Globalization and Keynes's ideal of a “sounder political economy between all nations”

Ours is a “gated globe,” according to the report of The Economist (2013) on world economy.

After two decades in which people, capital and goods were moving ever more freely across borders, walls have been going up, albeit ones with gates. Governments increasingly pick and choose whom they trade with, what sort of capital they welcome and how much freedom they allow for doing business abroad

( The Economist 2013) This would have produced a new kind of globalization, a “gated globalization,” whose appeal is “closely tied to state capitalism” (ibid.), at a time when this latter is currently enjoying greater popularity than its main competitor, liberal capitalism. In the liberal view of The Economist, we are currently living in a world wherein globalization has “paused.” This might confirm Eric Helleiner’s (2010) speculations about the future of the international economic order: the 2007–2008 crisis should be regarded as a “legitimacy crisis” ¹ for the neoliberal order which followed the collapse of Bretton Woods, as well as an important stimulus to elaborate an international reform agenda. But this does not necessarily mean that the process will end with a “constitutive phase” of the Bretton Woods kind; rather, the lack of consensus concerning the content of the reform agenda induces us to interpret the current one as a phase of “interregnum” between two global orders, of which the future one remains unpredictable. “The more plausible scenario,” writes Helleiner, “is one in which states increasingly attempt to carve out greater degrees of autonomy to pursue distinctive national and regional practices within the context of a still quite integrated global economy.” ²