In the late 1990s, I was astounded to realize that, despite all the hoopla about globalization, the great novel on this subject had not yet been written. In all likelihood, the great globalization novel cannot ever be written.
There just is too much material, too many story lines and too many angles to capture in a single book. What could be done?
For an answer, I looked to past eras when the world had been engulfed in a similar upheaval. For example, the early industrialization period also confronted people with serious questions about their relationships to their communities, to society and to the economy.
How did people back then try to capture that existential change — and all the social and psychological pressures related to it? The great novelists of that time told the story. But the novelists didn’t try to do it all at once.
They tried to write about the pressures of industrialization by presenting their views in the form of daily installments in newspapers. Later on, these same writers would tie these installments together and publish them as a novel in book form. Today, we would call that the creation of a second revenue stream.
Hence the guiding insight for The Globalist: It is is futile, if not dishonest, to try to give one “big”, definitive answer on the globalization question — whether in the form of a novel or a comprehensive policy paper. But trying to cover the biggest story of our lifetime in daily installments seems a more promising avenue.
A global exploration
That’s the moment The Globalist was born. The Globalist is dedicated to exploring the vast subject of the global economy, politics and culture — through a package of original features every day.
And that’s also why we break it all down into short stories, quizzes, fact sheets, charts, quotes collections and radio snippets. The object is to help audiences everywhere in the world to make up their own mind on the issue of globalization.
And so it was that, right on the cusp of the new millennium, we launched The Globalist on January 3, 2000.
Stephan Richter
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief