This week, I was in Poland for the first time, Warsaw to be more precise. Walking around the city centre a few things struck me. First, there were hardly any McDonald's, Starbucks, Pizza Huts or any of the other similar global mega-franchises to be seen. Maybe they're somewhere, but I saw very few.

When you went into a bar for a drink, Guinness, Heineken, Carlsberg, Budweiser and so on were not in evidence. Instead, it was Polish and German beers.

Third, there was hardly a non-white face to be seen. I saw no Africans, no Asians, no Turks, no Arabs. Poland, therefore, is a monoculture. Personally, I prefer a more multi-ethnic society, but despite several hundred thousand Ukrainians living there, Poland is very much still Polish. It seemed clear that Poland has not yet become a fully-fledged part of our increasingly globalised world.

Similar thoughts came to mind watching Joanna Lumley's Japan travelogue which has just ended a three-week run on UTV. Japan is also a monoculture. It is in no way multi-cultural. It is part of the world of free trade and giant globalised brands, contributing a lot of them itself, but it is not part of the world that allows free, or 'free-ish', movement of peoples. Japan is for the Japanese, even though the number of guest workers is on the increase because Japan's population is ageing rapidly.

Have Poland and Japan the right to be monocultures or does every country have to become multi-cultural? Does every country have to sign up fully to the free movement of both goods and peoples? I don't think they do and forcing them to do so can easily produce a backlash.

These thoughts are completely relevant to what is happening politically in countries like Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, and, of course, the United States.

Donald Trump is a reaction against the ever faster pace of globalisation. Many Americans no longer feel in control of their destiny and they are reacting against this. That's especially the case among working-class Americans. At home, they believe they are competing for low-paid jobs with Mexicans, and overseas that they are losing traditional manufacturing jobs to the likes of China.

Therefore, tens of millions of Americans are turning against both facets of globalisation, that is, against both the free movement of goods and people.

In fact, politics is becoming increasingly defined by attitudes to both of these facets of globalisation. The left is against the free movement of goods, and the nationalist right is against the free movement of peoples and sometimes of goods as well.

The left is against free movement of goods because it believes it hurts the poor at both ends of the transaction. In their view, poor workers in developing countries are exploited by big corporations so they can sell cheaper goods in our part of the world. The poor in our part of the world lose out because they see their jobs being exported to the developing world.

The left is for free movement of peoples because they think this is a way of helping the poor of the developing world. That is not how the poor in Western countries see it though. They think they are the losers in a competition with migrants for low-paid jobs. That is why left-wing parties are losing working-class votes to the likes of Trump and Marine Le Pen in France.

Trump in America and Le Pen in France are against both aspects of globalisation and are winning lots of support from voters who feel alienated from globalisation, who believe that globalisation was invented over their heads and without their consent.

All of this puts both the traditional left and the traditional right in a terrible quandary. How does the left respond to the fact that their support for mass immigration is losing them votes? How does the right respond to the fact that their support for almost unrestricted free trade is having the same effect?

Hillary Clinton is for globalisation tout court. She may now claim to be against this or that free trade treaty, but no one really believes it, not least the left-wing Democrats who voted for Bernie Sanders during the Primaries. Clinton favours both free trade and mass immigration. The Democratic Party is her home mainly because she is so wedded to identity politics and unrestricted abortion-on-demand up to birth.

In the Republican party, Donald Trump has shoved aside the Republican establishment who basically like globalisation in both aspects but are more hostile than the Democrats to identity politics and abortion.

Clinton is lucky that Trump is such an appalling candidate and seems to have done everything in his power to alienate women voters in particular. Imagine a candidate with the same policies as Trump but who appealed more to women?

It's hard to see the fight over globalisation going away anywhere soon. It might even start to loom larger here in time. At the moment, our main parties like free trade and like the free movement of peoples.

I am basically for globalisation but its losers are starting to make their voices heard and cannot be ignored. The answer might be to start moderating its effects, to slow it down so countries can restore their sense of balance and so those who have lost out because of it can be given a chance to catch up.

If not, then we can expect more Trumps and more Le Pens and sooner or later they are going to seize power in a major country.

Irish Independent