Just a year ago, it seemed like the era of globalization was over.



At the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland—on a panel called “Squeezed and Angry”— hedge fund guru Ray Dalio set out the new direction of the global economy. “We may be at a point where globalization is ending and where provincialism and nationalism are taking hold,” he said. “You will see more protectionism, perhaps the reversal of the trend in the 90s of trade agreement and globalization.” Co-panelists Christine Lagarde and Larry Summers nodded along.

Dalio’s view reflected a growing consensus. The economist Dani Rodrik diagnosed globalization to be “at risk.” Nikil Saval, co-editor of n+1, proclaimed its fall. And Columbia’s Jeff Sachs catalogued its crisis. It seemed that the “great globalization lie” had finally been exposed. And voters were punishing the political parties that had pushed it.

Across Europe and North America, the rise of populism was widely seen as a backlash against globalization by its losers and left-behinds. Their vote reflected discontent with decades of international economic integration, which came at the cost of democratic control. Populist candidates were elected with the mandate to take back that control.

Many observers made sense of this transformation in the terms of Rodrik’s “trilemma of the world economy.” The trilemma stipulates that we can satisfy only two of the three following conditions: global economic integration, national sovereignty, and substantive democracy. Within this framework, the populist turn was away from globalization + sovereignty and toward democracy + sovereignty. Or so the argument went.