Revolt: The Worldwide Uprising Against Globalization

Introduction: The Death of an Age

The building looks like a typical office tower that can be found in every prosperous city center, from Manhattan to London to Tel Aviv. The VIPs are led through a back corridor to a small service elevator, completely inappropriate to the occasion, adding to the mysterious ambience. The elevator descends and its door opens, revealing the venue for the night’s event—a family wine cellar, a secret one, our host says. At one end of the room, a famous chef is preparing our dinner. All along the walls, behind glass, lie bottles of wine flown in from vineyards all over the world. The guests—high-tech entrepreneurs, a former prime minister, a former senior army officer who is now a social entrepreneur, the CEOs of leading corporations—are impressed, and they are not easily impressed. Everyone there—indeed, most everyone everywhere—knows the generous host’s name.

As we seat ourselves around a table, I look around and count the uber-wealthy. I’m pretty sure I am the only guest who drove here in a Toyota Corolla with a loose bumper.

I’ve been invited to speak about the international situation, about globalization and the revolt against it. My audience in the expertly lit wine cellar listens attentively to my accounts of populations bypassed by the prosperity generated by the present world order, and of how giant technology companies have avoided responsibility for the ills of the connected world they have created. I argue that liberal values are being challenged by a resurgence of enemies of progress, and suggest that young people have become less inclined to fight for democracy and instead are calling for radical solutions. The numbers, I note, show that humanity is doing well in general. Why then, do so many people feel so trapped?

I should have known what the reaction would be. The 1 percenters feel, for the most part, that the crisis of 2008 was but a passing cloud; that Trump’s election was but a onetime historical fluke; and that progress—that is the aristocratic version of progress to which they subscribe—is unstoppable. Our munificent host and one or two of his guests grasp the thrust of the analysis, even if they do not accept it. The others balk. It’s overblown pessimism, one of them suddenly says, and the others begin to chant pe-ssi-mi-sim. They quickly counter me with the common wisdom: It’s a wave of populism, a brief backlash that will pass without causing significant damage. The conversation degrades into the kind of anachronistic discourse characteristic of people born in the 1950s and ’60s, including clichés such as confidence breeds success, fortune favors the bold, the young will grow up, and we can’t go back to the Dark Ages. Most of them have no interest in listening to what I have to say. Instead, they want to instruct me—and through me, my generation—that all will be well if we just think positively. Dessert is served, elegantly ending the debate, such as it was. It’s easy to disagree politely when your children’s future is ensured by low-risk bonds.

The dinner somehow reminded me of a much more dramatic event I attended as a journalist two years previously. Anxiety was ubiquitous at both gatherings. It’s just that when the super-rich are anxious, they wrap themselves in cellophane-like packaging that crackles with optimism. The middle class adopts a much simpler tactic: outrage.

The evening of November 8, 2016, was festive and crisp in Manhattan. A cloudless sky was visible through the glass ceiling of the Javits Center, ready for the crowning of the new leader of the free world. Hawkers outside were doing a brisk business—President Hillary t-shirts, showing her in a Superwoman costume; First Husband Bill Clinton t-shirts; campaign buttons of all colors, souvenirs of the historic day. Hundreds of policemen and security personnel were deployed outside, along with an army of broadcast vehicles and an entire field of satellite dishes. The media presence was many times larger than that assigned to the more spare headquarters of the Trump campaign, less than half a mile away as the crow flies. She means to rise, wrote the poet Maya Angelou about Clinton back in 2008; now she was about to break free of those rusty chains and become the most powerful person in the world.

Representatives of America, of all the colors of the rainbow, were placed on the stage. There were straights and gays, Hispanics and blacks and whites, women and children. They were to serve as models of the new age that Clinton’s election heralded. With infinite patience, they sat there for long hours, waiting for those few seconds their children would see on television and forever cherish, that image of them with the first woman to be elected president of the United States of America. Even when the skies grew dark over the Javits Center, they did not budge from their seats.

In the end, of course, Clinton never showed up. She did not see the celebration prepared for her. Night fell and swept it all away.

There’s something brutal about the journalist’s gaze. He sees the image as it develops, from a distance that gives him perspective. He observes the disappointment as it spreads through the crowd, the shocked gasps, the tears and the heartbreak, the banality of human reaction—denial, disappointment, the desperate hope that continues to percolate among the believers.

When the results began to come in, the eyes of the Clintonistas were glued to their smartphones, murmuring in disbelief. That was exactly the point. They couldn’t believe it, they couldn’t understand how this could be happening. Many wept. One told me that, as a Jew and a homosexual, he feared a new Holocaust.

I asked him if that was just a figure of speech.

No, he sobbed, I’m really scared.

On the face of it there seems to be no connection between the distraught and panicked Clinton campaigners on that autumn night and the self-assured rich whom I met in the wine cellar. The latter were resolutely optimistic, determined to explain just how the world order that is so good for them, personally, is so great for everyone else. Clinton’s supporters sensed that democracy was endangered and that they had been robbed of their future. But the point is that both shared a deep, unspoken fear. The 1 percenters dealt with it by euphorically hiding their heads in the sand; the Clinton campaigners coped by covering the floor of the Javits Center with the tears they shed.

They were not only frightened by the prospect that Trump, the advocates of Brexit, European nationalists, or Islamist fundamentalists would propel the world toward catastrophe. After all, if such a catastrophe were to come, it would demonstrate just how correct they had been in their faithfulness to liberal values or to the market economy. No, what they feared was not a cataclysm but the opposite—that the other side, that Trump, might be successful. His success would mean a world with an enduring anti-liberal order and severely constrained global cooperation.

It would be a world in which bedrock beliefs—in the victory of good over evil in World War II, in freedom as a precondition for prosperity, in the rejection of bigotry, in the principle of women’s rights over their bodies, and most of all the fervent faith in the overarching value of progress—would turn out to be ephemeral. For them, history would stop, and then reverse. For many, the years since have proved that the shift has already begun.

I AM NEITHER AMERICAN NOR EUROPEAN. I LIVE IN A DISTANT province that shelters under the wings of the American empire. From here I can be an observer, with the luxury of some emotional detachment from the coming storm. In 2016, some months before Election Day, I set out on a journey through the United States, seeking an answer to a simple question: If Trump were to win, how would it happen? The polls said it was nearly impossible, but I was skeptical. In Pennsylvania, one of the cornerstones of the Industrial Revolution, I sat in the living room of a coal mining family as rain fell outside and the wind shrieked. The family was as grim and despondent as the weather, lacking a trace of the American optimism that I so put my trust in. Black activists in Philadelphia told me that President Obama was simply one more mask worn by whites who were killing innocent residents of their neighborhoods. They vowed not to vote for that Hillary person. A little girl in Charlotte, North Carolina, told me with tears in her eyes that a classmate had stopped inviting her to her birthday parties because her mothers are transgender women. In her story I could feel the burgeoning animosity toward the new America. In the same state, I attended Sunday services in a church whose preacher maintains that the United States would be punished with a plague worse than Ebola for condoning homosexual sodomy. I asked him if his America was not passing from this world; his response was, Hey, don’t bury us yet!

What has taken place in the United States under Trump is no routine political change; nor is it a revolution based on a new and coherent political idea. Neither is there a coherent political idea behind Brexit. The rise of populism and nationalism, from Brazil to Italy to Hungary, constitutes an attack, albeit diffused, on today’s globalization, growing out of an echo chamber of injustices that have plagued the middle class throughout the industrialized world. Those who are overly focused on what is going on in the Americas, Europe, Africa, or Asia miss the most important social, cultural, and political phenomenon of our time. As in a pointillist painting, the little dots come together to form a picture, of revolt. Large numbers of people are rejecting globalization as an economic, cultural, and universal value system. The revolt is worldwide, unorchestrated, and fluid. It is more about the rejection of current power structures than about the fine details of building new ones.

Fundamental opposition to globalization began at opposing poles—anarchist-radical on one side and fundamentalist-religious on the other. Spurred by growing social disquiet, radical and reactionary ideas began to make their way into the middle class. The revolt is manifested in the British decision to leave the European Union, the rise of the extreme right in Europe, the growth of fundamentalism, as well as increasing support for the radical left and burgeoning resentment of the rich and of the concentration of wealth. Politicians are desperately trying to ride the tiger. After his election, the president of the United States has inundated the American and international discourse with relentless provocations. The tap of his keyboard as he was tweeting was so deafening that we have forgotten what we all realized when he won: Trump is a manifestation of a much broader phenomenon, which preceded the 2016 and 2020 elections. Now, a few years down the line, we can do what is required and look back on recent decades as one section of the political and historical mosaic that is our current world. The era of the revolt is too momentous, too consequential, to be defined by Trump or by the media’s addiction to him.

The rebels are a disparate coalition of rejects. Some claim that globalization, the liberal values to which it is tied, and the technology it has both spawned and fed upon, have been toxic to their lives, their communities, and their deeply held values and beliefs. Others are up in arms, sometimes literally, against a political class that promised that global solutions would bring prosperity to all while at the same time becoming bedmates of the upper 1 percent. They are in revolt because they were told that globalization makes the world flat—everything lies before you, everything is immediate, everything is within reach, all you need to do is take it. That, it goes without saying, is a hollow notion, because the international economy is built more on inequality than on equality. The rebels see their children forsaking their culture, and the demand for political correctness spreading and preventing them from giving voice to their understandable frustrations. They are rising up because their security, identity, and livelihood are all endangered. Terrorism could strike at any moment, immigrants want to go everywhere, and employers are constantly thinking about terminating them. The COVID-19 pandemic that swept across the globe in 2020 revealed the degeneration of twentieth-century-style politics and its incapacity for coping with contemporary challenges, like the spread of a new pathogen in a world that was highly interconnected. As a matter of course, both political systems and their leaders routinely put on a facade of control, certainty, and security to the public. But during the course of history, epidemics have shattered that illusion. They also expose which rulers are effective and able and which are feckless and dangerous. Luchino Visconti, who ruled Milan in the fourteenth century, imposed quarantine on homes in which the Black Death had broken out, saving many lives in his city during the epidemic’s first wave. Other rulers fled to their summer palaces as their subjects died, in a way not dissimilar to Donald Trump playing golf as the coronavirus raged. In a dark time, the eye begins to see, wrote the American poet Theodore Roethke. It is no coincidence that widespread protests broke out in many countries as the virus spread. COVID-19 further catalyzed the uprising against a fractured world order.

This outpouring of grievances, this surge of resentment, is changing the world. Contrary to the picture often painted by the media, the protests against international trade or, on a different plane, against universal values, are far more than flare-ups of hatred and ignorance or passing phenomena. Protesting the increase in immigration in Western societies is not always hypernationalist, jingoistic propaganda. Globalization has bettered the human condition, but it has also decimated communities and ravaged ecosystems, sowing the seeds of insurrection. The revolt erupted at the end of the age of responsibility.

AFTER WORLD WAR II, THE WORLD ENTERED AN ERA OF relative stability, guided by caution and a sense of duty. This was the age of responsibility. It was in a very profound sense molded by the horrifying personal experiences of both voters and the representatives they elected. Before them lay a devastated and burned world, a planet in a state of shock. They saw the horrifying consequences of racism, hypernationalist vengeance, economic decline, trade wars, and addiction to ideological extremism, and they rejected it all. For a brief time after the war ended, civilization was awash in optimism, like rain after a drought. President Franklin Roosevelt gave voice to these feelings as early as 1943, two years before the war ended: We have faith that future generations will know that here, in the middle of the twentieth century, there came a time when men of good will found a way to unite, and produce, and fight to destroy the forces of ignorance, and intolerance, and slavery, and war.¹

The simple goal he articulated was achieved. The Soviets, Americans, Chinese, British, and French all agreed that it had been a just war, and grasped the significance of the horrors they had witnessed. But that’s as far as the consensus went. Roosevelt spoke of future generations, but his generation saw Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and were shortly afterward terrified by the first Soviet nuclear test in 1949. A new world had been born, but one that was faced with the prospect of its own extinction.

The trembling world’s greatest fear was that another world war was on the way, one that would be set off by the dangerous antagonisms of the Cold War. Optimism was soon overwhelmed by profound pessimism. If, immediately after the end of World War II, Americans thought that the Soviet Union would cooperate to achieve world peace, just a year later few Americans believed that the Soviets could be trusted, and 65 percent predicted another global conflagration within no more than a quarter century. At the same time, according to one survey, six out of every ten Americans wanted a stronger United Nations, or even a single world government.²

Anxieties and fears are sometimes advantageous, especially for rulers. One advantage is that they can compel caution. And caution begets responsibility.

The age of responsibility was virtually defined in 1947 by William A. Lydgate, the editor of the Gallup Poll, in a lengthy analysis. Let’s-drop-a-few-atom-bombs-on-Moscow extremism doesn’t appeal to our people . . . The very fact that the situation appears so gloomy may, however, be a healthy sign. Instead of idealistically supposing, as many did after 1918, that the world was safe for democracy, the nation today soberly realizes that you have to work to keep peace.³

Nostalgia is as deceptive as it is dangerous. The Cold War didn’t feel like the age of responsibility. The West shed its colonies in the developing world grudgingly and often violently. The world heard the drums of war in the Cuban missile crisis, in the tensions over Berlin, and in the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. The two superpowers sparred through a slew of proxy wars, in which people of the so-called Third World were sacrificed on the altar of preventing a nuclear war between the West and the East.

Yet it was nonetheless a responsible world, and recognition of that fact, even if in retrospect, is useful now. It is difficult to discern the good in the present, and even harder to follow the rapid trajectory of evil. After World War II, the world’s leaders lived in steady anxiety about a new and truly calamitous conflict. It was their anxiety that held them back, in most occasions, from walking down the road of militaristic adventurism. Even more significantly, public opinion limited them. In both Soviet propaganda and the pronouncements of American generals, peace was the highest value, or at least leaders wanted the public to believe that it was peace they were pursuing. Even the bellicose General Douglas MacArthur spoke a lot about peace. The soldier above all others prays for peace, he said, and spoke of the need to preserve in peace what we won in war. He even said that honor should be sacrificed for the sake of peace.⁴ Was it ideologies that restrained or constrained leaders with the bonds of responsibility? Not really. It was a much more profound force—the personal and collective memory of the horrors of the war, and the moral lessons learned from them. All wars start from stupidity, President John F. Kennedy said during the Berlin crisis of 1961.⁵ During the Cuban missile crisis, when the military leadership presented Kennedy with a plan to stage a nuclear first strike that would destroy the entire Soviet bloc (the plan included dropping 170 atomic and hydrogen bombs on Moscow alone), Kennedy left the room, appalled. And we call ourselves the human race, he bitterly remarked to Secretary of State Dean Rusk on his way to the Oval Office.

The leaders of that world—Nikita Khrushchev and Kennedy, as well as Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito, Konrad Adenauer in West Germany, Israel’s David Ben-Gurion, Britain’s Clement Attlee, Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union, and France’s François Mitterrand—had lived through a great and destructive war, or even both world wars. They were not naive pacifists. Rather, they had pragmatic goals, which were consistent with their particular national interests—stability, international institutions, avoiding the next great war.

In the West, responsibility also took the form of a decline of extremist forces on both the right and the left and increasing support of democracy. Political scientists Roberto S. Foa and Yascha Mounk have shown that more than 70 percent of Americans born in the 1930s felt that it was essential for them to live in a democracy. Almost as many British subjects born in that decade—65 percent—felt the same way. Democracy was an essential value for those born in the 1940s and 1950s as well.⁶ The people who built the West shared a single, terrible formative experience—the awful destruction of war. These parents and grandparents of the current generation shared an ethos that cut across national borders. They exhibited an almost religious diligence and scrupulousness, and sanctified the present rather than harboring fantasies about the future. They demanded a more or less mainstream responsible politics, and that is what they got.

Slowly and painfully, the age of responsibility led to relative stability and peace. The two superpowers maintained an adversarial, competitive relationship that was fundamentally rational and responsible. They eschewed populism and focused on science and technology to win the Cold War and as the means for improving the material conditions of societies. Each in their separate spheres of influence, the superpowers idealized international cooperation within their blocs.

Indeed, following World War II, with the exception of a temporary spike in conflict following the fall of Communism, the number of interstate wars declined.⁷ The last time complete armored regiments fought battles was in the Second Gulf War in 2003. The number of fatalities in conflicts around the world is in steep decline, as is the number of people living on less than $2 a day. Child mortality is in decline. In 1950, less than half of the world’s inhabitants could read and write; today the figure is 86 percent.⁸ Between 2003 and 2013, the world’s median income per capita nearly doubled.⁹ None of this happened by chance. The scarred societies and apprehensive leaders of the postwar period planted a tree of stability. These are its fruits.

Two things about the age of responsibility need to be kept in mind. First, it was an exception in the turbulent and war-torn modern age. World War II struck extremism and populism speechless. The silence lasted for a moment in history, but it was during that period that most of this book’s readers were born. Then the memory of the war began to fade. Unlike the generation born in the 1930s, people born in the 1980s in Britain and the United States do not tend to believe that democracy is vital. Only 30 percent think it is.¹⁰ Their grandfathers may have made the ultimate sacrifice on the beaches of Normandy to defend democracy, but they themselves think that the term has lost its meaning.

The second thing you need to know about the age of responsibility is what you already sense: that it’s over.

THE AGE OF RESPONSIBILITY ENDED WHEN THE WORLD Trade Center towers came crashing down. We are living in the initial aftermath of 9/11. Al-Qaeda’s attacks on American soil were an act of war by fundamentalists against the universalist vision that the US represented. The terrorists sought a global war between Christianity and Islam, and in the process they unleashed demons previously kept in check, many of which had nothing to do with the two faiths. It was the start of a battle to determine the fate of the world, an engagement fought not between religions but between ideas. On one side are those who believe that the world is moving slowly toward political and cultural integration, and on the other are those for whom such a prospect is a nightmare, and who are willing to fight to ensure that it never happens. In the middle is the world’s, and especially the West’s, middle class, wavering uncertainly between the nation-state and globalization, between particular identity and universal values.

Today’s globalization is not sustainable; the relative peace of the post-World War II era is under threat, and the signs of instability are multiplying. The most serious of these is the climate crisis. The prosperity of the industrial age was paid for by abuse of the present and future natural world.

This book is a journey through the trenches of the revolt, both its visible contours and its dark corners. In northern Sri Lanka I saw the last elephant herds that have been pushed into patches of forest that are slowly being destroyed by indigent farmers who are themselves trying to cope with the consequences of international trade. Teenage Syrian refugees spoke to me about their future as we trod along a railroad track on their long trek from Greece to Germany. In Japan, which is facing an unprecedented demographic crisis, an elderly woman told me, in a deserted school, about her longing for the lost sounds of children playing. I saw the Greeks riot, protesting the severe recession there, and I was in London at the outbreak of the great financial crisis of 2008, the most severe since the Great Depression of the 1930s. I spoke with starry-eyed racists and nationalists about their hopes for the future.

It is a story that offers conversations with and observations of particular people coping with local problems at specific places and specific times, but much larger issues emerge from them. It tells of the advent of a global consciousness that crosses geographical and cultural borders, and the way in which globalization has changed moral sensibilities.

We are living in a time in which an era of relative peace has impelled a huge wave of refugees to flee their homes in centers of catastrophe in search of sanctuary in the West; in which a great economic crisis has passed but nevertheless continues to fracture the middle class and to threaten globalization and its institutions; in which cooperation between the world’s people and institutions and states is declining just as the world needs to address the greatest global crisis ever, that of the climate. Fundamentalism is flourishing in an era of rapidly declining poverty and increasing education, ever-improving health services and ever-growing incomes—but as people are producing fewer and fewer children, with all the implications that ensue. An international community founded on a liberal vision accepted by consensus is turning more to the extremes.

These tensions have spawned a crusade against the very idea of progress. Progress in the sense of Enlightenment values depends on trust in facts and reason, acceptance of science as essential to bettering the human condition, and an open society in which tradition has no absolute veto over critical thinking. The energy of the revolt against globalization is being harnessed by both old and new opponents of progress. Their ambition is not to address the grievances stemming from an unsustainable global system, but only to use them as a decoy. Populist-racist politicians, anti-science charlatans, Bakuninite anarchists, fundamentalists, virtual communities on social networks, totalitarian ideologues, neo-Luddites, and the votaries of conspiracy theories—they are all on the march.

The revolt and the politics it engenders can lead to a more just, and thus stronger, international system, one that will balance the local and the global, require more equality of opportunity, and facilitate the environmental cooperation that is crucial for our survival. But this optimistic scenario is neither obvious nor inevitable. If there is something we have learned in the last twenty years, it is that nothing is preordained, and that no progress is irreversible.

Progress affects to be muscular, but it is actually quite fragile. It is wholly dependent on the readiness of communities to fight for it, and on the determination of leaders to avoid folly. People around the globe are living through a radical moment. This book is an attempt to listen to them.

Chapter 1

An Attack on a Newspaper

I once had a hand in an attack on a Pakistani newspaper by more than two dozen armed men. I could hardly have anticipated it and certainly did not want it. I knew neither the attackers nor the victims; indeed, I had never visited the newspaper’s offices. Pakistan and Israel, where I live, do not have diplomatic relations. But in a globalized world, things a person does in one country can have dire, occasionally overwhelming consequences for people living far away. Sometimes it is more ominous than anything you expected.

I met Ammara Durrani, then a senior editor for Pakistan’s Jang Media Group and a writer for the country’s largest English-1anguage newspaper, the News International, in 2004. We were members of a group of journalists who had come to the United States for a lengthy professional program funded by the State Department, at the invitation of one of the country’s best-known public radio stations, WBUR of Boston. The organizers from the station had what they thought was a brilliant idea. They’d bring together hostile tribes, Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis. The program focused on the media’s role in conflicts, a polite way of saying that journalists feed the fires of conflict and inflame public opinion, and perhaps it would be better if they didn’t. The Bush administration was interested in projects of this sort because, in the midst of its war on terror and the occupation of Iraq, it needed the fig leaf of promoting dialogue between hostile peoples as a demonstration of its commitment to resolving international conflicts by peaceful means. The organizers may have believed that Israelis and Palestinians might be able, thousands of miles from home, and in the presence of a parallel conflict on the Indian subcontinent, to find a common language. It was a vain hope. With foreigners in the room, they entrenched themselves in their traditional positions. So did the Pakistanis and Indians. Nevertheless, some exceptional and culture-crossing friendships emerged. Everyone got along with Ammara. She was the quintessential Oxfordian, speaking eloquently serious and polished English. All the Middle Easterners, whether Israeli or Palestinian, envied her.

Her passport, like all those issued by her country, specified that it was valid for travel to all countries except Israel. There is a long tradition of cold hostility between the Jewish state and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. It dates back to the birth of both countries, within a year of each other, as Britain divested itself of its empire. Despite and in fact because of this, Durrani and I remained in contact by email after the American seminar. In 2005 she began work on an in-depth article on the unofficial relations between the two countries, and the possibility that these might be upgraded to full diplomatic recognition. She wrote to me that she’d be delighted to interview Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for the piece. My guess was that it would not be easy to get him to grant an interview. But if she wanted, I suggested, I could probably land her an interview with Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres, whom I knew well. Durrani seized the opportunity. Peres, a former prime minister and Nobel laureate, was no less an international figure than Sharon—in fact, he was probably better known. But there was a problem. She told me that, because of the hostility between the two countries, she could not place a telephone call from Karachi to Jerusalem. In 2005, Skype and other such services were not available. I thus suggested that she send her questions by email. I would arrange an interview through Peres’s press spokesman. I would ask him her questions just as she wrote them, tape-record his answers, and then transcribe and send them to her.

Peres’s office was only too enthusiastic to have him interviewed by a prominent Pakistani newspaper, and Peres himself was always more than happy to broadcast his indefatigable political optimism. So it happened that, one day in mid-January 2005, I sat across the table from Peres in the Knesset’s cafeteria, and instead of chatting him up, as usual, about the possibility that he might seek to recapture the leadership of the Labor Party—a routine issue of the type I dealt with on a daily basis on my politics beat—I interviewed him for a Pakistani newspaper, adding some questions of my own. I typed up his answers and sent them to a very pleased Ammara Durrani, who wrote them up for the News International.

Fourteen years later the two countries still had no official relations, but by this time Ammara Durrani and I could place video calls between Karachi and Tel Aviv and reminisce about that interview and its aftermath. Ammara told me that, at the time, she had not been entirely frank about her feelings.

I was afraid, she told me. This was the first time that a top Israeli official had given a statement to a Pakistani media group. This was unprecedented. So I was terribly afraid and expected a negative impact, and a big one. What really gave me the confidence was support from my editors—it was an immediate ‘Yes, let’s do it.’ And they sure did. The interview appeared on the front page, following Durrani’s four-page article on the relationship between the two countries, citing officials in Israel, the US, and Pakistan.

The headline was Peres: If Pakistan and India Can Do It, So Can Israel and Pakistan. The subhead: Says There Is No Shame in Peace; If Pakistan Wants to Be a Part of the ME Peace Process, It Cannot Do So with ‘Remote Control.’

The piece led to neither peace nor diplomatic relations. A day after it appeared, in the dark of the night, a group of about thirty armed men on motorcycles arrived at the main offices of the Jang Media Group. They fired shots in the air, overwhelmed and beat the security guards, broke into the editorial offices, trashed the newsroom, and tried to set it on fire. Fortunately, no one was killed. They left shouting Allahu Akbar! It was clear to everyone in Pakistan that the attack was a direct response to the interview. A reaction not necessarily to what Peres had said but simply to the precedent that had been set, that a large and well-known Pakistani media outlet could publish an interview with a senior Israeli official calling for peace between the countries. The attack was reported by international news agencies, such as Reuters, largely because of this context. The Pakistani government condemned the attack, as did Reporters Without Borders. Closing the circle, the attack was also reported in Israel, where the interview that set off the incident took place. It was news creating news.

Let’s take a close look at what happened here.

Two journalists who had grown up on the far corners of a huge continent met in a class sponsored by the government of a country on a continent on the opposite side of the world, a superpower seeking to bolster its position by ongoing mediation of conflicts around the globe—at the same time that it itself occupied a large swath of the Middle East. The journalists’ countries were enemies, but the two of them could communicate freely, thanks to technology that collapses the huge distance and breaches the diplomatic and political barriers between them. Extremists responded to an interview signaling the possibility of peace and conciliation—with violence. The attack was reported all over the world, returning to Israel as a news item.

This entire incident, from beginning to end, took place over just a few days. It is a story of human connections, the viral nature of ideas, the technological challenge to hidebound politics, fundamentalism, media involvement. It’s also a story, of course, of capitalist interests, in this case the need for a newsworthy headline so as to sell newspapers. This latter factor is the prime generator of the whole sequence of events. The violent end of the story demonstrates how these supranational interactions pose an increasing threat to local power structures, traditions, and beliefs. Opponents do not, and will not, sit idly by. They are rebelling.

Just three years later it became clear that this doesn’t happen only in a country like Pakistan. It is happening everywhere, in different ways, and by different means. I saw that when, during a stay in London, the entire world slid into its most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression.

A WALKER IN LONDON FINDS HIMSELF OUTSIDE TIME AND gradually oblivious to his schedule. The eyes drink in the street, its intensity, the sediments of humanity laid down and mineralized there over centuries. Human diversity is so typical of London today and so much a part of British history that one might think that all these people accept it as a matter of course. Not true. Many people on the street feel a profound sense of alienation, of being strangers among themselves. It is a feeling that both disconcerts and stimulates the city. Nearly 40 percent of Londoners were born outside Britain, most of them outside the European Union. Three hundred languages are spoken in the metropolis. Alienation is at the root of its current identity.

I was a stranger among those mutual strangers. My wife and I needed a break from the steeplechases of our local Israeli careers. We wanted to experience life elsewhere, so we decided to pursue graduate degrees far from home. New York, London, Paris, Washington—the truth is that it didn’t really matter to us where we might land. We came from a distant province and, as far as we were concerned, each of those places was the center of the universe, wonderfully foreign and tantalizing for us.

My route to the university was a fixed one. I strode along the streets bordering Bloomsbury to Theobalds Road and then to my favorite spot. It was in a sort of alleyway, narrow and ancient-looking, heading off from the main thoroughfare. Reeking of fried food, the alley was adorned with an old pub and a few cheap cafés offering tasteless sandwiches. I imagined it teeming with rats bearing the Black Death and people emptying excrement into the street. The alley’s filthy walls and congestion exuded that. The modern city had transformed this little walkway, making it almost exotic. It bustled with human traffic, the hurried strides of suits in the morning rush hour.

At the end of the alley, past a small park, I reached the clutch of buildings that form the urban campus of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), not far from Holborn station and the British Museum. It’s not Oxford or Cambridge—instead of green spaces and bike paths, there is the bustle of an ambitious city preoccupied with its own affairs.

It was September 2007, and the world was more or less coherent, even if deeply polarized between the ideology of the Bush administration and the international community. Those with sensitive ears could hear, as the bullet train of change shot forward, that the ties in the tracks laid by the previous era were groaning. But few yet had grasped the deep meaning of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath. My fellow-students and I in the LSE program were slated to study global politics, comprising global governance, the challenges being faced by economic institutions like the World Bank, international trade, interest rate policy, post-imperialism, equality and the growing international income gap, and immigration policy. As I came from a small country in the Middle East, and most of my time was devoted to its turbulent politics, I was less expert than my classmates about matters like international trade policy or foreign direct investment. However, unlike the rest of them, I was a journalist. I had covered election campaigns, seeing prime ministers go ballistic when they were asked probing questions. I covered the second Lebanon war, running for cover when rockets rained onto northern Israel, and went to the Oval Office to cover official visits. That was the baggage I arrived with. In other words, like every reporter in distress, I could make up for insufficient knowledge with anecdotes—like the story of the Pakistani newspaper. But my baggage, like that of the other students, would soon prove itself to be of very limited relevance. Just a few months later, in the midst of our studies, globalization would face its worst crisis since the Great Depression, and international politics would begin to change and challenge the assumptions an entire world order was built upon.

This tectonic shift in international economics and politics was, of course, not included in our weighty textbooks or in the lectures we heard, which had been written and delivered before the crisis. Only the most radical approaches in the syllabus addressed, in some way, the earthshaking turn of events that swept away the complacence of the experts.

At the end of 2007, the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, realized that a liquidity crisis was impending because of defaults on subprime housing mortgages, which led to a collapse in the speculative derivatives market based on those mortgages. The United States soon faced a large-scale financial crisis. At the beginning of 2008, the Bush administration tried to counter it with a stimulus package, but that didn’t work. Then, between the spring and autumn of that year, giant American firms like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers began to fail. These were the very same firms that my classmates had been hoping to get jobs at.

It was one of those instances in which our textbooks became obsolete as we read them, their theories proven invalid as soon as they were put to the test. As the crisis smashed models and refuted the pronouncements of pundits, we were forced to question much of what we thought was certain. Born in the 1980s or at the beginning of the 1990s, my classmates and I had grown up in a world of expanding interconnectedness, changing at an exponential pace. It had seemed obvious that the entire globe would become more integrated into a single economy and order, and that this would bring us and everyone else more prosperity. But then the false premise of globalization’s inevitability collapsed.

A Constant Revolution

During the last ten years, globalization has lost a great deal of its luster. The data itself points to the shrinking or stagnation of international trade, cross-border investment, and bank loans relative to world GDP, a phenomenon The Economist calls slowbalisation. The great economic crisis undoubtedly undermined globalization’s fundamental assumptions. Perhaps people simply tired of the optimistic prophecies of a globalized world that dangerously downplayed the dark side of the force.

But the fickle fashions of public discourse cannot change the stark truth that globalization is a constant revolution. I use the word constant to denote the aggressive way in which globalization is changing, in an ongoing and intensive way, how people have lived from time immemorial. It has created a climate in which human beings must cope with the world, materially