Need for non-economic globalisation: Lessons from the Coronavirus pandemic

Even as we write, Covid-19 virus has directly affected 166 countries and more than 340,000 people across the globe, with 14,748 reported deaths. Indirectly, it has brought the lives of billions to a standstill, with many organisations now stating that the pathogen is the biggest threat facing the world since the second world war. One significant outcome of World War II was rise of “Multilateralism”. With the memories of war time destruction afresh, the world had an incentive to “co-operate”. The broad shape of the international order after the war was a multilateral liberal internationalist system embracing, in principle, collective security, economic openness and social progress. Seven decades into its inception, we find that this process has successfully promoted trade