The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World

The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World

Non-fiction , 2005

Penguin Canada / RBA

John Ralston Saul is already explaining that almost all of the reactions to the crisis which officially began in 2008 have been little more than that – reactions to the status quo. Most of them have made the mistake of thinking that the crisis was provoked by a financial crisis. Saul says this is not the case, and the crisis is far broader and far more profound. He believes that the more we react to the financial crisis the more we will freeze ourselves into the old globalist system, which is already on its way out.   

Proponents of globalism predicted that nation states were heading toward irrelevance: that economics. not politics or arms, would determine the course of human events; that growth in international trade would foster prosperous markets that would, in turn abolish poverty and change dictatorships into democracies.  The successes of globalization include the astonishing growth in world trade and the unexpected “se of India and China, which seem slated to become twenty-first-century superpowers. But its collapse has Left us with a chaotic vacuum: the United States appears determined to ignore his international critics; in Europe. Problems such as racism, terrorism and renewed internal nationalism call for uniquely European solutions born out of local experiences and needs.  Elsewhere, the world looks for answers to African debt, the AIDS epidemic, the return of fundamentalism and terrorism, all of which perversely refuse to disappear despite the theoretical rise in global prosperity.   Insightful and prophetic, The Collapse of Globalism is destined to take its place as one of the seminal books of our time.