Data is now at the center of global trade. For decades, international trade in goods and services set the pace of globalization. After the global financial crisis, however, growth in trade plateaued, and in its place came an explosion of cross-border data flows. Measured by bandwidth, cross-border data flows grew roughly 112 times over from 2008 to 2020.
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COVID-19 has highlighted the pressing need for better global risk management. So too has escalating climate change. As did the financial crisis. Urgent reform is required to tame the butterfly defect of globalization. These networked threats require changes in all parts of the system.
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Politicians pushing globalisation like Clinton may have told the public that the purpose of NAFTA and of China’s admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO) was to open the closed markets of Mexico and China to “American products made on American soil, everything from corn to chemicals to computers.” But U.S. multinationals and their lobbyists 20 years ago knew that was not true. Their goal from the beginning was to transfer the production of many products from American soil to Mexican soil or Chinese soil, to take advantage of foreign low-wage, nonunion labor, and in some cases foreign government subsidies and other favours.
The era of peak globalisation is over. An economic system that relied on worldwide production and long supply chains is morphing into one that will be less interconnected. A way of life driven by unceasing mobility is shuddering to a stop. Our lives are going to be more physically constrained and more virtual than they were. A more fragmented world is coming into being that in some ways may be more resilient.
Like the Sept. 11 attacks and the Great Recession, the coronavirus pandemic is an economic and geopolitical shock that will remain vivid in our minds long after it passes. But it is something more: Coronavirus is the historical marker between the first phase of globalisation and the second.
The global economy is undergoing a far-reaching transformation. Change is being driven by shifts in countries’ populations, productivity, wealth, power, and ambitions, and accelerated by US President Donald Trump’s moves to reshape supply-chain structures, alter cross-border investment incentives, and limit the movement of people and technology across borders.
“We reject the ideology of globalism” in favor of the “ideology of patriotism.” So spoke the American president from the pulpit, in the high church of the first ideology, before a congregation nominally convened in a spirit of global cooperation. Ahead of his address at the annual gathering of the United Nations General Assembly, the buzz around the building was not about whether the world would witness a confrontational Donald Trump, but rather about who specifically the president would single out for attack.
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The modern economy depends on bilateral trade deficits; it would collapse without them. In an age of advanced technologies and accelerating specialisation, attempting to manufacture everything domestically or bilaterally would be prohibitively costly.
In the epilogue to the first volume of his biography of Henry Kissinger, The Idealist, historian Niall Fergusson notes that he asked Yale university professor, John Gaddis, whether he agreed with his designation of Dr K. as a foreign policy “idealist.” That assessment contrasted with the conventional view of the former U.S. Secretary of State as archetypal national security “realist,” the kind who hangs a picture of Otto von Bismarck in his study.
Confidence in globalisation saw massive amounts of Western capital and intellectual property flow to emerging markets, above all to China. But few in the West registered the geopolitical significance of this at the time. Instead, they praised the economic growth story. And not without good reason: the integration of China into global markets lifted a billion people out of poverty. It remains a testament to the material benefits of removing geopolitical obstructions from the development of global business.
