The Guardian view on COP 21 climate talks: saving the planet in a fracturing world | Editorial
In the late 20th century, those who stood against globalisation were charged with swimming against an unstoppable tide, caricatured as "Stop the world, I wanna get off!" But in the 21st century, history is running with the anti-globalisers. World trade talks have gone nowhere, immigration controls have shot up the agenda, and two post-national EU projects - the euro and Schengen - are under strain. Figures as diverse as Donald Trump, Nicola Sturgeon and Marine Le Pen - who failed to convert a remarkable first-round victory in French regional elections into any outright wins - are all peddling one form of nationalism or another. Rumours of the death of the nation state, then, have proved exaggerated: globalisation is spinning into reverse.
Looking back on the future as it appeared in the 1990s - as a technocratic, transnational order - a democratic push-back was surely inevitable, in some senses even desirable. But when problems from the overuse of antibiotics to terrorism refuse to respect national borders, the retreat from the dream of global governance has some frightening consequences, especially in connection with climate change, the archetypal global problem. Saving the planet in a fracturing world is a daunting challenge indeed.
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