The effects of globalism are appearing less appealing everyday, from the mining juggernaut about to crush the Kayapo and other Native peoples in Brazil (Financial Times article by Joe Leahy, 26 June 2012) to the restraints mentioned by Ed Crooks and Keith Fray for America (Financial Times, 26 June 2012). This is not new. Carlo Cipolla in his book, Before the Industrial Revolution (1976) shows from original documents, how cheap textiles and other manufactured goods overwhelmed the textile manufacturers of the Middle East in the 13th and 14th centuries. Middle Easterners recognized these foreign goods were of an inferior quality, but their cost and novel colors won the day destroying indigenous goods. Middle Eastern manufacturing has never recovered. The same is true for the Italians, who saw cheap English and Low Countries' goods flood into Italy two centuries later. Italy hardly recovered until the post war period. England suffered the same fate as manufacturing went abroad to the USA and then Asia. Now the USA has experienced the same effect with manufacturing moving to Asia.
What one sees on the streets of Germany is something different. German workers and consumers are concerned for their future, they buy German goods and are eager to produce products that will find buyers. While the Azerbaijani dubbing of foreign films may seem quaint today, some degree of local focus is in order. It is not sustainable to produce goods in one continent and jet or ship them to others.
But the idea of union and common markets should garner more support. While EU members try and hammer out an agreeable set of documents to bind together a new financial foundation, they might look at the struggle the Continental Congress went through to try and preserve union. The chaos of the Articles of Confederation in economic terms is well described by Charles Beard in his book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1956). Most of the Founding Fathers like Franklin were opposed to it, but the pressure to form a stronger union was unbearable in face of disunity. Beard shows how the election for the Constitution was organized to produce the smallest number of voters and that eventually less than 5% of the population gave its assent. It has endured but we will never know if the world would have been better off had it not.