In public debate, the claim that globalization is ending<\/strong> appears more and more often. The same authors, however, write these revelations on devices bearing American logos, produced in Asia, made with African minerals, and delivered by a European merchant fleet. Something is changing. But what?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The answer depends on the definition we adopt. If we treat globalization broadly, as a range of phenomena running from economics and technology to politics, then the world has been moving toward its current condition since the first half of the 19th century.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n During that time, the United States flourished and the colonial empires finally collapsed. China, in turn, traveled from political humiliation at the hands of Europeans, through communism and poverty, to the role of a power offering an alternative to the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During that same period, two world wars<\/strong> took place. Industrial, moral, and social revolutions passed like lightning. We moved from balloon flights to entirely realistic concepts for conquering space. Is another global rivalry really supposed to end the migration of specialists, foreign investment, outsourcing, and international exchange once and for all<\/strong>? Globalization is the official name for human greed equipped with concrete tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where, then, does this fear come from? The crisis of globalism<\/a> has two dimensions. The first is measurable and less significant: Americans have genuinely lost their monopoly over world power and now have to share influence, which in fact has already happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The age of interventionism, protectionism, rebuilding productive capacity, and renewed concern for one\u2019s own security will come as a shock to Europe. In fact, this is already happening, though at a snail\u2019s pace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shortening and duplicating supply chains, maintaining reserves, moving production closer to one\u2019s borders, paying more for energy, and spending more on defense all represent the cost of security. We will pay for it through lower efficiency, slower growth, and a decline in wealth. We will simply be poorer<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The cultural shock, however, will be much greater. Until now, the debate has treated globalization too strongly as an economic mechanism and too weakly as an ideological and anthropological project: in other words, as a particular vision of the human being, society, history, and political order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here, the most important distinction matters. Globalization is a real process<\/strong>: flows of capital, goods, people, information, norms, and lifestyles. Globalism is an ideology<\/strong> claiming that ever-greater integration of the world is not only inevitable. It is also fundamentally good, progressive, and leads humanity to a higher stage of development. That second idea really is in crisis today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the fall of communism, Poland developed a particular synthesis of several ideas: economic and political liberalism, cosmopolitanism, supranational institutionalism, technocracy, and individualism.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n We embraced globalism with particular zeal because it was not merely an abstract doctrine. In practice, it meant leaving the Soviet sphere of influence, gaining access to the West, modernizing, becoming wealthier, and traveling freely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It therefore became easy to mistake the success of Polish integration for proof that the Western model was not only beneficial for us, but also universal for the whole world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Globalization was never only trade in containers. It promised to create a world in which the market, law, technology, and individual rights would gradually replace geopolitics, religion, borders, and collective identities<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Globalization Crisis Has Two Dimensions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The End of History, Polish Style<\/h2>\n\n\n\n