Geostrategy and world trade: a couple in crisis

As an isolated voice in an ideological and empirical context that favoured openness and deregulation in all directions, the Nobel Prize winner Maurice Allais drew attention early on to the demanding political conditions of trade liberalisation: he saw an incompatibility between free trade and political fragmentation. Recent developments seem to prove him right: open and global multilateralism is now opposed by the organisation of supply chains between countries sharing the same values (friend-shoring), reindustrialisation strategies, the return of questions about sovereignty (food, industrial, etc.), and the reconfiguration of value chains, which has already been underway for several years, and which are now less global. This session will address the following questions: Are we witnessing a “de-globalisation” and how? Are we moving towards a “plurilateral” world where national interests govern international relations and networks of alliances of opportunity? What role for multilateral organisations?