Globalisation as an ideology is dead and buried
Today, the concept neither represents the yearned-for paradise nor the supreme vision of family welfare, and those same countries and sectors that preached its wonders decades ago have become its chief detractors
sector and save private bankers from bankruptcy. The private sector’s supposed efficacy in handling people’s savings was left in a disgraceful heap.
The economy and global exports then began to slow. And now, a handful of years later, British and American voters have tipped the balance back towards the protectionist — not to mention fortified — state, and revealed the disgust of people around the world with global trading’s devastation of productive economies and relentless blows to the middle class.
Today, globalisation no longer represents the yearned-for paradise nor the supreme vision of family welfare, and those same countries and sectors that preached its wonders decades ago have become its chief detractors. We are seeing the demise of the biggest ideological trickery of recent centuries.
Immediate alternatives
Yet, its moral costs and the social frustrations have themselves become an obstacle to finding immediate alternatives to globalisation. As an ideology, globalisation triumphed over the alternative of state socialism, or state control of the means of production, a single ruling party and an economy planned from above. A single, triumphant path emerged, only to die today and leave humanity without direction or certainty. It is not so much the end of history as the end of the ‘End of History’. Or simply, the void that follows a period of history.
Capitalist countries must today face pervasive disenchantment, inertia and doubts at a time when, as murmured by Macbeth, “what seem’d corporal melted as breath into the wind”.
But necessarily, this is also a fertile time because the world will not be ordered with inherited certainties. New certainties must be created with the chaotic particles of the cosmic cloud emanating from the death of past discourses. Which future will mobilise social passions? Anything is possible and none is certain for now, but the “common”, the communal and the “communistic” provide possibilities hidden within the actions of people and their essential, metabolic relationship with nature.
No human society could rid itself of hope, nor humans, of a future horizon. Obliged to build one today, it is the shared and common traits of society that can lead us to design a destiny different from the erratic capitalism that has suddenly lost all faith in itself.