Every trade conference I have attended this year has had a panel with deglobalisation in the title. The panellists agree it is happening, disagree on how fast, and go home. I would like to suggest, as politely as a columnist can, that the word is wrong, and that using it leads companies and governments to the wrong decisions.
Trade is not shrinking. It is taking the long way round.
The boxes have not stopped
Start with the most physical measure we have. The container lanes our data desk tracks for the Break Freight Index carried more boxes last year than the year before, and more again in the first half of this one. Rates are falling, as Maren Okafor reported this week, but that is because the shipyards delivered too many ships, not because the world has stopped filling them.
The distance those boxes travel has grown faster than their number. Our own rough tally of tonne-miles on the main container lanes, which weighs each cargo by how far it goes, rose by more than the volume did. Ships are carrying slightly more, for considerably longer. That is a peculiar way for globalisation to die.
A world that was genuinely deglobalising would show it at the quay. Cranes would stand idle. Depots would fill with empties that nobody wanted. That is not what I see when I walk the terminals, and I walk a lot of them.
Longer routes, more borders
What has changed is the route. Tariffs, sanctions and the fear of both have pushed manufacturers to put a new country between the old supplier and the old customer. A component that once went from a factory in one country straight to an assembly line in another now stops somewhere in between to be finished, relabelled or built into something larger.
Hendrik van Arkel runs a pump maker near Eindhoven that I have known for twenty years. Five years ago his electric motors came from one supplier by one ship. Today the windings are made in one country, the motor is assembled in a second, and it is fitted to a housing cast in a third before it reaches him.
"My supply chain did not get shorter," he told me. "It got a passport full of stamps."
Multiply that across a few hundred thousand firms and you get more border crossings, more customs declarations, more handling at more ports and more tonne-miles at sea. That is the opposite of retreat. It is a more complicated, more expensive version of the same integration.
What the word hides
The problem with deglobalisation is not pedantry. Words shape budgets. A government that believes trade is shrinking will not invest in customs systems, inland terminals or the dredging of its rivers. A company that believes it is bringing production home will not hire the trade compliance staff it now needs in three new jurisdictions.
The costs of the detour are real, and they fall in awkward places. Rules of origin get harder to prove when a product has four stops in its history. Small exporters, who cannot afford a compliance department, lose out to large ones who can. Ports in the new in-between countries are running out of room while the old gateways argue about overcapacity. None of this looks like a quiet world trading less. It looks like a crowded one trading differently.
The map got longer. The world did not get smaller.
A better word
I have tried a few. Rerouting is accurate but dull. Fragmentation sounds like something breaking, which is only half the story. The one I use in my own notes is re-wiring: the same current, carried along more wires, with more junctions where it can fail.
It is less dramatic than deglobalisation, and it will never headline a conference. It does, however, tell a finance director what to spend on: more suppliers, more paperwork, more buffer stock, more patience with customs. It tells a port authority to build for transhipment rather than decline. And it tells anyone forecasting shipping demand that the ships are still going to sea, just for longer.
The next time a panel asks me whether globalisation is over, I intend to answer with a container number and a tracking map. The box is still moving. It has simply learned a few more languages on the way.
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