Back in the 2000s (which now feels like a century ago), Tom Friedman wrote a book about globalisation that almost all of you would have heard about, titled The World is Flat. Friedman wrote that book in the aftermath of covering George W. Bush’s warfighting spree across the Middle East and it was crafted beautifully to reflect a sentiment of hope and optimism in the midst of America’s never-ending neocon wars.
In its opening pages, Friedman wrote that while he was away watching missiles and bullets fly over his head in Iraq, the rest of the world was changing in ways that he only realised after he had left Arabia. Driven by trade, immigration and the internet, businesses were transcending borders, teams within the same organisation were working across oceans, and hierarchies were being broken by young entrants who were leveraging the internet to get their ideas noticed.
Basically, the world was becoming “flat”. You didn’t need to ingratiate yourself to a snooty newspaper editor to get published or read; you could simply open your laptop and write to an audience in the several thousands. If you couldn’t move to a different country for work, then work could move to you from a different country, as businesses used workflow software to outsource jobs. In the years that followed, the smartphone turned every person on the street into a political activist, reporter and filmmaker, thereby making gatekeepers and corporate hierarchies less relevant.
But like I said, that was a century ago. Much of that promise is now fading away in many parts of the world, and the world itself is splintering.
Thanks to racism and religious/ethnic biases, it always mattered where you were born or whom you were born to, but the promise of globalisation was that the logic of business and economic growth would make all of this gradually irrelevant.
As businesses chased the bottom line, they would look to hire the cheapest and most meritorious labour, whether that was to be found in Ghana or the Galapagos. As countries tried to boost their GDP, increase tax revenue (and win votes), they were expected to liberalise norms so that businesses could chase their bottom line. And as the West grew older than the East (where families were larger and more children were born), the West was expected to open up immigration in order to benefit from the East’s youth. That diaspora would then send back sizable remittances to their home countries and help develop them.
Of course, through the 2000s, some or all of this happened at some level or the other in many countries, especially India and China. But after the wars and the terrorism (and, perhaps even more importantly, the recession), the world went back to the medieval ages and the drawbridges were pulled back up.
Look at the ongoing Ukraine crisis, for instance. In just a month, Europeans have welcomed in twice as many Ukrainian refugees as they welcomed Syrian refugees in a decade. When Syria was churning out millions of refugees, blatantly racist populism surged in Europe, where white leaders sprung up seemingly out of thin air and promised to save their countries from the marauding Muslims.
But when Ukraine was invaded, much of Europe united, and even racists (such as the leaders of Poland and Hungary) suddenly became the messiahs of the liberal world order. There were no rhetorical questions over whether Russian spies were hiding amongst the Ukrainian refugees, or whether Ukrainians will steal jobs from poor factory workers in France or Germany.
It’s worth noting that Syria wasn’t exactly a “poor” country before the civil war. It was, for all practical purposes, a middle-income country and many of those who fled to the West during the war were doctors, engineers and lawyers who now had no home country to live in. The same thing happened after the Taliban took over Afghanistan as well — suddenly rendering promising talent, especially women and minorities, homeless overnight. Yet, for reasons of where they were born, Syrian and Afghan refugees were deemed more dangerous en masse than the Ukrainians.
Well before the world’s many refugee crises surged, the globalised “flat” world was receding. In 2015, for the first time in three decades, global trade flows dropped. Paths to immigration — and consequently, access to global opportunities — increasingly depend on which country you were born in or, at the very least, which country you’re a citizen of. There are, in fact, very profitable travel consultancy firms that run programs that will help you get a better passport, if you’re willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for it.
Meanwhile, in an era of ubiquitous sanctions, many countries — especially poor and authoritarian ones — are now increasingly being cut off from the global economic system by the West. In the aftermath of Ukraine and troubles in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, China and Russia are joining that league as well, ostensibly as captain and vice-captain of the anti-West team.
But far from failing to rein in authoritarianism, the overused sanctions tool is now threatening to facilitate it. Russia, China and Co are now building a world of their own, with a separate internet, economy and financial system. Already, the Russian and Chinese people live within a parallel internet. They have limited exposure to information that is known to the rest of the world (and vice-versa), thanks to state censorship. Increasingly, authoritarian regimes are demanding that firms store data in their own countries’ servers, thereby erecting more barriers to openness and free flow of work across borders. Internet apps are being banned indiscriminately, from Google in China to Tiktok in India.
And I haven’t even mentioned the pandemic, which has made everything ‘global’ far more difficult.
We are clearly living through the most difficult times in several decades. After World War II, almost all of the world unanimously agreed that there was a need to bring down barriers and increase contact between their people if another war was to be prevented. But the generation that made that decision is now dead, and seemingly, its memory has also died with it. The world is now going through the reverse cycle, and one’s destiny and success are now increasingly determined not by their merit but by their circumstances.
There is no surer recipe for widespread conflict than that.