World Politics since 1989. Jonathan Holslag

THE PENDULUM

      WALLPECKERS, THEY WERE CALLED. IN THE WINTER OF 1989, hundreds of wallpeckers or Mauerspechte descended on the Berlin Wall. Armed with hammers and chisels, they attacked the imposing barrier of concrete and barbed wire. One year later, the entire Iron Curtain between the Soviet Union and the West came down. It was an electric moment. “A second heart implanted,” wrote a student in her diary, “can’t breathe any more.”¹ From then onwards, the world experienced a period of opening up, of fading political fault lines, diminishing travel restrictions, and lowering barriers against trade. This was the age of globalization, of growing connectivity, commerce, and prosperity, growth that came with the expectation that the remaining vestiges of authoritarianism would make place for freedom.

The high tide of globalization appeared to hold opportunities for all.² Emerging powers like South Korea, China, and Vietnam received access to the technology, capital, and consumer markets of rich societies, like the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. Rich citizens benefited from cheap goods, from toys to mobile phones, and specialized into services. Countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East profited from growing raw material exports and investment. Trade propelled specialization between nations and specialization brought more growth to all. It was called a great convergence.³ There were still threats, to be sure. But these threats were expected to make countries work together. Terrorism, for example, pirates that targeted global shipping, criminals that penetrated digital networks – or pandemics. Experts spoke of security interdependence, of global common goods requiring a common policy.⁴ A teenager asked to name the most urgent challenge facing the world would likely mention pollution or climate change.

      If there was competition, it would be a peaceful contest for connectivity, conducted by multinationals and start-up companies instead of states and soldiers. Container ships not aircraft carriers shaped the fortune of the major powers. Cheap airlines made city trips affordable. Internet traffic exploded. Global economic production grew. Extreme poverty retreated. Magazines wrote about a renaissance in Africa.⁵ “China’s arrival has improved Africa’s infrastructure and boosted its manufacturing sector,” a magazine trumpeted. “Africa’s enthusiasm for technology is boosting growth.”⁶ India with its hundreds of millions of paupers was set to shine. Globalization augured a golden era – or at least an exit from an era of iron.

A missed opportunity

      But the pendulum swung back. In 2019, people protested again in the shadow of an imposing wall. It was pulled up along thousands of kilometers of border between the United States and Mexico. It was another milestone in world history, a turning point between a period of opening and a new period of fragmenting. The talk of the day was no longer about globalization but about de-globalization, about sovereignty, and autonomy. The United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union. In the United States, President Donald Trump railed against cosmopolitanism. Despite his turbulent term, two impeachment procedures, his blatant nationalism, his failure to address the devastating corona pandemic, and his rude style, Trump narrowly missed a second term during the elections of 2020. Many Americans continued to support him. The center of the global order, the champion of liberal values, the West itself, was cast adrift. Never had it been so fragmented.

All around, nationalism and authoritarianism were on the offense. In democratic India, Hindu-nationalist politicians exploited resentment against a minority of two hundred million Muslims. In South Africa, the legacy of freedom fighter Nelson Mandela was replaced by nationalism and xenophobia. If competition about territory was sometimes seen as trivial, Iraq invaded Kuwait, India clashed with Pakistan and China over Kashmir, Russia annexed Crimea, a strategically located peninsula in the Black Sea, and China went further and further in trying to control its adjacent seas. Numerous other territorial conflicts remained tense. The world moved from wall to wall.

      In 2020, a worldwide outbreak of coronavirus accelerated this evolution. The World Health Organization became a battleground between China and the United States, until Washington ended its membership entirely. Highlighting the nationalist tendency, countries like Germany delayed exports of medical equipment. Instead of joining forces, the major powers unleashed a propaganda war. Exposing their increasing weakness, disaster management in countries like Italy and the United Kingdom turned out to be disastrous. In the United States, militia protested against national government measures to halt the virus. “Tyrants get the rope,” protesters yelled outside the capitol building of the State of Michigan. The coronavirus did not cause the decay of political order. It rather took hold of a political body that was in bad shape. Over one hundred armed groups vowed to fight the return of a Democrat to the White House, his alleged attempt to bring in communism, and his attempt to curtail gun ownership. The defeat of President Donald Trump in the elections made Trumpism more defiant.

      The return of walls and nationalism cannot be reduced to isolated events, like the presidency of Donald Trump, the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union, or the corona pandemic. The next chapters will provide evidence of a more fundamental fragmentation. At this point, it suffices to summarize that there was an increase in both economic globalization and democratization in the 1990s. In the following decade, between 2000 and 2009, economic globalization still advanced, but democratization stagnated. Between 2010 and 2020, economic globalization stagnated and democratization receded. At the same time, global military spending surpassed the Cold War record. The number of armed conflicts increased.

So, what happened? How was it lost? How was it lost, the flicker of hope that rude power politics was bound to make place for a benign world order? How could it be that the age of globalization bred so much nationalism? This question forms the point of departure for this book. The history of the period of globalization, the 30 years roughly between 1989 and 2020, is the story of a lost momentum. For all the growth, it was insufficient to overcome the gravity of power politics and localism.

      One of the reasons was that the Western world held immense power, but often lacked wisdom: the wisdom to preserve social cohesion, the wisdom to use the historical wealth to build an attractive economic future, and the wisdom to use power with prudence on the global scene. It was as if those societies, after an arduous upward journey, a journey of toil and sacrifice, came to take their blessings for granted. They no longer had an idea about how to advance either, about what the next stage of development could be. A former South Korean minister once put it to me as follows. “I see the world as a mountain. Countries like mine and China are moving up,” he said. “But as we near the top, we see you having a picnic, consuming your wealth, unwilling to move to new heights, and being angry that others now move closer. You yield leadership and blame others for their ambition.”⁷ The three decades of relative peace in the West were a long-missed opportunity, a crisis of politics, diplomacy, and, in a way, civilization.

      As so often in history, it is in a time of prosperity that we find the causes of decay. “They who are in the sinking scale do not easily come off from the habitual prejudices of superior wealth.”⁸ While the West fell short in preserving and reinventing the historical sources of its wealth, others harbored resentment and used shrewd statecraft to profit from its short-sightedness. What accounted for a lot of the trouble was indeed that the West complacently consumed its prosperity