You won't find Jeremy Adelman on social media, and he is not very keen on interviews either. However, when he analyzes reality, his reflections transcend the usual narratives to remind us that in an interconnected world, no nation is an island. This Canadian specialized in Global History and affiliated with Princeton University until 2023 also has little ego. When his wife was appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), he had no qualms about moving his Global History Lab there, a teaching space where he connects Western students with refugees from different countries around the world who have access to online classes.
In 2019, he gave a conference at the Rafael del Pino Foundation in Madrid and asked himself, "if what we have built is about to collapse."
Indeed, in the last 10 years, we have experienced a constant shock: Brexit, the pandemic, the phenomenon of Donald Trump... This can be interpreted in two ways. The first is that everything has changed radically. The second is that we are surprisingly resilient: we have not had a Third World War, and despite major catastrophes, the world endures. The problem is that there is a huge gap between the experience of the moment and the story we tell ourselves through the media and social networks. We live in an environment where immediacy prevails, and where disasters receive much more attention than daily improvements. Capitalism profits from calamities, they feed algorithms, and these algorithms prevent us from seeing real progress.
What do you believe is the greatest threat?
Part of the fog of the present consists of the difficulty in identifying it. On one hand, there are slow-burning crises, such as the climate crisis, to which we are dangerously becoming accustomed. In the short term, I am concerned about the threat of a nuclear war, as well as economic fragility in regions like the Middle East, or in heavily indebted countries like Pakistan and Argentina. The system has experienced speculative euphoria, linked to sectors such as cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence. Financial correction will come, but I am not sure if global leaders are prepared to manage it.
Does living under this constant political uncertainty affect us psychologically?
Absolutely, we internalize the situation. The unpredictability, not knowing what the next crisis will be, generates anxiety. The most affected generation is that of individuals under 30, but their voices remain invisible because the loudest arguments in the media come from older generations. There is a serious and concerning generational gap.
You have warned about the dangers of methodological nationalism. Could you explain it?
Methodological nationalism is the false premise that the nation-state framework is the only natural way to view the world, as if other scales of life were less important. It is an approach that ignores that humans are interdependent. Nowadays, what is crucial is managing our interdependence among strangers. We depend on each other to survive and live securely in countless ways: from the technology we use to communicate remotely to the food we import.
Looking at Brexit or Trump, it seems that the opposite path is being sought: total autonomy.
That is the fallacy of Brexit: believing that one can be independent instead of managing interdependence. When Trump talks about independence, he envisions a fantasy world that only concerns American autonomy. In reality, all declarations of independence are declarations of interdependence; they are announcements of the terms of our relationships with foreign countries. In the absence of global governance, we depend on the nation-state, but its real function is not to isolate but to negotiate and regulate how we need other countries.
How does this global interdependence translate into the daily lives of citizens?
Its threads connect points on the planet that seem to have no relation. Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I was in Uganda and witnessed a striking phenomenon. There, those in charge of protecting state forests had to suddenly multiply their efforts. Why? Because the fuel shortage caused by the conflict in Eastern Europe forced the population to massively cut down trees to obtain firewood and survive. A shock in Northern Europe alters the ecosystem in the heart of Africa, just as it reconfigures agricultural prices in the Mediterranean. Crises are no longer local; their ripple effects are immediate and global. The real problem is that our international system no longer has buffers to soften these impacts. We have dismantled the operating system that allowed us to absorb these shocks, and we do not know how the world will reconfigure after such upheavals.
Can you give us a recent example?
The ideal buffering system during the pandemic was the World Health Organization, whose role was to collect information, turn it into knowledge, and apply it to manage the crisis. Faced with a virus outbreak in a city in China, the protocol should have been to alert and prepare the world. It did not work, in part due to mutual distrust between the United States and China. The consequence of this accumulation of shocks we have been experiencing since 2008 has been the alarming loss of faith by citizens in public institutions.
In apocalyptic fiction, a unified global government often appears to save the planet. In reality, is global governance unfeasible?
To achieve something like that, a threat perceived unanimously as such would be required, as with an extraterrestrial invasion in science fiction movies. Climate change is a shared threat, but we do not coordinate well in the face of it; simply put, some countries manage it better than others.
Which ones?
The green transition has accelerated in China and the United Kingdom, where the last coal mine was recently closed. It is symbolic that the birthplace of the coal-based Industrial Revolution is abandoning this fuel, but the transition is still not fast enough or global. Additionally, we face a paradox: as the world becomes wealthier and people ascend socially, they demand goods that require more energy consumption and depend more on fossil fuels. It is a dilemma that we are not managing well..
What is the relevance of discussing globalization today? The term seems to have disappeared from public debate.
Several things happened, but first, we must distinguish between globalization and interdependence. Globalization, as we knew it, is dead, although we are more interdependent than ever. Globalization was a narrative based on the belief that free markets were inherently good, that crossing borders was always positive, and that its operational conditions were not dangerous. Today, those two conditions - dependence on fossil fuels and access to cheap credit - have disappeared. However, we do not have a word to describe what it means to share the planet under this new scenario. Previously, pro-globalization and anti-globalization forces shared a common framework for discussion. Now there is no common sense about what we promote or criticize.
What does the loss of that narrative imply?
Narratives produce the social energy needed to mobilize resources and generate change. Without a common story, that energy dissipates. However, the absence of a dominant narrative also offers a positive side: it gives us the opportunity to create a new narrative about the future. The danger is being overshadowed by the constant complaint that everything is falling apart, which prevents us from seeing that we can build something different.
What are the real consequences of not addressing the global interdependence you mentioned?
By degrading the management of interdependence, we fall into predatory nationalism. Decision-making falls into the hands of the strongest powers, which choose to act on their own or, in extreme cases, seize foreign territories.
Despite the uncertainty, you often appear optimistic about the future of humanity.
It is a mixed blessing. There is confusion and uncertainty, but also opportunities. The big problem is that we do not know how to handle uncertainty, and that is precisely the muscle we need to strengthen because the world will continue to be uncertain. For the past 70 years, we have relied on U.S. leadership, which prevented us from developing our own adaptive capacity. As Mark Carney pointed out at the Davos Forum, we took the old system for granted, and it has ended. We are experiencing a historical rupture, and it is imperative to get used to the post-American reality. We are entering a new era, but we have the advantage of having resources from the previous stage that we can still use. There is no need to reinvent the wheel.
How does cooperation alter the balance between the costs and benefits of being so interconnected?
Interdependence generates a constant incentive to compete for the distribution of its resources. We obtain technological advantages and everyday goods from it, but it also incurs costs. When cooperation breaks down and gives way to fierce competition, the lack of mutual trust increases the temptation to hoard as many benefits as possible. This is the model that Donald Trump embodies: a systematic attempt to keep the profits and make others bear the consequences. It consists of internalizing the benefits and externalizing the costs. In this dynamic of externalizing costs, who bears the brunt? The most vulnerable individuals, those who lack citizenship rights: recent immigrants and stateless refugees.
You refer to them as 'unwanted': those that nobody wants.
Without a protective status, they lack the tools to defend themselves in the global negotiation of costs and benefits. The worrying aspect is that this happens invisibly to the majority. It is not that society is inherently bad; the problem is that we lack a cognitive model to understand the extent of our actions.
Do we not internalize it?
We struggle to connect with the fact that our accumulation of benefits displaces costs to the margins, indirectly causing an immigrant to go hungry or end up in a hospital with tuberculosis. Geopolitics directly impacts the body. The clearest, broadest, and most recent example of this was the pandemic.