By Judah Grunstein
13 minutes
Globalization has always involved more than just trade. Particularly as expressed by the United States and Europe at the turn of the millennium, it was a framework in which openness, interconnectedness, and the exchange of cultural and intellectual influences on the global level were seen as beneficial in and of themselves. The contrast is stark between that vision of international order and the one that is emerging today. Often forgotten, however, is that this vision of international order was not the only one being advanced. It is instructive today, to consider how the rest of the world thought about globalization back then.
This article originally appeared in Volume 66, Issue 4 in August 2022.
Whether it is cause or symptom, it seems clear that the war in Ukraine coincides with a qualitative change in the international order that emerged after World War II and has structured interstate relations on a global level since the Cold War’s end.
That order has been in the throes of transformation—some would say decomposition—since at least 2016. First Brexit, and then the election of Donald Trump as US president, signaled a collective loss of faith in the inherent good of liberalized trade and economic integration, the premise on which globalization—the superstructure of the international order—had been based.
Trump’s trade wars, with China but also Europe, subsequently marked the return of protectionism. The COVID-19 pandemic raised further questions about whether the benefits of economic interdependence outweighed the risks, particularly regarding strategic supply chains.
The shift toward a less benign view of trade was accompanied by the re-emergence of borders as a central focus of international affairs more generally. This focus was most visible when it came to immigration and migration, but it also manifested itself in a heightened sensitivity over national sovereignty and identity. Simultaneous with this shift has been a global retrenchment of democracy and a resurgence of autocratic forms of government that have reversed the gains made in democracy’s so-called Third Wave following the end of the Cold War, when liberal democracy spread to the post-communist states in Europe, as well as to post-dictatorship states in Latin America and Asia. Populism on both the far right and left have challenged long-accepted notions of liberalism and shaken the foundations of democracies in Europe and the Americas—including the United States.
Despite all this, as critics of the deglobalization narrative point out, there has been little evidence of a decline in international trade. Though some of it has been rerouted, and it might have plateaued as a proportion of economic activity, it continues apace.
Yet, globalization has always involved more than just trade. It was a framework in which openness, interconnectedness, and the exchange of cultural and intellectual influences on the global level were seen as beneficial in and of themselves. Particularly as expressed by the United States and Europe, it was expansive to the point of being universal in its aspirations.
Beginning with the global financial crisis in 2008 and exacerbated by the European refugee and migrant crisis, as well as the wave of terror attacks across Europe in 2015, that vision darkened considerably. The benefits of contact and interconnectedness gave way to fears of exposure. “Contagion” became the watchword, one further reinforced by the outbreak of a global pandemic in 2020.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has now crystallized many of these concerns, while reinforcing the defensive reactions to them. Europe’s dependence on Russian energy supplies is no longer acceptable in the context of a conflict perceived as an existential threat to Euro-Atlantic norms and ideals. And this reaction is not limited to Russia. The war in Ukraine has catalyzed a broader reconsideration of trade ties with China as well, which until now Europe viewed more benignly than did US observers. Concretely, a curtain—perhaps softer than the iron one of the Cold War—seems destined to once again separate Russia from the rest of the European continent. Part of that curtain will likely be a live front in a hot war for the foreseeable future.
On a more abstract level, the Euro-Atlantic world’s reaction, expressed in economic sanctions—and political and moral opprobrium—has redrawn the West’s mental map of Europe, but also the world. What was once considered an inseparable whole is once again made up of discrete parts, with exclusion wielded as a potent instrument alongside integration. In fact, it is integration that makes exclusion so potent, as evidenced by how Europe has leveraged its economic integration as a weapon in the current standoff with Russia. Compare that reaction to how economic integration was meant to operate in the golden age of globalization in the early 2000s. That version of globalization was normative: its embrace of economic liberalism was based in part on the faith that free markets go hand-in-hand with liberal democracy. It was believed that openness—when it came to goods and capital, if not people—would serve as a vector for political liberalism to spread mechanically, through both the affluence generated by commerce and the influence of the ideas that accompanied it.
Emphasizing free markets meant that private-sector actors would be the agents in this process, with national governments largely expected to remove the barriers—including state intervention in the economy—that might get in their way. To the extent that there was oversight of the process, it would be in the form of international rules-based authorities, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and regional groupings. Many observers expected these organizations to evolve into supranational entities—whether that evolution was hoped for or feared. The contrast is stark between that vision of international order and the one that is emerging today. But often forgotten, particularly within the West, is that this vision of international order was not the only one being advanced at the turn of the millennium. It is instructive today, to consider how the rest of the world thought about globalization back then.
The South American Model of Globalization
Perhaps South America was the closest alternative vision of globalization to that of the United States and Europe. In the early 2000s, the region was an enormous beneficiary of the integrated global economy, due especially to Chinese demand for resources. It also benefitted from several unique characteristics that facilitated a shared understanding, namely a near regionwide common language and similar, if not identical colonial-era backgrounds.
What distinguished its globalization vision from the Euro-Atlantic one was that, while the latter was fully normative in its embrace of political and economic liberalism, the South American version was a hybrid liberal model.
The region began the millennium with liberal democracy firmly entrenched, even if governance challenges and insecurity remained persistent. Markets, too, were largely liberalized after several decades in which the Washington consensus had dominated. But beginning with Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and followed by Lula da Silva’s more moderate—and more effective— redistributive policies in Brazil, the state reassumed a central role in softening the market’s sharp edges. State-run energy companies and nationalizations of natural resources further amplified the state’s role as an economic actor—particularly at a time when these sectors were generating such a huge amount of revenue. Finally, while South America launched several projects aimed at regional integration, these remained summit-driven exercises in leader-level dialogue and crisis-management. They never achieved economic integration on more than a subregional level. Moreover, the region overall never entertained any supranational or federal ambitions. Non-intervention and jealously guarded national sovereignty remained central tenets of regional integration efforts. In contrast to the universal scope of the Euro-Atlantic’s globalization vision, the South American model remained one in which nations maintained their primacy. The downside was that, lacking any institutional architecture for regional integration, nations were embedded within global frameworks without benefit of the leverage that comes from an intermediary regional market of scale.
The Southeast Asian Model of Globalization
The globalization vision embodied by Southeast Asia differed significantly from both the Euro-Atlantic and South American models. Southeast Asia’s vision was entirely non-normative, primarily due to the heterogeneity of the political economies that the region comprised. Emerging
and fragile democracies co-existed with electoral autocracies and single-party dictatorships. Similarly, domestic economies ranged from free market, to directed, to elite-captured kleptocracy. In part because of this diversity, Southeast Asia’s model of globalization was similar to that of South America in one major respect: its insistence on non interference and national sovereignty, and its concomitant rejection of supranational federalism. Nevertheless, it managed to achieve a far greater degree of regional economic and trade integration than South America under the auspices of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The organization also served as an important interface between the region and its major global trade partners, helping to embed Southeast Asia as a central region in the global economy, to the benefit of its member states.
The Chinese Model of Globalization
In retrospect, among the most striking features of the globalization discourse in the early 2000s was how China was portrayed. It was often viewed as a field on which the process of globalization would play out, rather than as a player in the game of shaping it—a passive object, rather than an active subject. Indeed, to the extent that globalization was expected to be a normative process, those expectations largely centered on the liberalizing effect that integrating China into the global economy would have on its political economy. A newly emergent affluent middle class, it was argued, would soon grow dissatisfied with a social contract in which political participation and dissent are sharply limited in return for prosperity and stability. This would in turn lead them to demand more freedom and a greater say in making the rules governing their own lives.
Those assumptions now seem naïve. However, they are no more naïve than how China’s clear vision for how to organize the processes of globalization was so cavalierly ignored. That vision was much closer to the Southeast Asian model than the Euro-Atlantic model, in that it was non-normative, and emphasized national sovereignty and non-intervention. The latter was a pillar of China’s declarative approach to foreign policy and international relations. Moreover, through both its demand for commodities and its willingness to forego conditionality on loans and investment, China provided emerging economies with a non-normative alternative to the Western model of development aid. This opposition and resistance to anything that smacked of liberal proselytizing, whether political or economic, was rooted in China’s single-party system and its hybrid development model of state capitalism, which combined elements of a domestic free market with state-owned industrial giants and a managed economy. Throughout the first decade and a half of the new millennium, Beijing pocketed foreign investment and amassed capital through trade surpluses. At the same time, it largely deflected pressure to adopt a more level playing field for foreign firms operating in its domestic market.
The Chinese vision of globalization was universal, but with a one-to many structure, rather than the many-to-many nodes envisioned by the Euro Atlantic model. Because of its mass, China could expect the world to come to China and vice versa, and all on China’s terms, with the Belt and Road Initiative being the illustrative example.
The Civilizational Model of Globalization
The final vision of globalization examined here I call the civilizational model. However, it could arguably be considered a neo-imperial model. This vision might seem more at home in the mid- to late 2010s rather than in the early 2000s. Yet, it actually had a champion during that earlier period: Osama bin Laden. While bin Laden was not often thought of as a proponent of globalization, his ideology can be seen as a form of transnational political economy. And he clearly advanced his vision as a direct competitor to the Euro-Atlantic model. Like that model, bin Laden’s was normative, in that it sought to spread the adoption of his fundamentalist reading of Islamic teaching and law. But it was illiberal, in that it was willing to impose that adoption violently under a church-state caliphate. And to the extent that it was universal, it was within the limiting boundaries of a civilizational framework. Bin Laden’s goal was for all Muslims, but not necessarily the entire world, to live as he dictated.
The reason this civilizational model seems more at home in the later part of the past decade is because it is associated with leaders like Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, having consolidated power at home in the 2000s, began to pursue more ambitious agendas abroad in the subsequent decade. Though we often think of them more as nationalist-populists than as civilizational proselytizers, both depend for their base of power on a socially conservative and religious coalition, backed by official and semi-official endorsements by the religious authorities of their respective countries. Both men entertain ambitions for transnational spheres of control that they express in civilizational terms. Putin has done this explicitly in his war of aggression on Ukraine; Erdogan more implicitly in his neo-Ottoman project. This civilizational model has also been embraced by Hungary’s Viktor Orban in his efforts to offer a conservative and illiberal counternarrative to the European Union’s normative integration project, as well as by the identarian supporters of Donald Trump, if not explicitly by Trump himself.
Taking Stock
What do these admittedly rough sketches tell us about the direction that globalization has taken since its ambitious highwater mark in the early 2000s? In particular, how do they compare to the current transformations in globalization—here understood as the organizing narrative of the international order—described in the opening of this article?
Clearly no single vision won out. But if there is one that has lost out the most, it is arguably the Euro-Atlantic model. On almost every count, its vision of globalization has failed to take hold.
To the extent there is a transnational normative vision these days, it is being advanced by the civilizational currents, such as those on display in last year’s gathering of conservative identarian movements in Hungary, rather than by the defenders of globalization. Though US President Joe Biden has framed the current global environment as a battle between democracy and autocracy, champions of democracy are clearly on the defensive. The past six years have also seen the resurgence of the state, with its contested histories of identity and geography, as the organizing feature of global politics and a more prominent economic actor in its role as protector of domestic markets. Liberalism, both political and economic, is widely contested, and while the urgent need to preserve it is assumed, there is no longer any illusion of being able to actively spread either of its pillars. Globalization’s universal aspirations have also given way to integration that is increasingly conceived of on a regional, rather than a global level. And a bloc-based component is emerging in response to the realities of geopolitical competition that economic integration never did—and probably never could— efface.
The tension between these disparate visions and trends is one of the central drivers of the war in Ukraine. That conflict pits liberalism against illiberalism, universalism against civilizationalism, and self-determination— albeit expressed as national sovereignty—against neo-imperialism.
How these trajectories develop moving forward will undoubtedly be determined, at least in part, by the war’s outcome. But whatever the global order looks like in its aftermath, it will bear little resemblance to the Euro-Atlantic vision of globalization that took shape in the early part of this century.
