My life, our times; Grave new world

What links a former prime minister, a former chief economist and an academic? They have all recently written about globalization. The current wave of globalization started roughly at the beginning of the 1980s and coincided with new approaches to economic policy—notably Thatcherism in the United Kingdom, Reaganism in the United States and the ‘opening up’ of China driven by Deng Xiaoping's reforms. In My life, our times Gordon Brown traces how these developments overlapped and affected his political trajectory. Brown was first elected to parliament in 1983 and was actively involved in politics and government, as Chancellor of the Exchequer and subsequently as prime minister, for the following three decades. To some extent Gordon Brown—who, with Tony Blair, developed New Labour and implemented a market-friendly economic agenda—embodies the dichotomy between global markets—and the idea that they can create a more prosperous world for all—and nation-states, which Dani Rodrik discusses in Straight talk on trade. Brown was, and remains, an unrepentant supporter of multilateral trade and of global governance through global rules and institutions, which are, according to Rodrik, ‘the mantra of our era's elite’ (p. 16). Brown is a globalist and thus unlikely to score many points with today's populists. As Theresa May famously stated, ‘if you are citizen of the world, you are citizen of nowhere’

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