Disintegration, Crises and Chaos. Deglobalization

I already wrote a little about deglobalization here and here.

You can find products from distant countries nowadays in any supermarket in any country and no one is surprised by that. All people have access to each other's food, products and culture and it has become something commonplace. Every product which is produced in the world nowadays is the result of cooperation between different nations and available in almost every country. International organizations (UN, WTO) transnational corporations (McDonald's, Shell) and new alliances of very different nations (EU) have emerged.

All this is the result of globalization, which has become the realization of integration efforts of mankind. It appeared thanks to the development of global communication (radio, TV, Internet) and the world transportation system, first of all, aviation. Nations have become closer to each other in time thanks to air transportation.

Humanity has tried to create one big family consisting of different countries, but… Different countries have different visions, values, goals and methods of achieving them, so the result is simply rival alliances. What arose was not cooperation, but competition which is considered in the capitalist West a blessing thing and driver of the economic progress. However, the globalization has stalled because of the irreconcilable contradictions of the participants in this competition and the whole process is turning in the opposite direction.
A global union of the states has failed.

Justice as a condition and guarantee of the viability of any union.

Any union exists as long as there is a free exchange of energy between its members. Any union eventually falls apart because of dissatisfaction of its members with the amount of energy received in the form of money/material welfare/recognition/new opportunities compared to what they contributed, i.e. when any party feels "injustice". It is injustice (imaginary or real) that can destroy any union of people (family, enterprise, country, international organization).

The contradictions between global competitors became unsolvable.
For example, there is a constant conflict of interests around a very important issue for any country - possession of nuclear weapons. The founding countries of the "nuclear club" (USA, Russia, UK, France, China) have developed nuclear weapons long ago and then tied the hands of all others by the «Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons» of 1968. India, Pakistan and North Korea built their nuclear weapons later, tested them and declared that, but could not get into the "nuclear club". Israel also has nuclear weapons, but does not acknowledge that.

Now 5 main NWS (nuclear weapon states) actually require the rest to voluntarily “not arm themselves.” In return, NWS have made «undertakings not to use their nuclear weapons against a non-NWS party except in response to a nuclear attack, or a conventional attack in alliance with a Nuclear Weapons State.»
However, these undertakings have not been incorporated formally into the treaty, and the exact details have varied over time.

The second clause of «Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons» directly speaks of the future voluntary disarmament of 5 main NWS which naturally has not happened since then. Everyone understands perfectly well that no one in their right mind would voluntarily give up the most powerful weapon in the world. And everyone probably learned well the lesson of Ukraine, which gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 as part of the Budapest Memorandum. In this document, the USA, Great Britain and Russia guaranteed Ukraine's security. It was a good attempt to globalize the efforts of different nuclear countries to “disarm” and, probably, “achieve a sustainable peace” which cracked in February 2014 and shattered completely on February 24, 2022.

Thus, 5 NWS (all five are coincidentally the permanent members of the UN Security Council with veto power) have practically usurped the right to possess (and therefore, to use) nuclear weapons under the guise of fighting for «Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.» This hypocrisy produces the opposite effect - North Korea has carried out an aggressive nuclear program, including the testing intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the US homeland and developing tactical nuclear weapons against South Korea. So everyone now sees how North Korea is reckoned with on the world stage after that.

Another example: Iran launched its nuclear program in the 1950s, came under international sanctions for this in 2006, but agreed not to continue the program in exchange for the lifting of these sanctions in 2015. UN sanctions were lifted in 2016, but the US President D. Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. That was a violation of previous agreements, Iran considered that unfair and resumed its uranium enrichment. Now this is another big headache for the US and entire Middle East.

Many countries are seeking access to nuclear technology for self-defense, and Russia’s war against Ukraine has completely dashed all hopes for the “rule of international law” and protection from military aggression. Even well-protected European NATO countries realized that they now need to rely only on themselves and began to increase their defense budgets.

Humans, unfortunately, cannot live without an arms race simply because there is a constant threat from other humans. We are an aggressive species. “Disarmament”, like “sustainable world peace”, is a utopia.

Why and how will deglobalization happen?

Now the energy of disintegration is actively manifesting itself in the world at all levels - from the family to countries and international organizations. The trend towards deglobalization became clearly visible at the end of the 20th century when the Warsaw Pact collapsed in 1990 as well as USSR in 1991, Yugoslavia in 1991-92 and Czechoslovakia in 1993 did. It was a very interesting wave.
Then deglobalization died down for some time, but again became very apparent during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. The humanity has become too globalized. It's time to deglobalize and that will happen naturally. How?

Deglobalization naturally occurs since different countries have opposing interests and will pursue them. Humanity is leaving the era of convergence and entering the era of divergence.

Different countries of the world gravitate towards different world power centers (USA, EU, China, Russia, India, Turkey, etc.) and are united into different informal ("global South and North" and formal (EU, UN) alliances.
These centers and alliances have different (often opposing) goals and therefore their participants will never agree.

Wars very quickly destroy globalization.

Disagreements between different countries can be so strong that they may turn into wars and no one can do anything about that, especially if the war was started by the «nuclear state» and permanent member of the UN Security Council.

World War III is already going on as a “cold war” in cyberspace, and the first big “hot” war after 1945 is current Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. The world was immediately divided into parts in its attitude: the collective West (democratic developed countries ) condemns the aggression and helps Ukraine, the global South (hybrid regimes of developing countries) and authoritarian countries (China, Turkey) refrain from judgment and tries to make some money from the war. The sanctioned outlaws (Iran, North Korea, Venezuela) support Russia.

The similar division of the opinions has occurred in the world over recent Israel's war against HAMAS.

Wars add global problems in the areas of international law, global cooperation and trade, human rights, environmental pollution, migration, etc., and undermine globalization.

Other global issues that contribute to deglobalization.

Everything is interconnected in our civilization like in the human body, therefore the energy of disintegration manifests itself in the world in the form of growing misunderstanding and disrespect between the nations, which brings us different problems that contribute to deglobalization:

- the objectives of rich and poor World Trade Organization member countries are often opposite, which affects the international trade. In 2023, global trade is set to contract by 5% compared to last year with an overall pessimistic forecast for 2024;

- the confrontation of different world power centers and military actions interfere with global transportation. For example, many transportation companies are sending now their cargo ships around Africa because of the Houthis hostilities in the Gulf of Aden area;

- a constant information war is going on in global communication systems (radio, TV, Internet). All world power centers aggressively throw their mutually exclusive messages into the global information space and pollute it very much. All countries actively try to prove to each other that their way of living is the most correct one and the others have no right to criticize them, so the mankind is quite confused about who is right ("good") and wrong ("bad") here.

Besides, there are objective natural drivers of deglobalization:
- our viruses are not going anywhere, they have a life of their own, and some diseases (measles, which was "defeated" in the 20th century) are even making a comeback;

- extreme weather greatly affects the life of different countries - crops, trade and migration.
And it's the humans who brought the global warming to the planet. We're now a little over 8 billion people and at least every 5th person on average has a car, heating in the house, A/C, washing machine, and all this warms the environment. There were never so many people, machinery and heat from them on the Earth. There was only around one billion people here in 1800.

All international organizations will be the first to collapse.

The coronavirus outbreak was the first true natural global stress for mankind which pointed at our future though — deglobalization. Coronavirus pandemic in 2020 plunged the world into a global recession and showed us very clearly that our civilization was vulnerable and interdependent too much. In the language of Darwin's "natural selection", something simple and the most «fitted” usually survives in great adversity, i.e. “the efficient”.

The pandemic specifically showed humanity that its international institutions (the UN with its World Health Organization, in particular) are “inefficient”, completely useless and thus, needless.

All intergovernmental and international institutions (UN, NATO, WTO, OSCE, IMF, EU, etc.) will become over time more and more impotent like UN and NATO or paralysed like the UN Security Council because of the opposing interests of their members. These organizations are losing their influence and will soon cease to exist. Countries will begin to leave their membership like Great Britain left the EU in 2020 or simply stop paying membership fees.

The most vulnerable sectors of the world economy.

Air transportation, its dependent international tourism and the entire industry of hospitality have almost stopped during the pandemic.

«The number of air passengers reduced by 60.2 % compared to 2019, leading to a system-wide load factor of 65.1 %. International and domestic air travel demand dropped by 75.6 % and 48.8 %, respectively. Net losses of 126.4 billion USD, on revenue loss of 373 billion USD by airlines were observed in the year 2020. Direct aviation jobs (at airlines, airports, manufacturers, and air traffic management) decreased by approximately 43 %, and aviation- supported jobs are estimated to have reduced by 52 %.»
Only in the end of 2023 global airline capacity surpassed its corresponding 2019 levels, but their profits were still low.

In my opinion, this is a clear indication to the future of these industries.
Young people now should not become pilots or travel agents. Who would have thought that hot air at the surface of the earth could become more rarefied (it rises up faster) because of the global warming and therefore the airplanes would need more speed to take off? And for that, the weight of the aircraft must be less or the runway must be longer, or better both... In addition, extreme weather, overuse of the new technologies and aircraft assembly quality affect the reliability of air travel.
The period of globalization in our civilization began with the development of aviation at the beginning of the 20th century, and it will end with the collapse of aviation in the 21st century.

Travel is becoming more tiring, dangerous (terrorism, warfare), expensive and simply unpredictable due to extreme weather. Traveling will bring less and less pleasure and more trouble in the future. No one wants to get caught in bad weather and spend a couple days in an airport. Now it is very important to look in advance at the weather forecast for the time of travel and in general news in the chosen country. There will be so many problems with traveling over time that it will be easier not to go anywhere.


P.S. All this will happen, yes, but for now…
In my personal experience, the best airline in the world currently is «Turkish Airlines», the flagship of authoritarian-democratic Turkey.
It flies to most countries, almost never cancels flights, doesn't force passengers to reschedule (as Lufthansa often does), provides delicious and free in-flight food, and is the first airline to recover from the coronavirus pandemic.