The Future of Globalisation in a Unipolar Age

• Author: John Rapley
• Pages: 308-322

308 PROMOTING MULTILATERALISM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Heaven, goes the European saying, is run by a British administration

with German efficiency, and is filled with Italian lovers and French cuisine.

Hell, on the other hand, is run by an Italian administration with French

efficiency, and is filled with German lovers and British cuisine.1

This adage serves as a useful starting-point for any inventory of the

1990s experience with globalisation. When the Berlin Wall fell, the West

lapsed into a brief spell of euphoria that began with US President Bush’s

declaration of a new world order and quickly gave way to the optimistic

global age envisioned by his successor, Bill Clinton. In this vision, trade

integration would lead not only to rising incomes, but to the multiplication

of capitalist entrepreneurs around the globe. These entrepreneurs would go

on to form the basis of an emergent civil society which, eager to defend its

expanding private interests, would roll back the powers of the state and

thereby help democracy to take root. Given the time-worn wisdom that

democracies do not go to war with one another,2 this development would in

turn produce global peace. In an atmosphere of enhanced peace and

prosperity, the planet’s citizens would use their rising incomes to avail

themselves of all the new advances in medical technology, not to mention

the explosion of consumer products coming out of the 1990s technological

boom. In short, economic liberalization — which is to say, globalisation —

would create a world which was healthier, happier, richer and more

peaceable.

Yet while the combination of available factors might have suggested

we were headed for this heavenly scenario, in point of fact, more often than

not they were combined to produce the sort of perverse outcomes alluded to

in the opening paragraph. Globally, incomes rose in the 1980s (at least

until the Asian Crisis), but the gains were unevenly distributed: while the

number of billionaires on the planet rose, so too did the number of poor

people.3 The peace-dividend did not last long, as the Cold War gave way to a

multiplicity of low-intensity regional conflicts of a post-modern variety.4

Medical breakthroughs sounded great in theory; in practice, Western

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