The end of history?
Once upon a time, we believed that economic globalization could make the world safer.
Let’s rewind the clock back thirty years. Optimism was everywhere. We thought that the benefits of economic integration would stop the war once and for all. There was even this theory called the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention,” which claimed that no two countries that both have McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.
Would you like to feel like a lazy optimist of the 1990s? Go to a bookstore and pick up “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama.
The book was published soon after the collapse of the Soviets. Its main idea is that Western-style liberal democracy and free market system will be universally accepted and end the long-lasting conflicts over territories and ideologies.
Unfortunately, as we all know, his prophesies failed miserably. Globalization – representative government, global trading, consumerist culture, internet - may have become universal and increased the costs of the wars but it has obviously not prevented conflicts.
What was the tipping moment that the world has turned unpredictable and dangerous? Was it the terrorist attack of September 11? A humiliating failure of global institutions to fight back the 2008 financial crisis? The outbreak of COVID-19? The rise of right-wing politics? Or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Probably all of them. The world has escalated its journey to a new era over the course of these events rather than reaching the happy conclusion, happily ever after.
In 2011, President Obama asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs what it would take to bring iPhone manufacturing back to the US. Jobs’s answer was simple and direct “These jobs aren’t coming back”. Why? Because making iPhones exclusively in the US would add more cost, which would harm customers, Apple, the overall economy, and ultimately the entire US.
14 years have passed since Obama met with Jobs. iPhones are yet to return home, but the US is aggressively pushing businesses and trading partners so it can bring manufacturing jobs back home. It isn’t only the US that is violating the code of globalization. Regardless of the potential cost burden, the major economies aren’t no longer hesitating to implement once-criticized practices such as tariffs and subsidies.
It's official. We are now officially at the end of “the End of History”. Globalization was defined by the extremists, then by Russia and China, followed by many emerging countries, and now even by those in the West who feel left behind globalization.
The world has changed. We should embrace it and find a way to deal with it. Fortunately, history will go on and we will find a way. We always have.
