Disorder and Public Concern Around Globalization

7Liberalism Revisited

The decline in State sovereignty in the name of a vision of liberalism structured the dominant discourse on globalization. This institutional evolution is particularly significant at the level of the European Union, although the latter aims at federal sovereignty. Such evolution is an expression of the paradox of globalization, whereby, in the absence of a world government, trade globalization requires States intervention that is reduced to the application of intangible rules enacted by the doctrine at the expense of democracy and the arbitrations that this implies. There would be no alternative other than restoring national borders to safeguard the democratic principle to the detriment of trade expansion and growth, but also at the risk of populism and autocratic deviations.

Yet, the issue of sovereignty as well as that of liberalism cannot be easily addressed. There is an ongoing debate that leads to considering a possible alternative to the current discourse, which restores States in their prerogatives without it being necessary to renounce the benefits of globalization. Yet it is important to know what is at stake, namely the control of the long term.

This depends on the ability of actors to project into a sufficiently long future, which, far from being undermined by regulation, results from the extension of the decision makers’ time horizon allowed by this regulation. The very nature of liberalism is questioned, depending on whether it is assimilated ...