History is regularly a process, rarely an event, which is a fact that often eludes human perception prone to understanding it through concrete dates, although events are most often just the culmination of long-term, incremental changes and the last station behind which a different landscape follows. It is always therefore thankless to declare 'end of an era', as vividly demonstrated by the case of American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who once proclaimed the end of history itself, but sometimes the quantity of indications clearly suggests a significant change in the air.
Thus, unlike the aforementioned political scientist, one of the greatest economic minds John Maynard Keynes accurately perceived that World War I marked the end of an era for many comfortable lives under the British Empire and the first period of globalization in the modern era. The interwar period, which increasingly resembles what now seems to follow the world, was marked by a strong slowdown in globalization in favor of isolationism, protectionism, self-sufficiency, distrust among states, major social upheavals, severe economic downturns, rising frustrations in countries dissatisfied with their status in the post-war world (especially Germany), a slow awakening of the self-awareness of colonies, almost continuous politically motivated violence, and the creeping decay of the imperial European order and the shift of power towards the USA. The war completely exhausted European powers and shifted the center of financial power 'across the pond', marking the beginning of the decline of Europe as a world power, but also the stagnation of globalization processes accelerated during the Victorian era.
Hegelian Climax
After two pandemic years and the war in Ukraine, it is hard to shake the impression that the plate is being reshuffled again, or that the processes initiated decades ago, then accelerated after the great recession that the West has never fully left behind, the pandemic and now the war in Ukraine have led to their Hegelian climax behind which something noticeably different follows. Globalization, historically speaking, moves in cycles and it seems that the world is facing that uncomfortable period of numbness in which smaller interest blocks or specific alliances based on the strengths and weaknesses of individual states will be formed, and some form of economic self-sufficiency will dominate, whether it is about relying on one’s own resources or on resources in geographical and 'political' proximity.
