Is globalisation over?

LATE last year, Morris Chang, the legendary founder of Taiwan’s (and the world’s) leading semiconductor producer, proclaimed that “globalisation is almost dead”. In a world where supply chains have been disrupted by Covid-19 and the deepening Sino-American rivalry, other commentators have echoed this view, and many companies have begun “on-shoring” and “near-shoring” their procurement of goods. But it is a mistake to conclude that globalisation is over. A lot of human history reveals why.

Globalisation is simply the growth of interdependence at intercontinental, rather than national or regional, distances. Neither good nor bad in itself, it has many dimensions, and it certainly is not new. Climate change and migration have been driving humanity’s spread across the planet ever since our ancestors began to leave Africa over a million years ago, and many other species have done the same.

These processes have always given rise to biological interactions and interdependencies. The plague originated in Asia but killed a third of the European population between 1346 and 1352. When Europeans journeyed to the Western Hemisphere in the 15th and 16th centuries, they carried pathogens that decimated the indigenous populations. Military globalisation goes back at least to the days of Xerxes and then Alexander the Great, whose empire stretched across three continents. And, of course, the sun never set on the 19th-century British Empire. Through it all, great religions also spread across multiple continents – a form of sociocultural globalisation.