Does cross-border trade bring people closer together?
The hope for it is about as old as human civilization.
The trade routes of the Mycenaean culture (1500 to 1100 BC) stretched from the Aegean through Crete, Cyprus, modern-day Turkey and Lebanon to Palestine and Egypt.
The oil extracted from the olive trees of Crete was exported in large cans to all directions of the world.
Prosperity and progress were the fruits of this global world order.
Rainer Hank
Freelance author in the business section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.
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Today, roughly 3,500 years later, we are in the process of throwing the idea of “change through trade” into the (green) bin: “That was wrong”, pure “illusion”, that’s how succinctly the German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock put it that merely reflects the cultivated zeitgeist.
As if it were a new discovery: Measured by "Western values", many of the countries in the world with which we trade are quite rogue.
However, it is now said that there should be no economic activity with villains.