Who wins and who loses in the game, not at all new, of Globalization

HISTORY SHOWS THAT, AT THE BEGINNING OF THE LAST CENTURY, WE ALREADY LIVED SIMILAR MOMENTS

by Andrea Colli, professore ordinario di storia economica

History rocks, and not surprisingly. When life turns upside down, and the future is uncertain, people turn to the past. Historians know many things well: for instance, they have much to say about globalization - about the shrinking of space, driven by technology, institutions and culture, which determines flows of goods, capitals, and human beings under the form of migrations.
 
The post-1989 World order is changing deeply. Globalization is under attack, and the aggressors are nationalisms and populisms, together with new “imperial” temptations. But this is nothing new, for historians. Globalization, as described above, is something not new. It already happened in the past and vanished, and yet it came back again. No matter if it was the Roman Empire, or Genghis Khan’s Moghul Rule in Central Asia. No matter if it was the trading empires of the East India Companies in the Eighteenth century, or the global travel across the British Empire of Phileas Fogg, the protagonist of Verne’s masterpiece, Eighty Days Around the World. No matter if it was the Scorpions’ song, Winds of Change: Globalization runs in waves, and it rhymes, to some extent, with itself.
 
Before the current one, another globalisation took place. It created a global World very similar to the one we live in, at least, so far. It was made by technological innovations which shrunk space and time: railways, telegraph, telephone, rotary press – a true ICT revolution. It was accompanied by institutional elements accelerating globalization such as the Gold Standard, and widespread trade agreements. This was a borderless World, in which mass migrations were the normality, and capitals migrated endlessly in search of profits; in which international trade flourished, and cosmopolitan culture dominated. There were hidden perils: nationalism was triumphant everywhere, while inequality, and distress were undermining the quietness of the “old order”. In the end, it was globalisation which made Russian and American grains cheaper, and forced so many Italian peasants to emigrate to the US.
 
Historians also know that this global World came to an abrupt end on June 28^th, 1914, in a dusty, sunburnt morning in Sarajevo. It was killed by the shots fired by a young, ardent Serbian patriot, even if its health had been deteriorating for a long time before. The first World War turned out to be the beginning of a long period of instability, which lasted until the conclusion of another global conflict. The long and sad “European civil War”, as the three decades from 1914 to 1945 have been labelled, cost nearly 80 million military and civilian lives. But in the muddy trenches of the battlefields all what had made the first global World truly “global” also died: the institutions regulating World trade and investments and those allowing people to travel freely and safely. The long interwar depression killed, above all, the cosmopolitan culture of the early Twentieth century, so vividly represented in the giant Globe which welcomed visitors at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900.
 
The end of the Second World War, however, also marked a reversal in the trend, and globalization restarted again. Institutions facilitating integration (economic, but also political) were progressively built, in a World, however, again divided by a wall crossing one of its most beautiful cities, Berlin. The march towards a new global order went on, however, constantly, and with sudden accelerations, such as in 1978, when China inaugurated a new “open door” policy, in 1989, when the Berlin Wall finally collapsed, and 2001, when China joined the WTO. The new globalization has had also its own global financial crisis, successfully governed thanks to international cooperation. Again, however, integration took the Genius out of the lamp – or, better, the Geniuses: nationalism, inequality, and divergence.
 
We are now at a key point in the tortuous path of globalization, a point in which an inescapable reversal could also start. As historians know well, there is not “one”, single future, but many, and which one will materialize will largely depend on how the distress brought by globalization will be managed. In the meantime, we can only put to us the same question Passepartout frequently put to his master: “And now, Mr. Fogg?”
 
 
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Europe’s malaise has origins in Beijing. A study by Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig
The sense of fear is not enough to explain the new populisms. A study by Massimo Morelli