Is globalisation retreating?

…Another factor unraveling the globalist project is its obsession with economic growth. Indeed, unending growth is the centerpiece of globalization, the mainspring of its legitimacy. While a recent World Bank report continues to extol rapid growth as the key to expanding the global middle class, global warming, peak oil, and other environmental events are making it clear to people that the rates and patterns of growth that come with globalization are a surefire prescription for ecological disaster.

The final factor, not to be underestimated, has been popular resistance to globalization. The battles of Seattle in 1999, Prague in 2000, and Genoa in 2001; the massive global anti-war march on February 15, 2003, when the anti-globalization movement morphed into the global anti-war movement; the collapse of the WTO ministerial meeting in Cancun in 2003 and its near-collapse in Hong Kong in 2005; the French and Dutch people’s rejection of the neo-liberal, pro-globalization European Constitution in 2005 – these were all critical junctures in a decade-long global struggle that has rolled back the neo-liberal project.

But these high-profile events were merely the tip of the iceberg, the summation of thousands of anti-neo-liberal, anti-globalization struggles in thousands of communities throughout the world involving millions of peasants, workers, students and indigenous people and many sectors of the middle class.

While corporate-driven globalization may be down, it is not out. Though discredited, many pro-globalisation neo-liberal policies remain in place in many economies, for lack of credible alternative policies in the eyes of technocrats. With talks dead-ended at the WTO, the big trading powers are emphasizing free-trade agreements (FTAs) and economic partnership agreements (EPAs) with developing countries. These agreements are in many ways more dangerous than the multilateral negotiations at the WTO, since they often require greater concessions in terms of market access and tighter enforcement of intellectual property rights.

Financial Express