If at the turn of the 21st century, the world already seemed decidedly ‘flatter’ and more compressed, after a year of closed borders, silent airports, ‘stay at home’ injunctions, and all sorts of newly normalised barriers, it has now become a vast and forbidding archipelago of fiercely competing micro-sovereignties pulling further and further apart from each other.
Once again, globalisation has proved skin-deep.
In so many ways 2020 felt like a brutal reality check. So much of what had been taken for granted as part of the ‘third’ era of globalisation came to a violent halt: inter- and trans-national mobilities froze by decree or stumbled on reinvigorated hard sovereign borders. A retreat into protectionism, already evident as a trend for some time, was further legitimised in the name of existential threat. National shortages of medical equipment and then of vaccines added fuel to a language of national self-sufficiency and a spirit of aggressive competition with other states for control of resources.
