Tracing  the History of Globalism         

     The world economy opening up after 1980 had no historical protest, it was doing so in a mere permanent.   way.

In the sphery of economics "Be local think global" is the cry of the Proutists. In this piece let us briefly trace the history of Globalism.

The end of the Cold War was the beginning of globalisation -or, at least, that is when people began to talk about it. The term itself entered mainstream discourse in 1983, with an article in the Harvard Business Review by the economist Theodore Levitt. The article lauded the global expansion of markets for manufacturers as the start of a process that would inexorably make the world a better place by breaking down the walls of economic instahy neionalism, and chauvinism." A decade later, talk of globalisation was ubiquitous By then, capitalism had triumphed over communism, and one form of capitalism

--dedicated to dismantling economic and labor regulations, barriers to trade, and exchange controls-had supplanted the more managed, state-run version of the immediate postwar decades.

Globalisation was more than a mere term, of course. Over the last three decades, the world has radically changed and become far more connected by revolutionary technologies, supply chains, and delivery systems. Trade in goods has soared as a proportion of world GDP; cross-border financial flows have grown faster still.

Geopolitical shifts in economic power have seen the rise of a prosperous middle class across much of what is commonly referred to as "the global South," or the bulk of African, Asian, and Central and South American countries. As producers opted for cheaper labor overseas, especially in China, Central America, and Southeast Asia, organized labor in the former manufacturing heartlands of the developed world was decimated. Interdependence and hyper-connectivity also sped

  

            up the transmission of global afflictions, from the series of sovereign debt crises that ran across South America, Eastern Europe, and East Asia in the 1990s to the COVID-19 pandemic.

For a long time, this extraordinary shift in the way the world works lacked any serious historical contextualization. Economists had long ago lost their predecessors' interest in history and instead turned toward mathematics. Historians, for their part, were becoming ever less numerate, and by the time of the 2007-8 financial crisis, they had relinquished almost any interest in macroeconomic change. In fact, it is only in the last decade that scholars have seriously begun to think historically about globalisation.

The relative openness of borders before World War I fostered political activism and economic entrepreneurship. The closing of borders during the war, along with the British continental blockade, led to malnutrition, pandemics, and an enduring anxiety throughout the interwar years about ensuring the security of the national food supply. Fascism's breeding ground lay in the poverty and instability caused by the collapse of political order in central Europe, in particular, as well as in the dislocation caused by: the international economic crisis of the early 1930s. What unites Zahra's large and diverse cast of characters is their role in the grand drama of the struggle between those who stood for some kind of internationalism and their more nationalist and nativist opponents.

Early opponents of globalisation in people who disliked free trade and unfettered immigration, worried about fragile, far-flung supply chains. across oceans and fretted when domestic workers lost out to cheaper labor abroad. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, was both radically nationalist and anti- global; anti-Semitic violence in central Europe was a violent manifestation of anti-globalism, and Jews were targeted as symbols. of international finance, unchecked migration, cosmopolitanism, and national disloyalty. In these and other ways, the concerns of anti- globalizers a century ago sound familiar today.    

                                                                              On the other hand, the growth 

patterns of recent de re unprecedented and without plausible parallel. Betwee980 and 2008, Europe's export GDP ratio grew from 24.3 41.1 percent, and the worldwide figure from 20.4 to 31 percent. Border- crossing financial markets, institutions, and elites rapidly gained enormous control over national economies. In short, the degree of openness in the world economy around the year 2000 was far greater than in any other period in history.

Not only was the world economy opening up after 1980 in a way that had no historical precedent, but it was doing so in a more permanent way. World trade at the bottom of the interwar slump was down a third from its 1929 height; the slump after 2009 was not nearly so pronounced or so lengthy. In other words, the interwar years in Europe were roiled by a crisis of a severity that has not been matched since.

On the whole, nationalism is a bad thing and that fascist politics were what you might well end up with if you turned your back on free trade, unrestricted migration and the gold standard the interwar versus of globali Zahra thay offers a message color like that of globalisation's proponents today In so doing, dic portrays interwar politics in ways that obscure sonic of the rea)) challenges of those times

The question of how to dial with the spread of nationalism after World War I was unquestionably at the top of the international agenda a cenimy ans The nation-state's march of mumph had begun in the mod nineteenth century and continued with new vigor at the Pare Peace Conference in 1919, when the victonous Allies presided over the dismembering of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires treating the modern map of Eastern Europe and the Middle fast. The process resumed again after World War II with decolonization in what was left of the European copies Borders proliferated and made

international economie life harder No real alternatives stood in the way of the spread of the nation state Empires could not simply be restored. Yet preserving prosperity in a world of nation-states was complicated by radical changes in every domain of life. For one thing. World Wars had increased rates of political participation and taken governance out of the hands of older elites At the same time, the collapse of the nineteenth-century gold standard meant that the international monetary system required concerted management for the first time.

In such circumstances. opposition to globalisation was rational It made sense on many national governments in the early 1930s to abandon the gold standard, opt for autarky, support or nationalize industry that sought to replace imports, and subsidize domestic grain production Such moves did not inevitably lead to  fascism the outcome in many countries was quite different Indeed, from the 1930s to the 1960s, the thrust of development economics across much of the global South was premised on this model the promotion of national prosperity by state-led industrialization drives that identified lant industries and facilitated urbanization

If a return to empire offered no clear ideological alternative to interwas nationalism that left only one other option: Bolshevism. And yet it was the manifest failures of early twentieth-century capitalism to improve living standards for the masses that more than any other single factor helped give Bolshevism worldwide appeal Lenin's desire to export world revolution because the universal ambitions of communism complicate even further the binary framework of globalizers and antiglobalizers? The commitment to build socialism in one country never led the Kremlin to abandon its longer-term desire to see communism triumph worldwide. Theirs was surely a form of global politics, utterly distinct from any other .

      The real lessons to be learned from the collapse of unspean democracy in the interwar years and its saboquent postwar revival nationalism not only framed democracy's demise in the 1910s it als framed democracy's recovery after 1945

Democracy was not restored in Westem Europe because of globalisation. That restoration came about because of how national governments stewarded their economies, producing steady economic growth and decades of low unemployment Indeed, after 1950, national economies opened up only slowly to one another regional integration took decades

The real lesson drawn at the time from the tumultuous interwar years was that laissez-faire economics could be fatal and that politicians had to understand the need for strategic national leadership Today, thanks in no small measure to decades of globalisation, politicians have abandoned this understanding of their responsibility and have coded theit power to central banks, constitutional courts, and the private sector The last thing societies need at the moment is to be told that democracy, now or in the past, depends on globalisation.       

             

          Subasish samal..☺️🌎