The era of deglobalisation has begun

Photo by L B on Unsplash

The grand narrative of perpetual global integration, that inexorable march towards a borderless world economy, seems to be at an end, bringing about a fundamental reconfiguration of the international order that challenges seven decades of post-war consensus.

The post-1945 order, particularly accelerated after 1989, rested on the assumption that economic interdependence would prevent conflict, comparative advantage would drive mutual prosperity, and that technological progress would naturally facilitate deeper integration. These articles of faith have shaped institutional design, corporate strategy, and national policy for generations.

It was possibly the 2008 financial crisis that first revealed the fragility of hyperconnected financial systems, before Brexit demonstrated that political sovereignty outweighs—in the minds of a slim majority, at least—economic efficiency in democratic decision-making. US-China trade tensions, which began in earnest in 2018, showed that even the world’s most important bilateral economic relationship wasn’t immune to geopolitical competition.

But these were often dismissed as aberrations, temporary deviations from an otherwise stable trajectory. Then came the pandemic, Trumpism, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Trumpism 2.0, conflict (and genocide) in the Middle East propped up by the West, and the AI arms race—it’s now clear that what we’re experiencing isn’t a series of unrelated crises but a systematic unwinding of globalisation as most of us have always known it.