proclaimed grown-ups of New Labor parodied anyone airing anxiety about globalization as making a childish demand: “Stop the world, I want to get off!” Putting the brakes on international integration is no longer as far-fetched as propelling away from the planet. For better or – quite possibly – for worse, it is happening. A few days before Russia responded to the E. coli scare with a heavy-handed bar on all sorts of European vegetable imports, the cheeriest thing America's top trade official could find to say about the Doha round was that he was not ready to read the last rites over its corpse. Meanwhile, the collapsing global carbon market is a reminder that – outside Europe, at least – no multilateral solution has been found to the most multilateral problem of the lot, writes The Guardian in its editorial. Excerpts: The European Union remains the single outstanding example of integration across borders, and yet here too the centrifugal force of national sovereignty is pulling afresh. Across its north the establishment is being battered at the ballot box by populists who resent bailing out the south. Meanwhile, those southerners imagined to be benefiting from northern largesse take to the streets of Athens and Lisbon to rage against strings attached to the money. The victors of Versailles once ordered Germany to starve itself into surplus, but today it is Germany that safeguards repayment of every last euro of bank debt by pushing pain on to Mediterranean taxpayers. A sweeping new assessment of the continent's drift, David Marquand's “The End of the West”, concludes that after federalists sought to take the politics out of their project, politics is now having its revenge. Without truly cross-border parties, there is no connection between the discourse of the election campaigns that voters experience and what happens in Brussels. Whatever their misgivings about their own politicians, publics prefer to trust leaders whom they know how to sack if they have to. Marquand proposes a shot of democracy for the center, through the direct election of the European council's president. Like federalism in general, that suggestion is unfashionable. But officials and capitalists who had hoped to create a new international order by stealth are discovering that they can't. The only way to continue the mission is to secure legitimacy from the people, messy as that may be. Otherwise, the present age of globalization could go the way of the previous one, which ended in 1914. Pro-trade technocrats would then find themselves pleading: “Stop the world, I want to get back on.” __
