BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2008 The post-World War II order began to crumble in the first half of the 1980s. Its dissolution followed no obvious pattern, occurring instead as a series of seemingly disparate events: the spectacular rise of the Japanese car industry; communist Hungary’s clandestine approach to the International Monetary Fund to explore a possible application for membership; the stagnation of India’s economy; President FW de Clerk’s first discreet contacts with the imprisoned Nelson Mandela; the advent of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in China; Margaret Thatcher’s decisive confrontation with Britain’s trades union movement.
Individually, these and other events seemed to reflect the everyday ups and downs of politics; at most they were adjustments to the world order. In fact, powerful currents below the surface had provoked a number of economic crises and opportunities, especially outside the great citadels of power in Western Europe and the United States that were to have profound consequences for the emergence of what we now call globalization.
