Fragmentation is the new frontier of liberty
“We are back to the enigmatic pulse-beat of the messianic,” wrote the literary critic George Steiner a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “No economist-pundit, no geopolitical strategist, no ‘Kremlinologist’ or socio-economic analyst foresaw what we are living through.” The surprise ending to the Cold War was followed by a period that many remember as one of global consciousness: a time of capitalist triumphalism, human rights talk, and corporate extension across borders, oceans, and continents. President George H. W. Bush gave the complex a name in 1990 when he praised the “New World Order”. The decade is marked in historical memory by a trend towards the scaling up of institutions: the World Trade Organisation, the European Union, NAFTA — new encasements for planetary supply chains.
