One day in 1956, Irish civil servant TK Whitaker was startled to see the cover of Dublin Opinion magazine. An illustration showed an empty Ireland, next to the text “Shortly Available: Undeveloped Country, Unrivaled Opportunities, Magnificent Views, Political and Other, Owners Going Abroad”. The Irish model of economic and emotional autarky had failed. Nearly half a million Irish emigrated in the 1950s. In 1960 there were less than 3 million left in the republic.
Besides people, Ireland mainly exported livestock, often on the same boats. Trade flows were so thin that individual racehorses, traveling back and forth to Britain for races, could shift the numbers. Whitaker began writing a pamphlet in his spare time outlining a new Irish model. He advocated “production for export markets” and said that “freer trade in Europe needs to be addressed”. In 1958 his so-called Gray Book became government policy.
Ireland had decided to globalize, even though no one was using that word at the time. The plan worked. Today’s rich, open country came into being with Whitaker (who died in 2017 at the age of 100), as Fintan O’Toole explains in We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958.
In the late 1950s, many isolated places boarded late the ship of globalization that had resumed its journey after 1945. Today, a similar drama is playing out, especially along Russia’s western borders: closed-off countries are trying to globalize. The war in Ukraine, often described as a struggle for democracy, is just as much a war for globalization.
The war in Ukraine, often described as a struggle for democracy, is just as much one for globalization
In the late 1950s, globalization won the argument. The new European Economic Community stimulated trade and in December 1958, 10 Western European countries made their currencies convertible. On June 5, 1959, Lee Kuan Yew was sworn in as Singapore’s Prime Minister and began transforming the impoverished new city-state into a global manufacturing exporter. A month later, Spain ditched its Irish policy of devastating self-sufficiency and began to attract trade, foreign investment and tourists.
The City of London, which had become a sleepy place of endless lunches and children playing on bomb sites, as Oliver Bullough describes it in money countryalso found its way into globalization: deposits of unregulated offshore dollars, the so-called Eurodollars, tripled in 1960, as historian Catherine Schenk showed.
London, Ireland and Singapore are among the most globalized places in the world. More recently, China and Vietnam have made similar journeys. It is largely due to globalization that, as Douglas Irwin of Dartmouth College points out, between 1980 and 2019 nearly all countries became wealthier, global inequality fell and extreme poverty plummeted. Trumpian isolationism denies this reality.
No wonder today’s isolated countries long for globalization. After the fall of communism, Ukraine saw its globalizing neighbor Poland walk away from it. In 1990, both countries had roughly the same per capita income. Polish incomes have roughly tripled since then, while Ukraine is poorer than it was 30 years ago.
It’s one of many failures: Tajikistan, Moldova, the Kyrgyz Republic, Georgia, Bosnia and Serbia could take “some 50 or 60 years — longer than they were under communism!” – to return to the level of income they had at the fall of communism,” economist Branko Milanovic wrote in 2014. Some of these countries are emptying, just like Ireland in the 1950s. Moldova estimated last year that perhaps a third of its citizens lived abroad. If a country doesn’t globalize, the people will, if they can.
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For European countries, joining the world usually starts with joining the EU. Therefore, on July 1, Ukrainian MPs stood clapping in unison as soldiers carried the European flag into the room. The EU this summer granted Ukraine and Moldova candidate status and opened accession negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia.
But Russia wants its neighbors to withdraw from all forms of globalization except the export of raw materials. When it first invaded Ukraine in 2014, it hoped to prevent the country from signing an association agreement with the EU. Belarus is also engaged in a struggle between a regime that wants to lock it up in the Putin sphere and a population that prefers the world.
Globalization is never just about trade. It also includes travel, foreign music and openness to other ways of life, religion and sex. Some people, especially the elderly, are afraid of these novelties, but most crave them. Hence the discontent when a country cuts itself off, as the UK does, partly by accident, due to Brexit. The anger at the traffic jams in Dover expresses the widespread British desire for continued globalization.
As the Irish knew and the Ukrainians know, there is only one thing worse than becoming globalized, and that is not becoming globalized.
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