De-globalization is not just about Brexit and rising U.S. protectionism. It is much more than that. It’s a pervasive negative attitude regarding globalization that includes various autonomous and sometimes antagonistic movements, such as anti-Western universalism in Eurasia, anti-federalism in Eastern Europe, Piketty-type neo-Marxism in Western Europe, as well as the Islamic State and the like from the Mediterranean to Central Asia. What’s at stake here is the post World War II intellectual construct positing that if people from all civilizations find it profitable to be acquainted through exchange, they will become interdependent and identify with mankind as a whole, peacefully. Globalization is losing ground fast to de-globalization — the view that a globalized economy generates intolerable inequalities between people, classes, nations and civilizations. To combat inequality, the argument goes, governments need to regain their sovereign rights and close their national borders. Inequality within societies has widened considerably in recent decades. But this is not because of international trade or movements of people; after all, cross-border trade and migration have been happening for thousands of years. So what is fueling it? To answer that question, we must consider what it is about globalization that is generating returns for the wealthy. The reply: the capacity to combine. A central aspect of globalization is the careful documentation of the knowledge and legal tools needed to combine sovereign rights and property rights over seemingly useless single assets (electronic parts, legal rights to production, and so on) into complex wholes (an iPhone), and appropriate the surplus value they generate. It is well-organized knowledge documented in clear and accessible ledgers that faithfully describes not only who controls what and where, but also the rules governing potential combinations, which makes it possible for the multiple components from ten countries to be brought together to manufacture one […]
