After the current period of turbulence – and the difficult social, cultural, demographic, and technological adjustments it entails – economic globalization will take off again. But the process will be hindered as long as political globalization fails to keep up.
WARSAW – Just over three decades ago, the Cold War ended, and former Soviet-bloc countries began their transitions to market economies, which enabled them to engage with the rest of the global economy. The world’s division into three segments – advanced capitalist economies, centrally planned socialist economies, and the “Third World” – appeared increasingly outdated. It was not, as Francis Fukuyama famously put it, “the end of history,” but it was an economic and political breakthrough, and the beginning of the contemporary era of globalization. Is that era now ending, as many claim?
WARSAW – Just over three decades ago, the Cold War ended, and former Soviet-bloc countries began their transitions to market economies, which enabled them to engage with the rest of the global economy. The world’s division into three segments – advanced capitalist economies, centrally planned socialist economies, and the “Third World” – appeared increasingly outdated. It was not, as Francis Fukuyama famously put it, “the end of history,” but it was an economic and political breakthrough, and the beginning of the contemporary era of globalization. Is that era now ending, as many claim?