Critically examine the Globalisation in the past 25 years from the perspectives of the Western world. (2017, 10 Marks)
The quarter-century after the Cold War opened with Western triumphalism, captured in Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” (1989), and closed with the Brexit vote and an “America First” presidency in 2016. Across its several perspectives (governing elites, workers, security establishments, cultural conservatives) the West moved from author and champion of globalisation to its most vocal internal critic.
The elite perspective: a Western-designed order (c. 1992–2007)
- Its intellectual roots lay in Adam Smith’s free trade and David Ricardo’s comparative advantage, first applied through a colonial division of labour.
- The 1990s institutionalised it: the Washington Consensus, NAFTA (1994), the WTO (1995) with TRIPS, the euro (1999) and China’s WTO entry (2001).
- The West gained cheaper consumer goods, booming finance and technology firms, and dollar-centred structural power.
The disillusioned perspectives
- Labour. David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson (“The China Syndrome”, 2013) show import competition hollowing out specific US towns, with little worker mobility. Branko Milanovic’s elephant curve shows the Western lower-middle class gaining least.
- Security. The attacks of 9/11 showed terror networks using global finance and communications, and migration became tied to fears over jobs and borders.
- Cultural conservatives. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (Cultural Backlash, 2019) read the populist surge as older, socially conservative voters reacting against value change.
- Voters after 2008. The crisis began at the core of Western finance, and eurozone austerity followed. The 2016 Brexit vote and the US exit from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (January 2017) turned grievance into policy.
Critical examination
- The West remained the chief beneficiary. It wrote the rules, kept farm subsidies and controlled the IMF’s voting weight. Deepak Nayyar stresses that the Global South experienced these decades as asymmetric rules and double standards, so the Western complaint is selective. India’s IT-services rise, built on Western outsourcing, became a target of the same backlash.
- Distribution, not openness, failed. Joseph E. Stiglitz blames management, not integration; the Nordic states combined openness with social protection.
- Technology mattered more than trade in long-run job losses, though trade losses were sudden and concentrated, and so politically explosive.
- Later events confirmed the turn: the CHIPS and Inflation Reduction Acts (2022) and the 2025 tariff wave mark a securitised, managed globalisation.
Conclusion
Seen from the West, the period proved Dani Rodrik’s trilemma: deep integration outran democratic consent. The disenchantment is real but largely self-inflicted. The West abandoned John Ruggie’s embedded-liberal bargain of compensating losers at home, then blamed globalisation for the bill.