Gideon Rachman
The Financial Times’s Gideon Rachman has launched an interesting competition on his blog. Readers have to come up with a term that epitomizes the opposite of ‘globalisation’. Entries so far include ‘autarchy’, ‘immunisation’, ‘fragmentation’ and even ‘backyardisation’. My own entry, for what it’s worth, is the more prosaic ‘deglobalisation’.
In a very popular new Danish TV serious called; “The bodyguards”, there is an episode where the danish bodyguads, have to protect the visiting British Cabinet Minister for the Environment. The Minister is convinced of the necessity of doing something about climate change, and as such she is under serious threat from what she calls the; “Sun Set Industries”. Those industries that will ignore the environmental challenges and maximise profit, going on producing unsustainable products in a continued unsustainable way. I find, that maybe it is the same here. Those who sees Globalisation as a threat and not as a window of opportunity, may be be more interest in sun set’s than sun rises? – Globalisation is a fact of life, and instead of watching the sun go down wishing for “village level isolationism” (here you got my proposal), we should instead try to manage globalisation. We can see how it went wrong with the bankers, when not controlled. Here international fora and indeed the European construction has its role to play.