Must the economic ascent of nations such as China and India come at the price of decline in Europe and North America, or is it possible for economic conditions to simultaneously improve in all nations?

While campaigning in 2016, Donald Trump declared that the United States would "no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism" (in Rosenboim, 2017). Britain's 2016 Brexit vote to leave the European Union and the success of Italy's right-wing Five Star Movement in 2018 have been widely viewed as a rejection of globalization (CNN, 2018; Elliott, 2018). In all three of these cases, and many more besides, leaders broadly identified as nationalists have condemned globalization. Globalization thus sounds a bit like the opposite of nationalism.
However, we should consider that globalization and nationalism, rather than being opposites, are two parts of the same phenomenon. As this chapter has shown, although the processes of globalization have speeded up in the past half century, the modern era of globalization has roots dating back to at least the 15th century. Globalization began in a world of competing kingdoms and empires.
The modern nation-state and the concept of nationalism developed in the 19 th century, within the context of globalization. However, globalization soon became a project of nation-states. This was expressed in terms of both economic trade and political empire. For example, the British nation-state and British identity grew as industrialization boomed. Industrialization required raw materials that had to be acquired through global trade, and in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the security of this trade was believed to depend on Britain's extensive colonial empire. Britons pointed with pride to the fact that the sun never set on the British Empire. Globalization built the nation. Throughout the 20th century, the centers of world industry, finance, and banking remained in Western Europe and North America. American and European industrial exports dominated world trade. However, by the end of the century, the balance of world trade was beginning to shift. Until the 1960s, the world's largest economies were the United States, the Soviet Union, West Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. However, by the end of the century, Japan had become the world's second-largest economy. By 2010, it had been surpassed by China. India, which in the 1960s and 1970s was almost synonymous with poverty, had by 2016 become the world's seventhlargest economy (Armstrong 2022).
This change in the economic position of countries was accompanied by political changes as well. The colonial empires that had aided and sustained nationalism in Western Europe collapsed after World War II. The United States and the Soviet Union competed to extend and consolidate their spheres of interest throughout the Cold War. In the 21st century, however, it is the newly rising economies, particularly China, that have been expanding their political dominion. In 2013, China's "one belt, one road" initiative was instituted to create a network of roads, transportation corridors, and shipping lanes anchored in China and stretching through the countries of South, Southeast, and Central Asia; the Middle East; and northern Europe. When completed, China's belt and road system will reach about \(65 \%\) of the world's population and could carry a third of all the goods and services produced in the world. Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America are not part of the project, but China has expanded its economic and political influence in these places as well.