Page 82 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

succeeded in lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty
but, for quite a number of years now, it has been called into

question and even started to recede. As highlighted previously,
today’s world is more interconnected than it has ever been but, for
more than a decade, the economic and political impetus that
made the case for and supported the increase of globalization has

been on the wane. The global trade talks that started in the early
2000s failed to deliver an agreement, while during that same
period the political and societal backlash against globalization
relentlessly gained strength. As the social costs provoked by the

asymmetric effects of globalization rose (particularly in terms of
manufacturing unemployment in high-income countries), the risks
of financial globalization became ever-more apparent after the
Great Financial Crisis that began in 2008. Thus combined, they

triggered the rise of populist and right-wing parties around the
world (most notably in the West), which, when they come to
power, often retreat into nationalism and promote an isolationist
agenda – two notions antithetical to globalization.

The global economy is so intricately intertwined that it is
impossible to bring globalization to an end. However, it is possible
to slow it down and even to put it into reverse. We anticipate that
the pandemic will do just that. It has already re-erected borders
with a vengeance, reinforcing to an extreme trends that were

already in full glare before it erupted with full force in March 2020
(when it became a truly global pandemic, sparing no country),
such as tougher border controls (mainly because of fears about

immigration) and greater protectionism (mainly because of fears
about globalization). Tighter border controls for the purpose of
managing the progression of the pandemic make eminent sense,
but the risk that the revival of the nation state leads progressively
to much greater nationalism is real, a reality that the “globalization

trilemma” framework offered by Dani Rodrik captured. In the early
2010s, when globalization was becoming a sensitive political and
social issue, the Harvard economist explained why it would be the

inevitable casualty if nationalism rises. The trilemma suggests that
the three notions of economic globalization, political democracy
and the nation state are mutually irreconcilable, based on the logic

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