The “opportunities and challenges” of globalisation were the theme of a lecture by the former British prime minister Tony Blair in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday night. As our report on his lecture points out, Mr Blair is concerned that too few people in western politics understand the opportunities and see only the challenges.
Both left- and right-wing political parties in the West have within them antiglobalisation movements – and those movements are too often on the ascendant. In Mr Blair’s United Kingdom, there were many on the left and especially on the right who supported Brexit, part of the reason for which was a fear of too much power seeping to Europe. In the United States, Donald Trump and others in the Republican Party are keen to turn inward, away from an interconnected world.
“We are on the edge of a period of openness and inclusion or a very dark period of close-minded policies,” Mr Blair said.
But concern about globalisation and the dangers of looking inward go far beyond one country in Europe or even the West more generally. Globalisation has, without a doubt, brought great challenges. But it has also brought great benefits. Often those benefits are not immediately obvious because the broad thrust of history, certainly over the past century, has been towards greater openness. So the benefits of globalisation sometimes get rolled in with the general idea of progress, ignoring the specific mechanism that brought about those changes.
Take an example from China. Since the 1980s, China has taken nearer 1 billion people out of poverty – the greatest reduction in poverty in the history of the world. But it did that because it instituted market reforms and opened itself to the world.
Yet globalisation is far more than about the movement of people and products. It is mainly about ideas. All of the great cities of history have been created through the cross-fertilisation of ideas – Baghdad, Venice and New York among them, and all benefited from new people and new ideas.
At the root, that is the great danger of building walls around countries. They may keep out new people and new products. But they also keep out new ideas – and it is ideas that are the lifeblood of any economy, of any city, and of any civilisation. The danger of this period of looking inward is that it heralds not only a closing of global trade – but a closing of global minds.
