World in Crisis. The Self-Destructive Contradictions of Ungoverned Globalization

Giampiero Bordino
Professor in Contemporary History and Political Analyst. President of the Einstein Center for International Studies

With increasing frequency in recent times, considerations about the crisis (or, more radically, the end) of the globalization process have emerged in the international public debate.

Wars, trade disputes, economic and trading sanctions resulting from political and military conflicts, isolationist and neo-nationalist policies, the development of illiberal democracies and authoritarian regimes, environmental crises and pandemics have, in fact, increasingly led to obstacles and disruptions in the management of global value-chains. Let us remember that these chains underpin production processes worldwide. The aforementioned phenomena and dynamics have tended to reduce trade volumes. More generally, and in many ways, it has fueled the often conflicting 'shattering' of economies, societies and cultures themselves.

However, these considerations and announcements about the crisis or the end of the globalization process, which are certainly verifiable and well-argued, have a fundamental limit, which makes them somewhat insignificant and of little use in building the future. The limit is that the globalization that is being referred to, and whose demise is being announced, is not globalization in general, but more specifically this ongoing globalization, 'not properly governed' by anyone. If all this is not said and made clear, one is definitely unable to explain what is happening, why it is happening, how one might get out of it and where shall we go to. This is, therefore, an essential and decisive clarification both from an analytical and cognitive standpoint and from a political-planning standpoint, on which we need to reflect.

The ungoverned globalization, the offspring of the liberalist myth of the 'self-regulated market', which lacks adequate institutions and procedures to guarantee its human and rational orientation, produces increasingly visible and significant self-destructive contradictions.  These are the contradictions that jeopardize globalization, first and foremost in its positive and progressive aspects, and produce conflictual processes, shattering closures and identity-related oppositions, which in turn, in a sort of uncontrollable 'vicious circle', feed the self-destructive character of the ongoing globalization.

At least four fundamental types of self-destructive contradictions of this nature exist and operate at every level, from the local to the global, which are empirically verifiable and verified and certainly now at the core of the public debate, but certainly not of most of the decision-making processes of institutional and political actors.

The first contradiction is that of the political and military wars and conflicts of various nature that crisscross and devastate the world. As of March 2022, according to an authoritative international estimate (ACLED, Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project), while the conflict in Ukraine brought about by the Russian invasion had just started, there were 59 open conflicts in the world, many of them long or very long-lasting. To give but a few examples: Afghanistan, Syria, Ethiopia, Israel/Palestine, Yemen, Mali, Myanmar, Nagorno Karabakh, Nigeria, Sudan, etc. In fact, all these conflicts mean deaths, health crises, destruction of infrastructure and education systems, disruption of production processes and trade, multiplication and militarization of borders, shattering of territories and societies, etc. In essence, a form of forced, bloody and pervasive de-globalization.

The second self-destructive contradiction is the growth of inequality, both between and within societies and states. According to the Oxfam 2022 Report, 10 super-rich individuals now possess six times more wealth than 3.1 billion people, i.e., the poorest 40% of the world's population. The World Inequality Report 2022 also indicates that since the mid-1990s, the top 1 per cent of the world's population has acquired 38 per cent of the additional wealth accumulated over the period, while the poorest 50 per cent have acquired only 2 per cent. Thus, inequalities in recent decades are still and increasingly on the rise, fueled by the economic development associated with globalization. Inequality, income and wealth asymmetries have reached levels that are no longer sustainable from the standpoint of social cohesion and coexistence, and also from the standpoint of economic development itself. This is a self-destructive contradiction of ungoverned globalization because the asymmetries in question are almost inevitably followed by conflicts (armed or not), the push towards closures and identity-related conflicts ('us' against 'them', everyone for himself locked in his own house), the collapse of 'social capital' (the level of mutual trust between citizens, the relational networks), the physical and mental shattering of the social fabric that tends to undermine economies and ultimately dissolve human communities. Thus, another pervasive form of de-globalization.

The third self-destructive contradiction is found in the ongoing environmental crises, from climate change to those related to the uncontrolled consumption of non-renewable natural resources. According to data from the UNDRR (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction), the global economic losses caused by environmental and climate disasters increased 151% between 1998 and 2017, compared to the previous two decades, from USD 1313 billion to USD 2908 billion. This contradiction also tends to fuel forms of de-globalization, because it differentiates and divides territories and communities, and actually pits their interests against each other. Even a single but relevant example can highlight this process. Africa, with a population of 1.4 billion people and a strong demographic expansion (it is estimated that by 2050 it will be home to 23% of the world's population), is responsible for less than one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. An obvious paradox, which cannot remain without conflictual outcomes for long and which, once again, may fuel de-globalization processes.

Finally, a fourth form of self-destructive contradiction is represented by the increasingly pervasive but perhaps still inadequately perceived and explored phenomenon of digitalization. As is well-known, there is a close link between digitalization and the globalization process, since it is precisely these technologies and the related platforms of the large digital companies (Big Tech), Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, that have made possible and fueled the growing flows of capital, goods, people, information, images, sounds, and values that daily traverse the world and, in fact, globalize it. But this digitalization, despite some more recent initiatives (e.g., in particular, the 'Declaration for the Future of the Internet' presented in April 2022 by the European Commission in cooperation with numerous international partners, including the United States), is still neither regulated nor governed by public authorities. Here again, the liberalist myth of the 'self-regulated market' still prevails. As Jonas Pentzien, a researcher at the Institute for Ecological Economy Research in Berlin, observed, “large digital companies set the rules of their markets themselves, buy out competitors, undermine regulation, and can limit access to information in terms of time and space. In this way, they create a centralization of power that is unparalleled”.

Secondly, and in an apparently opposite direction to the one indicated above, it should also be noted that in recent years, in various parts of the world, starting with China in particular, digital technologies have been and are being used by the public authorities themselves to put in place increasingly pervasive forms of surveillance and social control over the population, justifying them with reasons of security (with respect to real or presumed external and internal enemies) or, as in the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, with health-protection requirements. This has given rise to, and is now beginning to be proposed even in Europe and to some extent in other liberal democracies, the so-called 'social-credit system', which is based on the one hand on the digital, analytical and daily detection of citizens' attitudes and behavior (almost always beyond any respect for personal freedoms and privacy), and on the other hand, on the dispensing of rewards or punishments, mainly in terms of exclusions and prohibitions, with serious effects on people's living conditions (as in the case of the prohibition of access to bank accounts or to many types of essential public services) in relation to their behaviors. All this also makes possible, as is evident and verified especially in the case of China, but not only there, the political use of these technologies for the purpose of repressing dissent. Digitalization, in this way, determines the division of society, its shattering between 'good guys' and 'bad guys' (in multiple senses and directions), and the breakdown of relational networks both within societies and transnationally. In other words, a new type of capillary and creeping de-globalization, of which, moreover, there is still little individual or collective and social perception.

In conclusion, the contradiction produced by digitalization appears obvious: on the one hand, it globalizes because it allows to connect, to network, to integrate different phenomena and actors; on the other hand, and at the same time, it de-globalizes because it allows, with the same technological tools, to divide, close and separate.

Ungoverned globalization, the real globalization in which we live, therefore produces, as we have seen, self-destructive contradictions of various kinds that no one, as yet, is able to control. It is therefore not a generic globalization that has come to an end or is declining, as is usually said, but this ungoverned globalization that inevitably contradicts and self-destructs.

What is needed to reverse this trend, to guarantee a human direction and meaning to globalization, to make it positive and sustainable? What is needed, as is obvious to anyone who wants to see it, are institutions that are legitimised by consensus, and at the same time adequately effective in the implementation of policies to control and regulate this process, at the various levels at which it takes place: from the local to the global level, through all the intermediate levels, and well beyond the dimension of nation states. These institutions, as can easily be verified, do not yet exist. What is missing, in other words, is a multilevel democratic statehood that corresponds to the global complexity of the world in which we live. This is the real 'knot to untie' of the world in crisis, with respect to which we must have a horizon, a project, a strategy. Without it, self-destruction is bound to prevail.