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Does globalisation have a future?
Feb 04,2025 - Last updated at Feb 04,2025
CAMBRIDGE — As wildfires raged through Los Angeles in January, the infamous American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones posted on X (formerly Twitter) that they were “part of a larger globalist plot to wage economic warfare & deindustrialise the [United] States.”
While Jones’s suggestion of causality was absurd, he was right that the fires had something to do with globalisation. Last year was Earth’s hottest since recordkeeping began, and likely the hottest in at least 125,000 years, eclipsing the record set in 2023. For the first time, global average temperatures exceeded the Paris climate agreement’s target of 1.5° Celsius above preindustrial levels. For this, scientists overwhelmingly blame human-caused climate change.
Globalisation refers simply to interdependence at intercontinental distances. Trade among European countries reflects regional interdependence, whereas European trade with the US or China reflects globalisation. By threatening China with tariffs, US President Donald Trump is trying to reduce the economic aspect of our global interdependence, which he blames for the loss of domestic industries and jobs.
Economists debate how much of that loss was caused by global trade. Some studies have found that millions of jobs were lost to foreign competition, but that is not the only cause. Many economists argue that the more important factor was automation. Such change can boost overall productivity, but it also causes economic pain, and populist leaders find it easier to blame foreigners than machines.
They also blame immigrants, who may be good for the economy in the long term, but are easy to portray as the cause of disruptive change in the near term. The migration of humans out of Africa is arguably the first example of globalisation, and the US and many other countries are the result of the same basic phenomenon. But as these countries were being built, earlier immigrants often complained about the economic burden and cultural incompatibility of newcomers. That pattern continues today.
When immigration (or media coverage of it) increases quickly, political reactions are to be expected. In nearly all democracies in recent years, immigration has become the go-to issue for populists seeking to challenge incumbent governments. It was a key factor in Trump’s election in 2016, and again in 2024. Social media and artificial intelligence may be more important sources of disruption and anxiety, but they are less tangible (and thus less attractive) targets.
This is why some people blame the populist backlash in nearly all democracies on the increased spread and speed of globalisation, and why populists themselves blame trade and immigrants for most of their countries’ problems. Trade and migration did indeed accelerate after the end of the Cold War, as political change and improved communications technology led to greater economic openness and lowered the cost of cross-border flows of capital, goods, and people. Now, with populists’ influence growing, tariffs and border controls may curtail these flows.
But can economic globalisation be reversed? It has happened before. The nineteenth century was marked by a rapid increase in both trade and migration, but it came to a screeching halt with the outbreak of World War I. Trade as a share of total world product did not recover to its 1914 levels until nearly 1970.
Now that some US politicians are advocating a full decoupling from China, could it happen again? While security concerns may reduce bilateral trade, the sheer cost of abandoning a relationship worth more than a half-trillion dollars per year makes decoupling unlikely. But “unlikely” is not the same as “impossible.” A war over Taiwan, for example, could bring US-China trade to a screeching halt.
In any case, trying to understand the future of globalisation requires us to look beyond economics. There are many other types of global interdependence, military, ecological, social, health and so forth. While war is always devastating for those directly involved, it is worth remembering that the COVID-19 pandemic killed more Americans than have died in all of America’s wars.
Similarly, scientists predict that climate change will have enormous costs as global ice caps melt and coastal cities are submerged later in the century. Even in the near term, climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of hurricanes and wildfires. The perverse irony is that we may be in the process of limiting a type of globalisation that has benefits, while failing to cope with types that have only costs. Among the second Trump administration’s first moves was to withdraw the US from the Paris agreement and the World Health Organisation.
So, what is globalisation’s future? Long-distance interdependencies will remain a fact of life as long as humans are mobile and equipped with communication and transportation technologies. After all, economic globalisation spans centuries, with roots extending back to ancient trade routes like the Silk Road (which China has adopted as the slogan for its globe-spanning “Belt and Road” infrastructure-investment programme today).
In the fifteenth century, innovations in ocean-going transportation brought the Age of Exploration, which was followed by the era of European colonisation that shaped today’s national boundaries. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, steamships and telegraphs accelerated the process as industrialisation transformed agrarian economies. Now the information revolution is transforming our service-oriented economies.
The widespread use of the internet began at the start of this century, and now billions of people around the world carry a computer in their pockets that would have filled a large building half a century ago. As AI progresses, the scope, speed, and volume of global communication will grow exponentially.
World wars have reversed economic globalisation, protectionist policies can slow it down, and international institutions have not kept pace with many of the changes now underway. But so long as we have the technologies, globalisation will continue. It just may not be the beneficial kind.
Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, is a former US assistant secretary of defense and the author of Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump (Oxford University Press, 2020) and A Life in the American Century (Polity Press, 2024).
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025. www.project-syndicate.org
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