social safety net

The left is in shambles everywhere while hard-right and far-right parties are riding high in polls across the world. I contend that globalization is at the heart of these developments, and thus it is critical that the left comes to terms with what has gone wrong with its approach to neoliberal globalization and develops in turn an alternative vision of world order.

Globalization came to be a dominant force in our lives sometime around the 1980s. It coincided with the rise of neoliberalism, although globalization is not a 20th-century phenomenon. The 19th century contained a huge burst of globalization. In fact, between 1850 and 1913, the world economy was probably as open as it became in the late 20th century. Tariffs fell, free trade agreements proliferated, trade flows skyrocketed, information flows accelerated, and migrants flowed to all corners of the globe. Neither Europe nor the U.S. had any restrictions on migration. In the U.S., no visas or passports were even needed to enter the country.