It’s no news that the process of globalization has slowed. In some cases, it has kicked into reverse. In fact, the world isn’t converging. It’s somewhat diverging.
Immigration flows have reduced, and as reported by the Economist, the global trade fell by 5% between 2008 and 2019, accompanied by fresh tariffs and trade barriers.
Also, the world flows of long-term investment went down by half between 2016 and 2019.
These suggest the world is heading into deglobalization, and its causes are deep and broad. The financial crisis in 2008 even de-legitimized world capitalism more.
Can we say that globalization is already over? Or has the global culture war started?
The rise of anti-globalization movements
Some forms of anti-globalization movements have risen over the past few years.
China has demonstrated that mercantilism could be an efficient economic strategy, just like the Trumpian populists, xenophobic nationalists, Brexiteers, and the antiglobalist.
There are more world conflicts than there were in the 1990s. Travel, trade, and communication across global political blocs have now become more economically, morally, and politically fraught.
Due to the Russia-Ukraine war, hundreds of organizations have left Russia as the West decouples from Vladimir Putin’s war machine.
Also, some Western consumers don’t wish to trade with China due to some accusations of genocide and forced labor.
In 2020-21, several Western CEOs rethought their activities in China after the communist government became more unfriendly to the West. The political uncertainty affected the supply chains.
The FDI flows between the US and China, which were about $30 billion per year five years ago, fell to $5 billion.
Yes, the process of globalization, like trade flows, would continue, but globalization as a driver of world affairs logic tends to be almost over.
Economic rivalries are merged with moral, political, and cultural clashes into a contest for world dominance. Now, globalization is being changed by something like a global culture war.
Why globalization is changing into a global culture war
1. Over the past few decades, global politics has functioned as a significant social inequality machine. Across countries, groups of highly urban elites have risen to dominate culture, media, and political power.
Also, populist leaders have risen to exploit the above resentments. The former US president, Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen in France, and Narendra Modi in India are a few examples.
Authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Putin are practicing this politics of resentment on a world scale. In most cases, they treat the West as enemies and reveal their revolt against them openly.
Putin talks about the West’s humiliation stories, including what the West allegedly did to Russia in the 1990s. He has promised a return to Russian culture, exceptionalism, and glory.
China leaders discuss the “century of humiliation.” The leaders complain about the arrogant Westerners who try to impose their cultures and values on everybody.
2. Most people are now showing more strong loyalty to their nations and places. Over the past decade, several people and groups have felt they’ve been left behind as their national honors are threatened.
Across countries, nationalistic movements have grown to insist on national sovereignty and restoring national pride.
These movements have been recently championed by political leaders like Modi in India, ex-president Trump in the US, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and Boris Johnson in Britain. They all aimed to make their respective countries great again using their ways.
3. More people are now driven by moral longings attached to their cultural values and desire to defend the values when under assault. Many believe that globalization seems to be this type of assault.
Following the Cold War, Western values arrived to dominate the world via music, movies, social media, and political conversation.
The West believes that world culture should converge around western and liberal values.
Unlike others, the West thinks its values are or should be the world’s values. This has led to a crash of values, cultures, and interests as others fight to enthrone their cultures, especially those who believe that western culture shouldn’t be world culture.
Overview of the diverging world culture
Despite the globalization assumptions, the world culture doesn’t tend to be converging. It seems to be diverging.
People are mostly biased towards their countries’ culture, music, and movies.
This bias has increased since the 2000s. Most people don’t want to remain in the homogeneous world culture, and they wish to preserve their kind.
Unlike in the 1990s, the English-Speaking and Protestant Europe zones have drifted away from the rest of the world’s cultures. They’re now out like an extraneous cultural peninsula.
The World Values Survey Association has expressed that issues like family, gender, marriage, and sexual orientation have seen a rising divergence in high-income countries and low-income countries.
The Western culture’s grip on the rest of the world is growing apart.
As there are some signs that the globe is culturally and economically diverging, signs are also showing it’s politically diverging.
Unlike before, several democracies seem less stable while many authoritarian governments show more stability.
While American democracy under Trump slid toward dysfunction and polarization, China’s government has shown that centralized nations can be as technologically enhanced as the West.
Today’s authoritarian countries have technologies that permit them to assume pervasive control of citizens in manners unimaginable a few decades ago.
And they often weaponize cultural differences, status resentments, and religious tensions to attract allies, mobilize supporters, and grow their powers.
Also, these autocratic regimes have become economic rivals to the West. And are enjoying surprising popular backing.
According to research, these regimes account for 60% of patent applications. In 2020, they invested $9 trillion in equipment, infrastructure, and machinery, while democratic countries invested $12 trillion.
In the past few years, the nation-states haven’t evolved greatly closer to one another as envisaged. The West subscribe to universal values about democracy, personal dignity, and freedom, but the issue is that these universal values aren’t universally accepted, and they tend to get less.
This divergence has turned into conflict as big powers compete for dominance and resources in recent years. Russia and China want to dominate their regional zones, as seen in the invasion of Ukraine and aggression on Taiwan.
There has been a world struggle between the forces of democratization and authoritarianism. It’s different now! Presently, there’s a conflict about culture, politics, economics, status, religion, and morality.
Specifically, there’s the rejection of western culture by millions of people globally.
This rejection of Western individualism, liberalism, gender equality, and pluralism isn’t just occurring between nations but equally within nations.
Now, it’s safe to say there’s a global culture war as differing views on secularism and freedom are intertwined with global trade flows, nuclear weapons, status resentments, authoritarian power grabs, and toxic masculinity.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay