Twenty-five years on: “Globalisation” revisited

We now have a much better understanding of globalisation than we had 25 years ago, but we have lost that pro-market, entrepreneurship-friendly strand of social democracy, of which Helmut Schmidt was perhaps one of the last representatives

di Kristian Niemietz

When I visited my parents earlier this month, I stumbled across a book which I remember using as a reference for a final-year school essay: Globalisierung: Politische, ökonomische und kulturelle Herausforderungen (= Globalisation: Political, Economic and Cultural Challenges) by Helmut Schmidt. The book came out in 1998, so it is not exactly a “classic” to be “revisited”, but this is an area where a lot has happened in the meantime. Judging from Google Books Ngram Viewer and Newspapers.com, the word “globalisation” or “globalization” was barely used at all before the 1980s, and only really took off in the 1990s. Thus, while Schmidt’s book is not a trailblazer, it still counts as one of the earlier attempts to make sense of the phenomenon, and figure out where it might be going.

It therefore makes sense to re-read it today with the benefit of hindsight, to see which parts aged well and which did not, which parts still seem relevant and which seem a bit quaint.
Let’s start with the latter. In describing what he means by “globalisation”, Schmidt mentions the fact that he can watch up to 30 TV channels at his home in Hamburg and in the hotel rooms he stays in, and that he sometimes watches American and British news programmes. To my Gen Z colleagues (who were born around the time the book came out), the idea that you would get most of your news content from TV channels, and that you would have to wait until you get back home or to your hotel room to access it, will probably seem antediluvian. In this regard, the main impact of “globalisation” would not (as Schmidt expected) be further growth in the number of TV channels, but the rise of social media and smartphones.

Curiously, Schmidt does not mention the internet in this context: he does, in fact, not mention at all until well into the second half of the book. Or perhaps this is not so surprising. When the book came out, only one in ten German households were active internet users. Worldwide, the figure was just one in thirty.

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