Globalization: A missed opportunity

Abstract

One of the paradoxical reasons for the 2008 financial crash was that the competition between the Western and Eastern blocs was played out and won not militarily but rather on the grounds of economic efficiency. Because the primacy of the West had been established by economics and not armaments, not only did the West forgo the construction of a new global governance, but it also failed to reinforce the existing one, which might have avoided the risks of unbridled capitalism. The 20-year period between 1989 and 2008 highlighted a radicalization of the capitalist model on which developed Western societies were based, together with a distorted conception of the corporation. The relationship between democracy and free market is asymmetrical: democracy cannot survive without a free market, while the free market functions even in the absence of democracy. In fact, one of the reasons why several Italian banks such as Intesa Sanpaolo were less affected by the 2008 crisis than other institutions around the world was precisely that they relied less on financial risk than on credit. However, the West seems to have now lost the capacity of vision that the United States and the founding fathers of the European Union demonstrated at the end of the Second World War. Must the West, therefore, resign itself to a marginal role in world affairs, or does it still have a chance to regain an influential role in a fairer and more solidarity-orientated global order?