The End of Globalization
In a TED of the beginning of 2020, journalist and economist Mike O’Sullivan makes use of well-founded arguments to proclaim the end of the globalization era. Whatever the most interesting is not the announcement of what is being transposed, but of what begins to take form: a time when nation-states don’t follow a unique international order, but a multiplicity of them. Starting by the triad led by U.S.A., China and E.U., each one representing, respectively, the freedom of initiative allied to technology, the control associated to social contract and the privacy joined to data protection, the new order of politics tends to align minor nations around shared issues and values.
“As globalization comes to an end, and it seems that chaos is reigning, the future goes more and more to the hands of young countries, of their young population and the opportunity that they have to construct new societies. They are the promise of the New Global Order.”
In the summer of 1989, political scientist Francis Fukuyama brought to the world his famous essay named The End of History?, which postulates that with the Soviet Union collapse, the only ideological alternative to liberalism had been discarded. That “common commodification” of international relations, already predicted by Hegel more than a century ago, marks the apex of the globalization phenomenon and responds in part the question that John Stuart Mill said he did to himself in his youth: If all the social and political reforms in which you believe came true, would that make you a happier human-being? The ideological fissures of our times, endemic in their majority, shows that the answer is “not”, and Mike O’Sullivan exposes in a brilliant way what comes next.
Main research source: The End of Globalization and the Beginning of Something New, TED 2020.
José M. da Costa is a researcher, designer and founder of Storiologia.
