Globalization was never inevitable

What seemed impossible in the 1990s is a commonplace today.

Younger readers may not remember just what an aura of inevitability surrounded the idea of globalizing capitalism in the late 20th century. Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, in a 2002 award acceptance speech, proclaimed: "It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the law of gravity." And he did not dispute this thing that "has been said". Margaret Thatcher's frequent slogan was "there is no alternative". Tony Blair went so far as to say "I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer."

And that idea of inevitability was put into practice: in the 1988 election the Canadian Liberal Party was defeated on a platform of opposing a free-trade deal with the United States, yet then when the Liberals won power in 1993, they expanded that deal to include Mexico. In the end it didn't matter who you voted for, you got free trade and more free trade, whether you liked it or not. (That situation is a major reason I have little patience for Matt Yglesias's claim that democracy is "about entrusting elected leaders with the authority to make decisions on subjects of public concern". When all voters get is a "choice" between two parties that are going to do exactly the same thing whether the voters want it or not, that's really got nothing to do with democracy.)

Countries with fully and partially closed borders in March 2020. Chart from Statista.com, CC BY-ND licence.

That inevitability approach was everywhere around the turn of the century. Yet decades later, it now seems like a quaint relic. By early 2021, the Economist had a cover story subtitled "Don't give up on globalization". To Tony Blair in the '90s such a claim would be absurd – tantamount to saying "Don't give up on autumn following summer." Yet the Economist needed to say it, because during the COVID pandemic even the Canada-US border – the longest undefended border in the world – was closed to travel, including trade. The borders of Italy were closed – borders within the European Union, that body that was supposed to be all about free movement.

Notice: these were national borders closing. They were not state or provincial borders within a country; those still rarely close. (I do recall occasional orders instructing people not to travel between, say, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, but as far as I can tell they were not enforced.) That is the way things worked before World War II: countries had their own separate national economies, and trade between them was an extra bonus. In those earlier days it would have been absurd to pay extra for a vegetable labelled "locally grown"; you paid extra for something whose label said imported.

The borders are now reopened, of course. If the COVID border closings were an isolated phenomenon, we could simply consign them to history. But we are seeing now that they were not.

The high-water mark of globalization was probably at the turn of this century, when your friends and family could still meet you at the airport gate without an ID. Nation-states seemed increasingly irrelevant. Jane Jacobs had described human ruling classes as conflicted between trade-focused "commercial" and protection-focused "guardian" outlooks; in 2000, the commercial reigned entirely supreme. But with the terrorist attacks of September 2001, the guardians began to come back – everywhere, not just in the United States where the attacks had happened. National security was a major issue again. For the first time in my two and a half decades, borders began to strengthen. Many land and sea borders in the Americas had not required a passport to cross them; now they do.

At that time, the post-9/11 security state (including the wars fought) still seemed to fit in the general pattern of the globalized '90s. It was just an extra layer of hassle; trade goods still flowed ever more freely, open immigration was the consensus. The George W. Bush era felt in many ways like the next step of the Reagan and Clinton eras. I thought that was a bad thing, but one of the most frustrating things about Thatcher and Blair was how they explicitly told us it didn't matter whether globalization was a good thing: it was not supposed to be good, just inevitable. And even as the security state ramped up under Bush, globalization still felt inevitable.

But then something else happened. Starting in the mid-'10s, most of the world was startled by the resurgence of a strongly nationalist right wing: one that is anti-immigration and proclaims "open borders" as its enemy. Donald Trump was only the beginning; in September 2022 Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy won their election and the Sweden Democrats became kingmakers, and the trend has only continued. A large number of people around the world, it turns out, would prefer that their nation-state privilege its own citizens and make it harder for others to join those citizens. Trump resurrected the phrase "America First" to describe the country's foreign policy for the first time since Warren G. Harding in the 1920s (and the Sweden Democrats followed suit with "Sweden First"). Scarce American-made vaccines were distributed to Americans before any exports happened.

A further de-globalizing event was the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on the sort of nationalist grounds that would once have been called irredentist. Putin's speeches made a few flimsy references to "denazification" and other supposed grounds, but it scarcely seems that even he believes them; the point is that the territory of Ukraine, he claims, rightfully belongs to the Russian nation. Such nationalist justifications for an occupation were commonplace before World War I; one might even argue they caused it. But by the end of the 20th century it was presumed that such displays of national power are not allowed; the global régime of rules reigns supreme. Thus when Saddam Hussein's Iraq conquered Kuwait in the '90s, the global support for kicking Hussein out of Kuwait was nearly unanimous. But the rest of the world has not sent troops to Ukraine as it did to Kuwait, and the support for Ukraine has been wavering for some time; there is a growing likelihood that Russia will be allowed to keep a significant part of the territory it took. Such an outcome would have been more recognizable in 1890 than in 1990. The world of globalization – notably including the European Union's dependence on Russian energy – was built on the assumption that they wouldn't. Now European countries are scrambling to figure out an alternative.

And all of that is before we get to the big item in current news: Trump's stated threat to impose massive tariffs on imported goods, including from the US's close allies Canada and Mexico. In the world of Blair and Thatcher and Annan, the unanimous response to such a threat would be to say, "you can't do that!" In that regard at least, Trump is putting into practice Obama's slogan: yes we can. Nobody can actually stop him from doing it. Is it a bad idea? Of course it is; it would dramatically raise prices further at a time when inflation is one of the biggest problems hitting poor Americans, and every time Trump is asked why he plans to do this, the rationale seems different. (Generating revenue? Stopping fentanyl? Stopping migrants? Having leverage to renegotiate trade agreements? Protecting American jobs? Just for funsies? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) But what the threats make clear is that this kind of de-globalization and re-nationalization of economies is possible. Thatcher and Blair were liars: they made the conscious choice to globalize, even though there indeed was and is an alternative.

As for Canada, as noted, it wholeheartedly embraced the idea that globalization was inevitable – and that embrace left it, for lack of a better word, fucked. Canada had no internal capacity for vaccine production because it just assumed it was going to import vaccines, leaving it many months behind the US in being ready for COVID. Now, to have a credible negotiating hand in response to Trump's tariffs, Canada needs to be able to threaten to cut off American energy – but I am told that this is now very difficult to do from a technical perspective, because the systems were built on the assumption that they would always flow freely. Just like the EU, we so gullibly bought the assumption that globalization is inevitable that we didn't even have backup plans for what to do if it stopped.

As far as I can tell, the obvious lesson of the de-globalization era is this: never believe a politician who tells you something is inevitable! Some choices are better than others, but the choices are there, and sometimes the choice that supposedly "doesn't exist" may turn out to be a better one. The most famous words of free trade's biggest Canadian partisan should now be turned back on him and his ilk: you had an option, sir!