The Cold War wasn't really over (of course hindsight is 20/20, but I always found the naive "we won the Cold War" mindset of the US and Western European countri

The Cold War wasn't really over (of course hindsight is 20/20, but I always found the naive "we won the Cold War" mindset of the US and Western European countries a bit naive as an East German). If anybody "won the Cold War" it was the Eastern European countries which managed to escape the Soviet/Russian influence (which also never really stopped of course, but just moved underground). And also: globalisation was already a thing during the Cold War, just with different poor countries to be exploited. I guess globalisation will only be over when all countries reach the same economic equilibrium, or as Neal Stephenson put it so eloquently in Snow Crash: "...once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity..." ;)