Globalisation over with breath

Challenges and Opportunities for Czechia, Europe, and the World

Things and events are not eternal. This is true for the bad things, but unfortunately also for the good. If anything characterised the thirty years from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was the gradual opening up of the world. Both physical and invisible borders, which had restricted the flow of capital and ideas, were coming down. Ever larger parts of the planet were participating in the global division of labour, with companies finding more efficient production locations as well as new customers and markets all over the world. It was, in short, a golden era of globalisation, unprecedented in depth and scope in the recorded history of humankind. But this era is slowly ending, with small steps and a gradual tightening of the screws. And it's happening before many have even had a chance to notice just how extraordinary those three decades were. This book is therefore a collection of texts united by the search for an answer to a single unsettling question: how is the ongoing process of de-globalisation manifesting itself, and how will it continue to do so? And what could this planet-wide shift from openness to closure mean for the world, for Europe, and also for Czechia, which was one of the many winners of that golden era of globalisation.