After years of expanding travel opportunities and a worldwide uptick in open-minded expat communities, the future of globalism looks uncertain.
I was three when my family moved to the USSR. My first memories include Belomorkanal cigarette smoke, BBC Radio journalists discussing Chechnya, and a retired Bolshoi ballerina chanting raz! dva! tri! chetyre! to a classroom of little girls clumsily attempting the basic positions.
By the time we left Moscow to return to Suburbia, where daily life was all clean air and stable democracy, I began to piece together that my experiences differed from those of my classmates. I suspected they had never slept underground during a Soviet coup d’état, and was reasonably certain they hadn’t heard of Chechnya. By all indications, I was an unbearably elitist kindergartner.
As the daughter of an American diplomat, I resettled internationally often enough to classify as a Third Culture Kid, a term coined by American sociologist Ruth Hill Useem in the 1950s to describe children who spend their formative years outside their home country, where they’re exposed to a wide variety of cultural influences and tend to develop open-minded, creative mentalities. Many speak more than one language, are highly adaptable, and are accustomed to collaborating with those of vastly different backgrounds and assumptions. Skills such as these, formed during prolonged exposure to diversity, are valuable ones to bring into a globalized job market.
In my day, our ranks were relatively narrow: diplomats’ kids like me, military families, the children of foreign correspondents and missionaries. But with the rise of technology and modern globalization, this subsection has expanded alongside global commerce: many multinational businesses have moved production abroad and spread supply chain stages across multiple countries, relocating domestic employees and accompanying family to overseas assignments. In a study published in 2018, consulting firm Finaccord found that the number of expatriates worldwide amounted to over 66 million people, showing growth of almost 6% between 2013 and 2017, and forecast to reach 87.5 million by 2021.
Add to these figures the unheralded number of digital platforms now available for sourcing travel information, the social media-fueled travel FOMO frenzy, and the increased accessibility provided by low-cost airlines. Industry disruptors like AirBnB and Away have brought the notion of international exploration into the mainstream, while Gen Z and Millennials remain preoccupied with collecting experiences over material things, a principle that has led many to join a new army of laptop-toting “digital nomads” that work remotely from new and exotic locations.
Over the past decade, these forces have coalesced into the so-called “travel boom” that, even into the early days of 2020, outpaced the global economy. In 2018, the travel and tourism industry grew more than all other economic sectors but one (the construction industry), generating 10.4% of the world’s total economic activity that year, according to Forbes.
The boom saw backpackers and business executives mingling with long-term expats and locals on a modern-day Silk Road of sorts – providing not only an economic but also a cultural link between travelers of distant homelands and differing ideologies. It brought people into direct contact with “the other,” teaching important lessons about cooperation, flexibility and understanding.
The travel boom saw backpackers and business executives mingling with long-term expats and locals on a modern-day Silk Road of sorts.
And now: coronavirus. The pandemic has disrupted supply chains around the world and wreaked havoc on the global economy. Factories and plants have shut down or vastly reduced production, particularly in China, where roughly half the world’s goods are made. Though the Chinese industrial machine is slowly and strenuously restarting, many factories are still only running at 50% capacity. Recovery will not happen overnight.
The rate at which the global economy has come unhinged reveals just how vulnerable our supply chains really are, prompting analysts to wonder if this is the end of economic globalization as we’ve known it. Even once virus fears dissipate, governments may enact protectionist measures and pressure companies to seek more reliable sources of goods. If industries step away from free trade, the overall effect will likely be one of reduced global efficiency and slowed economic growth.
What does that mean, then, for the formerly burgeoning ranks of travelers and long-term expats, a demographic that, on the whole, is more tolerant of different cultures and people from other backgrounds, and less prejudiced toward out-group members? What is to be the fate of both economic and cultural globalism – the force of influence that helps everyday citizens think more like diplomats, evaluate more like anthropologists, and reflect more like historians?
If governments politick their multinationals into coming home or constrain operations, if borders are closed, or if self-sufficient economies decide to limit business with other countries as much as possible, it stands to reason that expat workforces on assignment abroad will be heading home too – and there’s plenty of reason to believe such a development may be on the horizon for many countries if policymakers continue on their current trajectory.
In a post corona-panic world, it’s not difficult to imagine that a new global order might come to pass. In time, the travel industry will rebound as it always has after pandemics, terrorism and natural disasters. Ripple effects from wide-scale policy changes, however, will be harder to mitigate.
At its essence, globalization is an ongoing process, a dynamic measure of the interconnectedness of our world across multi-continental distances that mankind has spanned for thousands of years. The Silk Road, for example, was traversed regularly by a small group of hardy traders and entrepreneurs from as early as 130 BC and lasted until the Ottoman Empire closed the routes in 1453. Thus, the question is not whether or not globalism as an underlying network will prevail, but rather, how thick or thin – how influential or trivial – that network will be in the years to come.
Perhaps it’s just my international education talking, but I believe the best parts of globalism, the parts worth nurturing – just like the best parts of people – are resilient. As populism sweeps the West, as fear and uncertainty prompt individuals, companies and institutions to scale back, the best parts of globalist values will be needed more than ever: the parts that are dedicated to figuring out how the world hangs together, rigorously questioning the forces that allow it to do so, and seeking to make the most of them.
Rebuilding our economy, our society, our businesses and systems in the aftermath of a pandemic will require every virtue in a globalist’s toolbox: dialogue, collaboration and, of course, the tenacity to face the unknown.
