FROM BIPOLAR TO... BIPOLAR AGAIN!

 

With all the talk of supply chains being threatened and needing to be moved because of geopolitical shifts, plus the growing protectionism in some places, plus trade wars between rivals, many are wondering if economic globalization is passé, a thing of the past, that fragmentation will replace globalization.

Is the world becoming fragmented? Yes and no.

Yes, in the sense that the political fractures have become more acute and more visible, making the economic fractures more apparent since the main actors are fighting economically instead of militarily. No, in the sense that the world order, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War, didn't become unipolar, but multipolar, which is not the same thing.

A unipolar world would have seen the population of the whole planet united around common values, common political practices, a common culture, and, especially, a common economic reality. In fact, the world became multipolar simply because there was still around 200 sovereign countries, each with its own set of interests, its own population, its own ressources, its own political system, its own history, and its own prospects.

Such a diversity, in an age of instant communications and relatively fast transportation, made globalization possible. Globalization may be seen as the need to create, extend and consolidate economic networks among countries sharing some level of similarities. The conditions that made it possible in the first place are still there, even today.

The main difference with the last decades is the slow emergence of China and the gathering of allies that this new situation generates. To put it simply, the world is becoming bipolar again, but this time between the United States of America and the People's Republic of China.

A change of guard is in the process of becoming reality, the leadership of the world leaving the hands of the United States and passing in the hands of the Middle Kingdom. In the last centuries, the title of Most Powerful Country of the World has been held in turn by France (more or less in the XVIIIth century), the United Kingdom (more or less in the XIXth), and the United States (more or less in the XXth).

China is likely to take and keep that coveted title in the current century, the first non-Western country to do so in a long, long time. In itself, it is not a scary subject, nor is it a joyful event, simply a bump on the road that we have followed so far, as a species, in the sense that change is normal in human history.

The main question, the real question, is how violent or non-violent would prove to be the coming transformation...

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https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/views/open-dialogue/news/our-world-becoming-economically-fragmented-3251391