I am writing this column in a French-style cafe in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), probably the most globalised location in the most globalised city in the Middle East.
Next door is a British bank, across the way is a German financial institution, and a short walk away are the offices of a gigantic Asian financial conglomerate.
For lunch I had Mexican fajitas. Last night I ate Japanese cuisine in an Emirati-owned hotel just a stone's throw from here. The waiters were Filipino.
Who can deny the facts of globalisation? Especially in a city such as Dubai, the inexorable creep of international, cosmopolitan culture and lifestyle appears 100 per cent natural and inevitable.
Since the concept of globalisation materialised, it has become widely accepted by economists, businessmen and socio-political commentators to describe the process by which local and national differences around the world are being elided, or "flattened", in the words of its most persuasive advocate, the US journalist and author Thomas Friedman.
The fact of globalisation has not been in dispute for many years, whether you are a jet-setting captain of industry travelling first-class high over the Himalayas, or an anarchist battering the windows of Starbucks in London's posh shopping district. Some were for it, some against it, but nobody denied it.
I confess I was very much for it. As a business journalist, I had to look at commercial and financial matters in a globalised context, because that's exactly what my subjects, targets and sources were doing.
In the 1990s, I was a convinced advocate of the EU; by 2005, after my first trip to China, I was confirmed in a broader globalist view; moving to and working in the Middle East was proof positive, I thought.
But now, something has come along that for the first time has caused me to doubt that weltanschauung.
Pankaj Ghemawat is an Indian academic living in Spain, himself an example of globalisation, you might think. But he has just produced a book that will be required reading for all economic, political and business strategists.
In World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve it, Mr Ghemawat argues the things that make us different as people, nations and cultures are just as important, and often far more significant, as the things we have in common. His argument is not based on any primitive nationalistic chauvinism, but on a wide range of empirical research and case studies.
(Because the book is not published yet in the UAE, I am grateful to a review in The Economist newspaper for the statistical details that follow.)
The author argues that economic globalisation is exaggerated. Trade between two otherwise identical countries will be larger if they have language, culture and history in common. Staggeringly, two similar countries are far more likely to have good trade relations if they have common colonial "suffering". So much for the evils of imperialism.
In other words, the traditional factors that delineate economies are much more significant than the globalising factors such as international finance, electronic communications, the internet, or cheap air travel.
Foreign direct investment accounts for only 9 per cent of all fixed investment, he reveals; only 20 per cent of venture capital goes outside the funds' domiciles; foreign investors own only about 20 per cent of shares on the world's stock markets.
The internet, the so-called great globaliser, comes under special scrutiny. Only about 18 per cent of internet traffic crosses national borders, Mr Ghemawat finds, and that proportion will decrease as national governments impose their own regulatory restrictions on content.
There are as many forces working against globalisation as there are for it, he says. Protectionism is on the rise everywhere, whether in the form of straight tariffs, border bureaucracies or the costs and complexities of the global visa "industry", valued at US$88 billion (Dh323.23bn) per year.
Now all this could be rubbish. Certainly sitting here in the DIFC it doesn't feel right. But hold on.
Am I one of the mere 10 per cent of people who has ever travelled outside their native land? Or am I one of the 2 per cent who believes they will die outside the country in which they were born? When you put it like that, it suddenly seems more relevant.
Maybe I'm one of the 40 per cent who used to be in favour of globalisation until summer 2008, but who now feel it's a con, a device fabricated by sweaty investment bankers on the Friday evening flight from Brussels to London; and by academics, who like to sell a book or two.
