democracies less democratic , and the quality of public-sector management has deteriorated . No wonder that the world is in the grip of another bout of pessimism caused by fears of sociopolitical instability , similar in many ways to that of Europe and North America of the 1930s .
Keynes mused that just as we once abandoned ties to a tribe , we may be tempted to abandon conventional approaches to collective security , such as that derived from the nation state , in favor of some kind of transcendent global identity that resides in transnational institutions . But did prosperity lead Britons to empathize and identify with European institutions , norms , and culture ? Did economic integration lead the Turks to embrace Europe ’ s enthusiasm for political pluralism ? Did the pain of economic sanctions deter Putin ’ s quest for global status and regional primacy ? Even as production , commerce , and finance are organizing globally , social identity is reluctant to follow suit . The idea of a global civil society vies with national symbols of modernity . Globalization itself is fertile ground for populist challengers like Donald Trump , Nigel Farage , Rodrigo Duterte , and Marine Le Pen . Behind the rise of each of these political figures is a concern by voters to restore the nation state in order to preserve the social fabric . Could it be that constructing a social identity on the logic of fiscal and commercial interests
Journal on Policy and Complex Systems
3 Living at the height of the British Empire , Keynes can be criticized for limiting his vision to Christians and the West . He was writing chiefly for the West , in the middle of the Great Depression and later world war , at a time when the major powers still held many colonies . “ Perhaps it is not an accident ,” he wrote , “ that the race which did most to bring the promise of immortality into the heart and essence of our religions has also done most for the principle of compound interest and particularly loves this most purposive of human institutions ” ( Keynes , 1931 ).
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is , after all , nothing but what the late historian Tony Judt called “ a grand illusion ”? In his prescient 1995 essay , Judt used that very phrase to describe the “ reductionist fallacy , the curiously nineteenth-century belief shared by classical economists and Marxists alike , that social and political institutions and affinities naturally follow economic ones ” ( Judt , 1995 , p . 119 ).
Rapid income catch up among the fastest-growing economies — China , India , Russia , Saudi Arabia , and South Africa — is producing a common set of materialistic preferences , but is this enough to establish a claim for a global civilization when it does not include a shared outlook in such matters as individual rights or the role of the state . More income does not necessarily lead individual citizens down a one way street toward democratic values and norms , it does not make them more receptive to the kind of electoral contestation fostered in democratic political settings . 3
In sum , Mahbubani and Summers ( 2016 ) perceive social change being in line with global growth dynamics , not realizing that those dynamics may contain the seeds of dissolution . They overlook that democratic liberalism and the rule of law — the social change processes with which globalism is associated — have failed to achieve legitimacy in much of the world . While the