borders and limited government, but for a sovereigntist, neo-statist revival that builds national resilience, protective social policies, and domestic security.
The emerging tariff regimes will, Milanovic predicts, usher in “a new world of nation- and region-specific trade and foreign economic policies, moving away from universalism and internationalism and into neo-mercantilism.”
So the break-up of the globalised world-system will lead to the revival of the nation-state. As Philip Cunliffe, professor of International Relations at University College London, observes in newly-published The National Interest: Politics After Globalization, the crumbling of globalization “involves deepening and broadening mass politics and democratic self-government.”
Political leaders have been accustomed to treat national interest as an embarrassment, he writes. But they will not be able to rise to the challenges that confront their countries without the legitimacy conferred by it.
Many university professors, elite journalists and corporate executives have been openly contemptuous toward both their nations’ traditions and the views of most of their fellow citizens. Globalists tend to view Western culture as unjust and destructive to the environment. This has eroded traditional values like patriotism, especially among the young and the highly educated.
Globalist elites’ attitudes on race, gender and climate have undermined their credibility with much of their national populations. Unsurprisingly, faith in globalist institutions such as the state bureaucracy, the mass media, the education establishment, as well as the corporate giants, has diminished.
Leftist thinkers deplore this outcome. Typical is Abdur Rehman Cheema, a development studies academic. “Globalization, once heralded as the pinnacle of human progress, promised a world united by shared science, development, and peace,” he observed in “The Collapse of Globalization,” published Feb. 3 in the journal Global Policy. “It was a vision of collective advancement, where borders would dissolve not just for trade and capital, but for knowledge, empathy, and mutual respect.” It seems those days may not return in the foreseeable future.