When the Soviet Union launched its first satellite in 1957, the Americans, who had always assumed their technological superiority, were deeply shocked. They responded with a crash programme of training in science and engineering. Had the rate of increase in training between 1957 and 1962 been sustained until 1992, there would have been two scientists for ever man, woman and dog in America. So, we have to be careful not to extrapolate wildly on the basis of events that are temporally bounded. Much of the discussion on globalisation is in danger of ignoring this caveat. It is guilty of both suggesting that we are witnessing a unique phenomenon of global integration, and in believing that this trajectory is unstoppable. But history tells us somethingdifferent. In many respects the process of global integration we have witnessed in the last two decades of the twentieth century merely restores the levels of the late nineteenth century (Baldwin and Martin 1999). In the intervening decades, the processof inter-country integration led to the development of political processes which forced a move towards greater inward focus.
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