Globalisation is in retreat. Countries are becoming less reliant on each other. They show a willingness to use currency manipulation as an economic tool. Surreptitious protectionism is being deployed. For the most part these developments are happening below the radar, which is why it has been possible to ignore them.
That will not be the case this week when trade ministers from 159 countries meet in Bali in the hopes of salvaging something from 12 years of so far fruitless talks.
Bali matters. At stake is not just the future of the World Trade Organisation, but the way and for whom the global economy is governed. There is everything to play for when the WTO ministerial meeting begins on Tuesday.
Trade ministers have travelled far and wide in search of a deal. In 1999, talks called to launch a new round in Seattle were the story of bad blood at the negotiating table and riots on the streets. It took a burst of international solidarity after 9/11 to launch the talks in Doha two years later.
Cancun in 2003 saw a further setback as a group of the leading developing countries made it clear that they were not prepared to accept the usual stitch-up organised by the US and the European Union. Now it is make or break time. When the talks began in 2001 the talk was of opening up new fronts in trade liberalisation, cutting tariffs and tearing down protectionist barriers in services and agriculture just as they had been progressively in manufacturing in the decades after the second world war.
All that's left now of the original agenda is a proposal to cut trade red tape and root out corruption at borders, coupled with the promise of easier access to western markets for the world's least developed nations.
But even the low-hanging fruit is proving hard to pick. Developing countries say they will need time and money to improve their customs practices, while western nations say that without a trade facilitation deal they will not sign off on better access to their markets for exports from the poorest countries. A bigger problem may be India's insistence that it be allowed to stockpile subsidised grain to ensure food security. The Americans are unhappy about providing an open-ended commitment.
The package on the table would have little real impact on the global economy. On the other hand, failure this week would be a disaster for the WTO, which might continue as the court where trade disputes are settled but would cease to exist as a forum for serious trade liberalisation talks.
Already, the bigger global players are seeking to cut their own side deals, seeing that as easier than the tortuous process of getting agreement at the WTO. Washington and Brussels almost certainly underestimate the time and effort it will take to forge their transatlantic trade partnership, but frustration with the WTO process means that's where the political energy already is. A big fat zero in Bali could easily result in the EU and the US giving up on multilateral negotiations completely.
So how did it come to this? Well, let's start by turning the clock back to Geneva in December 1993, when Peter Sutherland, the then head of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, ended the Uruguay round of trade liberalisation talks. It was four years after the end of the cold war, two years since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
China and India were opening their economies up and Russia was being given free-market shock treatment. It was the high noon of liberalisation. Even so, completing the Uruguay round was no picnic. It took seven years and was only brought to a conclusion after the G7 took a hand at its 1993 summit in Tokyo. Few though would have suspected that the world would still be waiting for a successor to the Uruguay round two decades later.
There was no desire to launch another round immediately, and the priority by the end of the 1990s was to secure China's entry into the WTO, something that coincided with the launch of the Doha round in November 2001. But since then, there have been a number of developments that have made it much harder to secure an agreement. The first is the impact of the financial crisis and the recession that followed. This has made countries more inward-looking and cautious about opening up their markets to foreign competition.
A second has been rising energy prices, which have pushed up the cost of transporting goods around the world and made offshoring less attractive. A third has been the growing prosperity of China, where labour costs are still low in comparison with those in the west but not as low as they were a decade ago.
James Carrick, economist at Legal & General, says: "Since 2006, the ratio of global imports to production has moved sideways. In other words, a product bought today is using the same proportion of domestic and foreign components as a product bought six years ago. This is in sharp contrast to the prior two decades of globalisation, when more and more of the goods we bought were made overseas.
"The pause in import penetration has not just happened in weak economies like the UK and the euro area, but has been most pronounced in China – the strongest economy – as well as the relatively robust US." Carrick says closer integration of economies in the 1990s was associated with cheaper imports into the west from China and other emerging economies, so a stalling of globalisation can be expected to lead to higher global inflation.
The stalling may not be temporary. Technological trends suggest the world will become more integrated; political trends point in the opposite direction. In the west, globalisation is not associated with cheaper imports but with manufacturing jobs being lost to offshoring and service sector jobs threatened by cheap migrant labour. Few voters will be impressed by warnings from business groups that failure in Bali will mean throwing away the possibility of a $1tn boost to the global economy.
That's only partly because the $1tn figure is made up; it's also because the public now associates increased integration with falling wages and job insecurity. Precedent suggests that if there is a $1tn boost to the global economy on offer, the benefits will accrue to capital as higher profits rather than to labour in the form of higher pay or lower prices.
Free trade is seen as a racket dominated by a particular class interest. Unless that changes and the fruits are more equitably shared, the WTO will continue to stumble from crisis to crisis and globalisation will remain a dirty word.