Asa's Take: What Did Optimism About Globalization Really Feel Like?

A potpourri of questions.

I’m too young to know. Despite my youth, this is a topic that has been on my mind constantly, infinitely wondering the psychology of how in the past we came to the conclusion that Globalization was going to be great. I think that 2008 was the initial alarm bell that most people chose to ignore, and then 2016 and everything that followed was the wake-up call: Globalization failed. Not just that, but I also often think about the connection between the failures of globalization and the rise of Trump. Without Globalization as it occurred, do tariffs appeal to rust-belt voters left behind by Washington? No.

My first encounter of globalization optimism is funnily enough, a conversation with my mother. I was in middle school and curious about what it felt like after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I asked my mother, a young adult when the wall fell, who said roughly: “Everyone thought free market capitalism and liberal democracy were the greatest things ever, and 10 years later we thought the internet was going to make the world a utopia”. She remembers going to Prague in the mid 90s and saying it felt liberating, but also eerie. A country that was not yet ready to accept its fate as a capitalist democracy yet gleeful to be free from the chains of communism.

My second encounter with this optimism was when reading Timothy Snyder’s The Road To Unfreedom, which I still believe is his best work thus far. Snyder outlines his politics of inevitability:

“A sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity” (Snyder 7).

My first reaction to reading this was: Man, Inevitability is the perfect word for this. People really thought that when democracy and capitalism combined, success was inevitable. How did we let this naïvité capture ourselves? Was there hindsight? Or no hindsight? Is the industrial revolution even a valid comparison? Is there any comparison to such a rapid change in systems in human history?

I wrote this solely to put my thoughts out there, to make public my internal questioning, thoughts, and ideas that I hope you comment on or share your own.

To end, one of the best insights I am yet to indulge in but will soon is Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. Published in 1992, Fukuyama argues that Western liberal democracy and capitalism are signals of the peak, final, optimal form of human government.