1. The Triumph of Globalization
The world has changed fast. Very fast.
I was born and raised in the Arabian Gulf — my Palestine-born father having moved there from Egypt in the mid 1970s, to take a job as a doctor in the newly formed United Arab Emirates. The rapidly modernizing country needed — and lacked — skilled professionals. At the time of its founding in 1971, it was home to under 300,000 people. By the time I was summarily expelled from the country in 2014, the population stood at 9.2 million. While the native Emirati population doubled several times, most of the population growth was driven not by natural birth but by immigration.
Demographic transformation doesn’t even begin to tell the story. Economic growth brought new people, and new people brought with them their cultures, languages, and religions. Literacy rose rapidly, and a revolution in communications technology brought an unstoppable inflow of new ideas.
A people and a society were completely, deeply, and irreversibly transformed. Today the UAE is home to nearly 10 million people, from over 200 countries. A country of fishermen, farmers, and merchants was transformed into one of businessmen, bureaucrats, doctors, engineers, and technologists.
It is difficult to capture in a few lines the impact that globalization has had on our world. Few countries were as dramatically transformed as the UAE — yet it is in a way a microcosm of the deep and irreversible transformation that played out all over the world over the past 40 years. Our societies have had to contend with an inflow of new immigrants threatening a previous homogeneity, new ideas threatening old traditions and customs, and new technologies disrupting old institutions. The world is almost unrecognisable from that of our grandparents.
The anger against globalization is, in no small part, a reaction against its triumph, and a testament to how profoundly it has changed our world. The world changed fast, so fast that our social and political institutions have been struggling to keep up, and it feels like nobody is in control. Zygmunt Bauman, who left us earlier this year, expressed it ominously. “What has been cut apart cannot be glued back together. Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity.”
Here’s the story, in seven trends:
Introduction (Previous Section)
#1 The Triumph of Globalization (You are here)
#2 The Loss of Anchors
#3 Economic Transformation
#4 Obsolete Nationalism
#5 Political Failure
#6 Social Media Broke our Public Sphere
#7 The Unravelling of the Middle-East
Conclusion: The Trump Effect
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