Yes, you're right, a laissez faire attitude to globalisation is a sure way to accentuate the negative. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries undeard of economic inequality and urban criminality were unleashed as a side effect of the political and economic freedom brought by the bourgeois enlightenment and revolutions. Eventually it was recognised that only the action of a benign state could correct the imbalances and Social Democracy was born. In the same way the global society will also eventually realise that freedom of globalisation has a price that must be corrected by collective action.

We have to recognise the problems and forge global solutions. The EU was ahead of its time in that respect but its now slipping behind the curve

When I say 'unheard of inequality' I am, strictly speaking, wrong, the industrial proletariat was probably richer (in money terms) than the peasantry that preceded them. But the proletariat were more exposed to the wealth of others and the opportunities they might have if they were just a bit better off. and so they lived much unhealthier, unfulfilling lives (please see Marx) - and that's another parallel with the present.

I don't think globalisation has any positives at all.

It's a policy of systematic exploitation which privileges the rich at the expense of the poor. While poverty is sometimes eliminated, the cost is literally incalculable. 'Growth' is really based on accumulating a huge ecological debt, and this will have to be repaid at some point, one way or another.

So while India and China are developing, their own ecologies are falling apart, and unless something dramatic changes, there really isn't more than a century of this kind of progress left. Meanwhile Africa is deliberately kept down at heel so that resources can be exploited as cheaply as possible.

So globalisation - which is really just violent theft and bribery with annual accounts - shouldn't be confused with global awareness. Which could potentially be about the West meeting 'less developed' cultures on equal terms instead of assuming that the Western approach is the best one, and the only possible one.

But different policies by various elites have created one particular form of globalisation, which doesn't have to be the only form possible. (BTW, the 'anti-globalisation movement' prefers to call itself Altermondialist - that name expresses that it doesn't really want to crawl back into nation states, it wants a different kind of globalisation.)

A different globalization? Do you mean in terms of whether it is politically, economically or socially driven, or just another type of economical globalization?

Be careful! Is it classified?