It was supposed to boost prosperity and democracy at the same time. What really happened? According to the legal scholar Anthea Roberts, it depends which story you believe.
So one big promise of globalization was that countries, as they became more integrated in the global economy, would also modernize on a political dimension.
Some people argued that economic globalization was going to be the US's best ever effort at spreading democracy.
I'm curious how successful or unsuccessful you think that's been.
One of the things that I think has clearly come out from both Russia and China is that that has not borne fruit in quite the way the United States may have hoped.
But part of it may also be that the US may be retelling that story a little bit.
It may have been that they wanted to say that it was about democracy, but actually a lot of it was also just about their own economic interests.
And now their understanding of their economic interests have changed.
What kind of stories do we tell ourselves about economic globalization?
About how countries interact and compete with each other?
That is a question Anthea Roberts has spent years thinking about.
She is a lawyer by training and now a professor at the Australian National University.
She is also the co author, with Nicholas Lamp, of a book called six faces of Globalization.
Who wins, who loses, and why it matters.
Their main point is simple, but also profound.
We all tell stories about our economic lives, we as individuals and countries, too, but we don't all tell the same story.
Maybe you prefer the story about how a rising tide lifts all boats, or the story about how China is stealing America's jobs.
Or maybe the one about how our planet is on an unsustainable trajectory and that GDP is a terrible measure of prosperity.
Most of us, when we subscribe to one of these stories, we tend to discount or ignore the others.
Yours surely is the right story.
The others must be wrong.