Globalism and neo-liberalism

Listen to Phil Mullan's lecture from The Academy 2018.

Globalists see themselves as the peacekeepers through their advocacy of the values of liberalism, free trade, democracy and internationalism. Yet the actions of the institutions over which they preside seem to bring the opposite. They generate division and conflict both within nations and also between them.

So we have heightened polarisation within Brexit Britain, as well as within other leading European countries. Within the European Union, tensions have escalated both between north and south, and between west and east. And despite the claimed Macron-Trump bromance, trans-Atlantic conflicts are mounting too. Is all this an inevitable outcome of the globalist perspective that denies the effectiveness of national state policies? Is there a solution to the widely held ‘global trilemma’, suggested by the writer Dani Rodrik? This says that economic globalisation, democracy and national sovereignty are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full.

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