Four possible futures

A new deglobalization phase is accelerating. The world experienced an abrupt transformation with the start of the Covid pandemic in 2019, exacerbating the disintegration of global value chains. However, a general slowdown of global integration had been in motion for more than a decade.
Since the beginning of the industrial era in mid 18^th century, the world has witnessed various globalization waves. Moments of acceleration in the pace of economic, political, and cultural integration across regional and national frontiers have been interrupted by escalations in international political tensions as wells as declines in the flows of trade, capital, and people.
Since the 1840s with the start of the second industrial revolution, the world economy experienced a period of rapid acceleration of international trade, (often forced) political integration under colonial rules, and booming migratory flows. The year 1914 marked both the highest growth of global interconnections via trading routes, with the inauguration of the Panama Canal, and a massive shock to the globalization process, with the start of World War I. The unprecedented scale of WWI sparked the "first deglobalization" phase, which continued through the great Depression, WWII, and the Cold War, before only coming to an end in the late 1970s.

Specifically, the interwar period featured three main elements that we can recognize today: (i) the contraction of capital and trade flows, due to the introduction of trade barriers; (ii) the emergence of authoritative regimes gaining consensus through populist rhetoric; and (iii) the increased role of governments, who accessed new technologies to collect and analyze large amounts of data about their citizens.
Decolonization, the decline of the Soviet Union, and the triumph of capitalism inaugurated a new cycle of globalization in the last decades of the 20^th century. China's transition towards a market-based economic system and the launch of liberalization policies in several major emerging economies such as India, Turkey, and Brazil, cemented this process.
2001 represented another major turning point in global politics. The first direct attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor led to a series of conflicts in the Middle East that are still unsolved today. In December 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization marking a moment of unprecedented commercial integration, fueling its already tumultuous growth, and setting its economy to challenge the global hegemony of the Unites States.
The first two decades of the 21^st century set the stage up for increasing tensions and the expectation of a decline in the economic and geopolitical supremacy of the West. Four main elements help us make sense of the new deglobalization cycle. The rise of global terrorism that since 2001 increased global political tensions and created instability. The global financial crisis in 2008 marked a major inflection point in terms of economic integration, which severely dropped and never fully recovered. In the 2010s, new authoritarian regimes emerged in Russia, China, Turkey, and Hungary among others. The rivalry between China and the US intensified with the leadership of Xi Jinping, who launched the Belt and Road Initiative in 2014, a new model of alternative globalization, which places China as the main political leader and economic partner for more than 160 countries.

After the Covid pandemic the levels of economic and financial integration reached a new low and global value chains started to disintegrate.
Is this the end of globalization? Perhaps these events are leading to a major structural shift, and the start of its transformation into a new version of economic integration, which will involve more exchange of ideas and intangibles, and less movement of physical goods. In a technical note that I wrote with my colleague Geoffrey Jones from Harvard Business School, we draw four possible scenarios ahead:
Back to Normal: the recent shocks like the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine are just temporary setbacks, and globalization will resume.
Back to the Future: we can expect disintegration to expand even further reaching new levels of autarchy and barriers to trade like the ones recorded in the interwar period.
Regionalization: integration will continue but on a different geographical scale. Trade, capital, and migration flows will redirect within separate blocks each anchored to different economic leaders, which will be coordinating integration while competing with the other regions.

Armageddon: the weakening of global norms and institutions might lead to a new global conflict after over 70 years since the end of WWII. This time, however, the opposing sides have nuclear arsenals. The current conflict in Ukraine has been indeed raising more immediate concerns about potential devastating consequences for the stability of the world system.
The historian's job is not to forecast the future, but rather to stress the recurring patterns, differences, and lost opportunities of the past. History can be of help to Western governments in crafting a coordinated response to the current crises. Hopefully, this entails stronger democratic institutions and enlightened economic policies that prioritize a more balanced distribution of income and pragmatically address grand challenges such as climate change and new potential pandemics.