Wednesday 2 May 2018
07:45
Ian Bremmer
Us vs. them: The failure of globalism
Those who championed globalization once promised a world of winners, one in which free trade would lift all the world’s boats, and extremes of left and right would give way to universally embraced liberal values. The past few years have shattered this fantasy, as those who’ve paid the price for globalism’s gains have turned to populist and nationalist politicians to express fury at the political, media, and corporate elites they blame for their losses.
Ian Bremmer shows in his eye-opening new book that populism is still spreading. Globalism creates plenty of both winners and losers, and those who’ve missed out want to set things right. They’ve begun to understand the world as a battle for the future that pits “us” vs. “them.”
When human beings feel threatened, we identify the danger and look for allies. We use the enemy, real or imagined, to rally friends to our side. This book is about the ways in which people will define these threats as fights for survival. It’s about the walls governments will build to protect insiders from outsiders and the state from its people.
And it’s about what we can do about it.
Ian is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, the leading global political risk research and consulting firm. He has published ten books, including Superpower and the national bestsellers The End of the Free Market and Every Nation for Itself. He lectures widely and writes a weekly foreign affairs column for TIME magazine, where he’s editor at large.
Bremmer points to the next wave of global populism, one that hits emerging nations before they have fully emerged.
Ian is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, the leading global political risk research and consulting firm. He has published ten books, including Superpower and the national bestsellers The End of the Free Market and Every Nation for Itself. He lectures widely and writes a weekly foreign affairs column for TIME magazine, where he’s editor at large.
