Page 12 - Nuvama | IC Report 2023

• DE-GLOBALISATION • DEREGULATION • DEBT • DEMOGRAPHY • DEMOCRACY

De-globalisation: Thesis to antithesis

“ When the rain came to wet me once,

And the wind to make me chatter;
When the thunder would not peace at my bidding;
There I found them, there I smelt them out.
Go to, they are not men o’ their words;
They told me I am everything;
”
‘tis a lie; I am not ague-proof.
– Act 4, Scene 6, King Lear by William Shakespeare

Globalisation has been the age-proof idea of our times. It came to be revered as a religion with
economists as its high priests, policymakers its devotees and financial media the proselytiser. The
zeitgeist is best captured by British PM Tony Blair’s speech in 2005: “I hear people say we have to stop
and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”
After the fall of communism (1989), the idea of international liberalism became so mesmerising that
American international relations scholar Francis Fukuyama saw it not just as the ending of the Cold War,
but the “end of history” itself. Deeper integration of global trade, explosion of global capital flows, light
regulations, just-in-time (JIT) global supply chains, energy dependence and a dollar-centric global
monetary system backed by a web of security arrangements were seen as a winning combination to
durable peace and prosperity. Indeed, globalisation did succeed in many ways.
Cut to present times: chinks are showing up in the mighty façade of globalisation. In essence,
globalisation is confronting a King Lear moment—only when it is too late (passion goes far ahead of
reason, errors mount and suffering deepens) that the once mighty monarch realises he is not age-proof.

Perhaps complacency took the world too far with globalisation, and now contradictions and fault lines
Perhaps are becoming conspicuous. As the 19th century German philosopher GWF Hegel observed, “the owl of
complacency Minerva flies only at the dusk”, which is to say that wisdom comes late in the day.
took the world
too far with One might wonder why globalisation is getting shunned now after shining for so long. What could the
globalisation, and new landscape look like, and what opportunities can it throw up for India? We think a good place to
now contradictions begin is the big-picture understanding of how history transitions from one epoch to the next. Herein,
and fault lines GWF Hegel’s view of history is instructive.
are becoming Subsequently, we zero in on the phenomenon of globalisation and highlight its contradictions that
conspicuous
are now coming to the fore. Harvard professor Dani Rodrik’s political trilemma of the world economy
beautifully elucidates such contradictions.
In the end, we surmise what this retreat of globalisation means for India.

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