Mutations of the emerging new globalization in the post-COVID-19 era: Beyond Rodrik’s trilemma

Today’s tensions and challenges at the global governance level seem to constitute structural expressions of the global system’s mutations towards the post-COVID-19 era. This study examines whether the structural changes observed in various socio-economic dimensions and interdependent spatial levels due to the pandemic crisis are accelerating the emergence of a new phase of global governance. It investigates whether Rodrik’s trilemma (the incompatibility of synchronously achieving national sovereignty, democracy and globalization) seems to be relatively inadequate to approach today’s emerging global reality and challenges comprehensively. After an elliptic overview of world governance’s evolutionary shaping and reaching the present-day necessarily repositioned role of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS), we argue that these countries must no longer be perceived as emerging exceptional cases but as central participants, equally responsible for promoting a more balanced and sustainable development perspective for the less developed socio-economic formations and the entire global socio-economic system’s stability. We conclude that in the progressively shaped ‘new globalization’, which is a distinct evolutionary phase of the international economy and international relations, Rodrik’s trilemma seems to some extent analytically insufficient since there is no more a sustainable optimum in any of its coupled dimensions, which could allow a viable exit from the current crisis.