Globalisation: the beginning of the end?

One year on from the il­le­gal in­va­sion of Ukraine per­pe­trated by the Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion, the world order es­tab­lished after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the col­lapse of the So­viet bloc has been al­tered, pro­vid­ing an im­pe­tus for what some are al­ready call­ing the world’s “de-west­ern­i­sa­tion”. Po­lar­i­sa­tion be­tween two great blocs was unimag­in­able thirty years ago, when the con­vic­tion pre­vailed that we were en­ter­ing the era of glob­al­i­sa­tion, in­ter­de­pen­dences and com­mon in­ter­ests. The war in Ukraine has ac­cel­er­ated the ri­valry be­tween the United States and China, a process that has been in the off­ing since Xi-Jin­ping’s China pressed the ac­cel­er­a­tor and de­cided to com­pete with the United States and the West­ern bloc for global hege­mony, with pro­found ef­fects on the fu­ture of the world’s po­lit­i­cal or­gan­i­sa­tion. China has gone from being the world’s cheap fac­tory to com­pet­ing for lead­er­ship in re­search, tech­nol­ogy and weaponry. It is not yet at the fore­front of every­thing, be­cause in mil­i­tary terms the most im­por­tant power in the world is held by the United States and NATO, but no one doubts that at the cur­rent rate, China will also be at the fore­front in mil­i­tary mat­ters.

In ad­di­tion, the ex­pan­sion of the Chi­nese in­flu­ence around the world, not only in Asia and Africa, has in­creased West­ern gov­ern­ments’ fears over the global con­trol the Chi­nese com­mu­nist dic­ta­tor­ship might ex­er­cise; in this sense, the ban­ning of the ap­pli­ca­tion Tik-tok from of­fi­cial de­vices by many Eu­ro­pean and Amer­i­can gov­ern­ments is a warn­ing of what could await us. In the end, the dis­cus­sion is about which model of so­ci­ety the world is headed to­wards: the evo­lu­tion of lib­eral democ­racy, im­per­fectly rep­re­sented by the United States and the Eu­ro­pean Union, or the pro­lif­er­a­tion of au­thor­i­tar­ian regimes, with human rights at stake? Un­der­ly­ing all this is the huge risk that the ca­pac­ity to meet global chal­lenges such as cli­mate change, world poverty and global health threats, could be badly dam­aged.