20 - The daunting challenges of globalization and the power of individuals in cross-stakeholder networks for a humanistic face of globalization

Summary

The new world order and disorder

Towards the end the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is quite clear that things have not turned out quite as had been expected in those early euphoric years that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall and what the American scholar Francis Fukuyama termed “the end of history.” Fukuyama did not, of course, mean that the world was coming to an end, but rather that the ideological confrontation between collectivism and individualism – translated in economic terms into the battle between the central command and control economy and the liberal market economy – had been irrevocably won by the individualist-oriented market economy, with all the social and political freedoms that it represents. For over two centuries the ideological battle had raged, resulting in millions of publications and, in real-life terms, the establishment of collectivist regimes under both fascist and communist rule throughout most of the twentieth century and all the harm they inflicted. With the deaths in the mid-70s of the Iberian fascist dictators, Franco of Spain and Salazar of Portugal, fascism as a system of state in Europe was finished. The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 presaged the collapse of communism. What the scholar Fukuyama called the end of history, the American president, George H Bush, termed “the new world order.