In the previous chapters, we analysed the ways in which obstacles for international collective action to meet the challenges of the present day have been overcome – or not – in different policy areas. We have shown that conventional reasoning does not adequately reflect or explain the diverse reality of successes and failures. The question then is what consequences should be drawn from this for the times ahead, in a context significantly different not only from that of the years of triumphant globalization, but also from that of the years ushered by the Trump presidency.

This new world will be characterized by an unprecedented combination of interdependence and fragmentation: interdependence due to the intensity of trade, the multiplication of health risks (of which the Covid crisis has only given a glimpse), the rapid deterioration of the climate due to rising temperatures, and certainly migratory pressures further amplified by future climate crises; and fragmentation as the result of the de-Westernization of a world that was once unified by its colonial legacy but is now openly at odds with it, of the rivalry between China and the United States for world leadership, and of the return, in Europe, of large-scale military confrontation with the war in Ukraine.

We simply have no experience of this combination of forces and events. Globalization was built on the assumption that increased trade would bring people closer together, lessen rivalries and prevent wars. This may have been true in yesterday's world. It is totally false today. As for the perception of a common destiny that the rise of global threats – be they health, climate or technological – should inspire, the truth is that both the pandemic crisis of 2020 and the worsening climate crisis suggest that we should not put too much faith in the rationality of collective behaviour.

A fragmented world

We have in previous chapters already explained our analysis of interdependencies. But we have not set out the reasons why fragmentation is likely to increase in the decades ahead. The first is the heterogeneity of preferences. In the early 2000s, most people in emerging and developing countries believed that the road to prosperity lay in imitating the advanced countries of the West. Expansion of trade and of financial globalization, anchored in a rules-based international order and liberal values was the order of the day and the road to take.