ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how literature is that globalization creates domestic economic divisions. It explores the theoretical underpinnings of the view that trade and openness promote long-term political consensus rather than conflict. The chapter focuses on the preliminary assessment of globalizations long-term demographic effects. It emphasises spatial segregation: by reducing economic barriers to secession, globalization might be thought to defuse, rather than sharpen, geographic tensions and the polarized politics that accompany them. While globalizations long-run impact on economic growth and development has been much discussed and debated, globalizations long-run effects on political growth and development have received relatively little systematic attention. With the global financial system in disarray and unemployment rates in double-digits across much of the world, one might have expected today's international political economy to be undergoing the sort of path-altering cataclysmic shock described in Stephen Krasner's landmark study of global free trade and protectionism during the nineteenth and twentieth century.
