Globalisation isn't over, but we need to ditch the fantasies it ushered in

INTELLECTUALS in the West love debating Big Think issues in terms of wars of ideas of thesis and antithesis that signify a la Hegelian philosophy - the end of one historical epoch and the birth of a new one, the "fall" of this power and the "rise" of that alternative force that would shape the Zeitgeist.

In the pre-Internet era, those debates were confined to university seminars and scholarly magazines and recapped in jargon-filled books issued by academic publishing houses.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, these Big Think debates, of trying to make sense of what had happened, produced such high-brow works like Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History" and Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations", while the entry of the former Soviet bloc, China and India into the global economy, and the growing trade and investment ties between national economies ushered a new intellectual consensus - that we were in the Age of Globalisation.