This anti-democratic ideology is unravelling before our eyes.
Until recently, politicians, academics and journalists assumed that globalisation had rendered the nation state redundant. As they saw it, superior transnational institutions had displaced national forms of governance. And superior globalist values had superseded narrow-minded nationalist sentiments.
But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has upended such assumptions. Globalisation is now fast unravelling before our eyes. Foreign Affairs asked last month if this is ‘the end of globalisation?’. Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock, one of the world’s largest investment corporations, warns that the war ‘has put an end to the globalisation we have experienced over the past three decades’.
But while the war in Ukraine may have exposed and exacerbated the unravelling of globalisation, it did not cause it. The integration of different parts of the world into global systems has been slowing down for some time. Indeed, global capitalism has still not recovered from the financial crisis, with world trade relative to global GDP falling by five per cent between 2008 and 2019.
