The contours of postglobalism: the U.S.–China confrontation and the crisis of universal models

The deglobalization phenomenon, which just a decade ago was perceived as a marginal hypothesis or a concept of anti-globalist discourse, has by the mid-2020s become both a dominant trend in the development of the global economy and a subject of intense scholarly debate. Of particular interest in this context is the analysis of how this trend manifests itself in the Asia-Pacific amid the intensifying confrontation between the world’s two leading economies — i.e., the People’s Republic of China and the United States. In this article, the author seeks to answer the question of whether the rivalry between the PRC and the United States will lead to the emergence of a new global development model, or whether the tendency toward further, albeit regulated, fragmentation will prevail in the world economy. Specifically, the article demonstrates that the Asia-Pacific, where the United States and the PRC are advancing competing regional integration projects, experiences not so much a movement toward the ‘greater integration’ as the proliferation of concurrent structures that tend to delineate the economic space into opposing blocs rather than facilitate its unification. Under these conditions, regional powers increasingly prioritize considerations of security, resilience, and sovereignty over pure economic efficiency, with smaller states engaging in maneuvering between the Chinese and American economic blocs. In this context, the policy of techno-nationalism is also becoming widespread. The author examines the development of the technological race between the PRC and the United States, which leads to the deepening of fault lines within the global economy and the formation of insulated technological clusters. Drawing on the analysis of these trends, the author formulates four scenarios for the development of the global economy, none of which, however, has been fully realized so far. In this regard, the article concludes that the current stage in the development of the world economic system can be described by the term ‘post-globalism’, which refers to a situation in which the old models of the global economy have lost their appeal, while new ones have not yet taken shape. As such, post-globalism harbors new threats but also opens up new opportunities for states, especially those of the Global South. However, to take advantage of these opportunities, internal consolidation and the ability to articulate a distinct vision of the future are necessary.

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