It was supposed to boost prosperity and democracy at the same time. What really happened? According to the legal scholar Anthea Roberts, it depends which story you believe.

Co-author of "Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters"

https://www.amazon.com/Six-Faces-Globalization-Loses-Matters...

> It may have been that they wanted to say that it was about democracy, but actually a lot of it was also just about their own economic interests, and now their understanding of their economic interests have changed.

Is the slightly more cynical way in which she puts it.

And I'd go further and say the way that globalization was carried out made certain people very rich at the expense of other people within their countries, so talking about countries as if they're a tight family that would never betray each other isn't helpful.

Oh, I read further and see that this is the "The left-wing populist" view, and it also seems to be the right-wing populist view too, if you remove the racist bit about immigrants and realise that what they are describing was what the right-wing pushed for and the left-wing pushed against, a warning which got ignored because people love a bit of racism and all those other things the left will wag their finger at.