The case for globalisation optimism

“We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism,” wrote John Maynard Keynes in 1930, in the midst of a disintegrating global economy. He went on to describe the much better future the world could expect if it ever got its act together. Things are not so bleak today, but it is nevertheless hard to feel cheerful about globalisation’s prospects. America and China, which together account for nearly a quarter of world trade, are on ever-icier terms. Rules which fostered an era of rapid globalisation are being flouted into irrelevance. Perhaps most distressing is the sense that this film has played before. The 19th century saw its own period of breakneck globalisation. In the end, however, economic nationalism and great-power conflict destroyed the global trading system, and much else besides. A spiral towards catastrophe sometimes seems only a few stray balloons away.