Is the tide of globalisation turning? There are reasons to be anxious, to be sure, but there are also signs pointing to a new convergence, if we choose to look for them.
Globalisation is the process by which national boundaries become progressively less relevant to our economic lives. This could describe many periods in world history, but it has never been more true than the past three decades. It is no coincidence this time has also seen history’s greatest increase in global prosperity.
In 2011, against the sceptics, I point to three reasons for global optimism. The first is technological. The facilitating technologies of globalisation – the standardised shipping container and modern telecommunications – are genies out of the bottle. The density of human networking online is also already staggering. 2010 saw the number of active Facebook users grow larger than the European Union. It is a safe bet it will soon be bigger than China too. A generation is growing up plugged into an internet-polity that lets it trade ideas and goods in a way that has no precedent. In the long run it is hard to see how any government can stand in its way.