In the wake of recent events such as the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s electoral victory, John Rennie Short explores why there has been widespread resistance to economic, political, and cultural globalization in a new article in The Conversation.
Short, a professor of public policy, traces the origins of globalization back to the end of World War II when the Allied countries set up a new order focused on free markets and trade, coupled with the establishment of international organizations with the idea that it would curb economic nationalism.
He then explains how this later led to money moving more freely around the world, with eventual global shifts in manufacturing and a loosening of trade restrictions.
“As a result, there was a global redistribution of wealth. In the West as factories shuttered, mechanized or moved overseas, the living standards of the working class declined. Meanwhile, in China prosperity grew, with the poverty rate falling from 84 percent in 1981 to only 12 percent by 2010,” Short writes, adding, “the backlash against economic globalization is most marked in those countries such as the U.S. where economic dislocation unfolds with weak safety nets and limited government investment in job retraining or continuing and lifetime education.”
Professor Short analyzes how expanding free markets, with the creation of institutions such as the European Union, along with cultural backlash to globalization seen across the world, have all contributed in recent decades to the widespread resistance to globalization.
“The globalization project contains much that was desirable: improvements in living conditions through global trade, reducing conflict and threat of war through political globalization and encouraging cultural diversity in a widening cultural globalization,” explains Short. “The question now, in my view, is not whether we should accept or reject globalization but how we shape and guide it to these more progressive goals.”
Read the full article in The Conversation. It has also been re-published with the below news outlets.
Why there’s a globalization backlash (U.S. News and World Report)
Globalization and its discontents (The Millennium Post)
Globalization and its discontents: Why there’s a backlash and how it needs to change (SF Gate)
Image: John Rennie Short in his office. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.
