In a speech in Washington, D.C. in 2019, ex-British prime minister Tony Blair declared that ‘globalisation is a force of nature, not a policy; it is a fact.’ He echoed President Bill Clinton back in 2000: ‘Yet globalisation is not something we can hold off or turn off. It is the economic equivalent of a force of nature — like wind or water… But there is no point in denying the existence of wind or water, or trying to make them go away.’ A generation ago, sentiments like these struck many otherwise intelligent people as profound. Now they seem quaint.
Globalisation is under fire. In the last decade, the partial deindustrialisation of Western democracies by a combination of corporate offshoring and cheap imports from China and other low-wage nations has contributed to populist insurgencies against trade and immigration policies on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US in 2016, votes for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were high in areas that had lost a lot of manufacturing to global competition. In Europe as well, anti-system populism is strong in post-industrial areas like eastern Germany and Britain’s Red Wall.
https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/globalisation-why-it-went-into-retreat/