In the balance: Gillian Tett on geopolitics and globalisation

There are three main issues challenging democracy today. One is the fact that essentially many of the decisions that governments need to make right now are long term in nature, and yet politicians are shaped by short-term political cycles and that’s creating real policy errors in so many areas, including climate change.

Secondly, you’re seeing a rise in of protectionism and geopolitical stress that is making it very hard for governments to essentially make decisions in relation to the national security situation when they have very volatile conditions at home. And thirdly, the rise of information technology and misinformation is seriously challenging democracies in many ways and likely to get worse next year with the American election. So democratic models of government are certainly under stress.

The one good thing about what’s happening right now is that these times are also making people really realise the values that they care about. And in some cases, as we’ve seen in Europe, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we’re actually seeing countries band together to champion Western liberal values or in the case of the recent Polish election, electorates saying that they do want to stand up for democracy. So it’s a world of great uncertainty and flux, but it’s also a world where things are still hanging on a knife edge and could go better in the coming years precisely because of just how dark and how threatening so many risks now are.

We are starting to see de-globalisation at least in terms of the way we talk about the world. And we’re seeing growing geopolitical fracture in a political sense, too. However, one of the fascinating things is if you track into the four main indices of globalisation – the movement of people, money, goods and information – in fact, on most metrics, globalisation is almost as high as it’s always been. So de-globalisation will not occur swiftly. And in some ways, the fact the world is so stitched together these days in a commercial and financial sense means that de-globalisation is talked about more than it’s actually happening.