Globalisation triumphant
There cannot be many historical trends more well-entrenched than globalisation. That trend is not likely to change soon.
The word “globalisation” is usually applied to the economy, and the economy seems to be the central concern of modern men and women, so it is a good place to start thinking about recent predictions of a new era of deglobalisation.
The best way to think about such ideas is historically, because globalisation is not some 20th century novelty. In the economy, globalisation started more than half a millennium ago. By the time Europeans reached the New World, their trade across geographical, political, religious, and cultural borders was already well established.
The changes since then are of degree, not of direction. With a few multi-decade exceptions, the world’s economy has steadily become more unified. Today’s almost totally global commodity markets and supply chains, with their accompanying globally standardised shipping and money-flows, are merely the latest—although perhaps the most dramatic—expansion of the practice of seeing borders primarily as something to be crossed, rather than as barriers to entry.
The globalisation of trade and production has been matched by an increasingly thorough global uniformity of consumption. The entire Old World knew about silk and spices many centuries ago. By now, everyone in the whole world eats tomatoes, peanuts, and potatoes. More recently, technologies and tastes have become standardised at a global scale, from car design to K-pop to cardboard packaging to McDonald’s.
The depth and breadth of it
But it is not just the economy that has become ever more global and ever more unified. Far from it. Consider religion, which the economy has displaced as humanity’s central concern. Islam, Christianity, and Secularism, all self-consciously global creeds, are steadily supplanting regional and local rivals. Would-be competitors such as Buddhism or various Hindu spiritualities increasingly adopt global messaging.
Then there is the stock of mathematical and scientific knowledge, which has been held in common around Europe and its offshoots since around 1500, and around the rest of the world since about 1850. Latin was a lingua franca in Europe for centuries, now English plays that role everywhere. In comparison, to tools, wisdom, and so forth, the mixing of peoples is less advanced, but the trend towards ethnic moving and mixing is also firmly in place. Even though migration is widely disliked in many migrant-receiving lands, there are many reasons to expect more of it.
Politics might seem to be the exception to this pattern. In some ways, national governments are more powerful than ever. However, actual political patterns are becoming ever more standardised. Indeed, the rise in powerful national governments, ruling bureaucratically over carefully demarcated territory, is yet another global trend. These governments are almost always democracies, whether actual, claimed, or promised. They are all primarily dedicated to domestic economic growth and safety. They all operate, or claim or desire to operate, extensive (and increasingly intrusive) welfare states.
The paraphernalia of governments—passports, political messaging, even military strategies—are not as similar as McDonald’s outlets, but politics and nationalities are converging into a single global system. That system is increasingly guided by a single global elite, men and women who attended a small group of universities which largely promote much the same sort of supernational expertise. Even the rebellions against globalisation—from complaints about “mass migration” to complaints about “neocolonialism”—are global in their organisations and ideologies. The result is that the largely vacuous ideology of the nation-state is almost as global as highway design.
The laments
It is easy to complain about the new “nowhere and everywhere”. It all so bland and uniform, not to mention soul-destroying. Why can the world not offer more than one or two styles of urban design, airports, social media, restaurant menus, sports teams, radical politics, phone design, and so forth? The thought is hardly new. Regrets over the disappearance of the distinctly local are at least as old as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who complained that the mountain villages he visited were not as picturesque as they had been before travel became easier. Now, hordes of tourists, coming from all over the world, crowd into the old cities of Europe looking for that lost variety.
These tourists sometime worry about what intellectual critics sometimes call the global loss of authenticity. The intellectual laments are more uniform and more articulate than they could be in Rousseau’s day, thanks to the ease of wandering around the world, studying the same varieties of world literature, and reading any number of similar laments, increasingly translated into English, about the decline of local traditions.
Change is unlikely (let’s hope)
It is possible that the complaints will be listened to, that the trend towards ever greater globalisation will finally stop or reverse. I have been hearing predictions of a such a shift for many decades. They have come from eager politicians and cautious pundits as well as cultural critics. The frenzied enthusiasm for US President Donald Trump’s “America First” campaign is the latest example. Typically, it has been echoed by nationalists around the world.
The Trump administration’s cack-handed tariffs and token deportations may look like an Idiocracy version of the Rousseau-like desire to restore national authenticity, but the fundamental problem with the agenda is not poor execution. It is that his big idea is a proposal to reverse a deeply entrenched historic pattern. The practical and intellectual infrastructures which promote one world—with one or just a few ways of doing this, that, and the other thing—are stronger than ever. Even if MAGA succeeds in making globalisation less of an American project, I cannot imagine how an isolationist US would lead to less globalisation in the rest of the world.
That is not quite right. I can imagine a big step backwards in the trend. The Thirty Years War of the Twentieth century, which both introduced truly global combat and led to a temporary retreat of other sorts of globalisation, offers an awful precedent. Another civilisational meltdown could perhaps start a new, longer-lasting trend of deglobalisation.
Globalisation is popular
Even though few people think a nuclear conflagration is better than greater globalisation many people do dislike the trends. Or so they say. What economists call revealed preferences suggest a quite different judgement. The actions of consumers, producers, scholars, entertainers, religious leaders, bureaucrats of all sorts—really all of us in so many ways—show that the world as a whole likes what the globalisation offers. Or at least people like that offer far more than they regret what the globalised world has taken away.
Our global preferences may well be wrong by some higher standard of judgement. Perhaps we really should be more local, more rooted, more diverse, more distinctive. I for one seriously believe that in many ways we should be. But I am posting this thought on Substack in the world language, so that people all over the world can read it. And I can be confident that there is enough globalised thinking that many of those people will understand what I am talking about.