Good read
[AlAhram] The title of this article jars with what we have grown familiar with. In past decades, "globalisation" was the mantra of the post-Cold War world. It signified a shift from an international political system based on sovereign nation states with distinct identities to a borderless world transcending different cultures and civilisations. The term was originally used in an economic way to denote a single global market, free trade and the free movement of capital and labour. There was some sense that humanity shared a common fate, especially in the face of common threats such as global warming, pandemics and other problems that no country could solve on its own. Some international relations experts saw globalisation as a path to world peace. As long as countries depended on each other, pursuing a growing number of common interests, there would be recourse to arms.
Before long, the concept broadened to include value systems and cultures, in part inspired by the desire to develop a single culture in which humanity, in all its linguistic and ethnic diversity, could be bound by the bundle of ideals and "global mood."  Technology played a key role in accelerating this process, starting with the third technological revolution based on digitalisation, IT and the proliferation of personal computers, mobile phones and tablets. The subsequent revolutions, whichever way they are numbered, accelerated the process. Multinational companies and organizations discovered that establishing a presence in the global market with the new technologies would open up previously unavailable opportunities. Google, Facebook, Spotify, Netflix and other such companies availed themselves of the advances in computerised translation as a means to cement "global culture." All this was closely associated with the growth of the global economy and the development of such global institutions as the World Trade Organisation and the G-20.
Now, that overwhelming tide of globalisation appears to have exhausted itself. "The most recent era of globalisation seems to have come to an end," writes Raghuram Rajan under the headline "The Gospel of Deglobalization" in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs. As proof, he points to the steady downward trend in the ratio of global exports of goods and services to world GDP since 2008, and cites World Bank figures showing that foreign direct investment fell from 5.3 per cent of world GDP in 2007 to 1.3 per cent by 2020. He adds, "the world’s two largest economies, China and the United States, have become increasingly hostile, trying to reduce their dependence on each other for goods and services." The process entails a "decoupling" - to use the current term - of their markets and means of supply and production. When this fraying happens between the two largest economies in the world, it’s clear that globalisation is in trouble.