Instead of Uniting the World, Globalization Has Set Nation against Nation
Total globalization has brought the world order into crisis. The difference of interests, conditions and opportunities, as well as the socioeconomic regimes of the participants initially implied risks of imbalances. As a result, the wrong policy of coordination—excessive integration with resource autocracies or forced physical (military) coercion to change regimes—led the situation to economic and ideological contradictions. The world has once again clustered into democratic and authoritarian and is obviously already in a phase of conflict between the two poles, deglobalization trends and a tightening of economic and social conditions.
Integration problems and deglobalization processes have also begun in developed countries, such as the problems of the European Union’s economic homogeneity and Brexit. However, these are the problems of homogeneous liberal democracies. Accordingly, whatever contradictions they possess, the processes of finding equilibrium are on a civilized track. Moreover, as the focus shifts from internal contradictions to external contradictions, to threats from the authoritarian world, internal imbalances weaken and, on the contrary, integration processes begin to strengthen again. A vivid example of this is the creation of various alliances in various areas, such as the Anglo-Saxon alliance, the alliance of a special US information-exchange regime with Pacific countries, a potential cartel of oil consumers, and, finally, the cohesion of democracies with regard to Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
Until now, Western democracies have followed mainly two political directions with respect to autocracies: external military intervention or deep socioeconomic integration with a de facto agreement to maintain authoritarian regimes according to the principle “your internal affairs are your affairs.” Both, as we can now see, have negative consequences.
On the one hand, attempts at institutional liberalization and democratization of autocracies and dictatorships through military intervention and forced external forms of reform of the socioeconomic frame are obviously an inefficient way to civilize autocratic regimes for a number of reasons. Métis in autocracies—that is, ethical and cultural values, customs, traditions, and established social rhetoric—contradict or are in some way inconsistent with the liberal market values of the Western world.
Elites have no positive incentives to change preferences, and the population has no positive incentives to protest. Thus, military invasion and the use of force exacerbate the social crisis, fail to create the conditions and incentives for liberalization, and delay the transformation of the mestizo for the entrenchment of market institution
Article from Mises Wire
