Kishore Mahbubani: Globalisation has not failed

Kishore Mahbubani, who spoke at Asia House last year, says that globalisation has not failed.

In an interview with The WorldPost, Professor Mahbubani, of the Lee Kuan Yew School at the National University of Singapore, said that Western elites did not share the fruits of globalisation with the broader population and left them unprepared for disruptive changes, such as China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. The addition of almost one billion workers into the global trading system was, according to Mahbubani, one major reason why Trump and Brexit happened 15 years later. Western populations were simply not prepared for globalisation, and still struggle to understand the end of the era of Western domination and the transition to a multi-civilisational world.

Mahbubani noted that globalisation did, however, work in the rest of the world, where the vast majority have enjoyed massive improvements in their lives because of it.

If China and the US were two companies instead of countries, they would naturally forge an economic partnership with each other. Unfortunately, irrational and illogical behavior on the side of the US prevents a shift from geopolitical zero-sum games to a natural positive-economic cooperation, Mahbubani argued.

He thought that Brexit, on the other hand, might paradoxically lead to a more globalised UK outside the European Union. In need of new economic links with the rest of the world, nationalistic rhetoric will decline. In this climate, Professor Mahbubani sees the chance that the UK might produce a figure like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, or Emmanuel Macron, newly-elected President of France.

Professor Mahbubani was a contributor to ASEAN: From Vision to Reality – the latest publication from Asia House.