Globalisation

Story hook

On 30 November 1999, a coalition of trade unionists, environmentalists, anarchists, students, and tribal-rights activists shut down the centre of Seattle. The occasion: the Third Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization, intended to launch a new round of global trade liberalisation — the "Millennium Round". Police fired tear gas; protesters broke through fences. The conference collapsed without an agenda. The cover of The Economist called it "The Battle of Seattle". An obscure Internet-published economist named Joseph Stiglitz — the World Bank's chief economist a year earlier — had just written the kind of thing nobody in the WTO had heard before: "Globalisation, as currently practised, is not working for the world's poor."

Eight years earlier, on 25 December 1991, the Soviet flag had been lowered from the Kremlin. Three years earlier, on 15 April 1994, in Marrakesh, 123 nations had signed the Marrakesh Agreement establishing the WTO. Six years later, on 11 September 2001, jihadists from a country (Saudi Arabia) that was a US ally, trained in another (Afghanistan) that the US had armed during the Cold War, would crash four planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania.

The decade between the end of the Cold War (1991) and 9/11 (2001) is sometimes called the "unipolar moment" — the brief period when the US looked like the only superpower and the Washington Consensus of free markets + free trade + free movement of capital looked like the global default. The quarter-century since has been the slow unwinding of that moment: the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of China, Brexit (2016), Trump's first term and trade wars (2017-21 and 2025-), COVID-19 (2020), Russia's invasion of Ukraine (2022), and now the era of techno-decoupling and friend- shoring. Globalisation didn't die, but it didn't end up where its 1990s prophets predicted.

Why this matters for UPSC

This unit sits in GS-I "World History — 21st century" with heavy overlap with GS-II International Relations and GS-III Indian Economy & External Sector. Prelims has asked about WTO ministerials, regional groupings (TPP/RCEP/CPTPP), and IMF quotas. Mains questions are almost always present in some form — "Discuss whether globalisation has helped or hurt developing countries". Interview boards probe the future of the rules-based order. Weight: medium for Prelims, high for Mains analytical, medium for Interview.