Are we heading to deglobalization?

Ten years ago, we never thought of a process of deglobalization that almost everyone was thinking about how wonderful globalization was and how we could speed up the process of globalization. However, nowadays, we can see a backlash of globalization, that it seems we are heading to deglobalization.

There are two major events that could be marked as deglobalization processes. One is the Brexit referendum and the other is the US presidential election. Moreover, in Europe, some radical populist groups are gaining more support from the public, even some are considered to be Neo Nazists.

What causes the process of deglobalization? As we can see from the past years, the global economy has been benefiting from the process of globalization; however, it creates more inequality in the society that some groups in the society feel they have been left out by globalization. Moreover, globalization has brought more players into the market, so the scale and the degree of competition increases, some workers or individuals are not used to such scale and degree of competition and feel threatened; therefore, they have the incentive to reverse the current process of globalization. In addition, globalization allows the "better" groups to gain much more from the "worse" group and the individuals and organizations who belong to the "worse" group will be angry about such situation and anti-globalization.

With the current wealth gap, we are inevitably heading towards deglobalization, in my words, we are heading towards an era of domestic wealth redistribution. Once the domestic conflict is mitigated or even solved, countries will restart their globalization process as people are now ready for and willing to get a larger market.

Therefore, maybe we should view globalization and deglobalization just like boom and recession, they are in a circle and hopefully our trend is towards globalization but there is some time that we are experiencing deglobalization.