TITLE: UNCERTAIN LONDON

London is the city that globalization created, or recreated.

It is the multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic urban face of what probably the new century was going to look like, what the world was becoming. It is the bustling city-state that primes the pump of the global financial system, a stage for global culture and sport, the noisy bullhorn of a globally powerful media. It is arguably more connected to New York, Moscow and Milan than Manchester.

Yet now London is the canary in the coalmine. With Brexit looming, with a political backlash mounting against globalization and populism sweeping from Britain to America to Continental Europe, what happens to London in the coming years is going to tell us a great deal about the fate of the interconnected, globalized world.

After the Big Bang in the 1980s when Britain loosened regulation, London quickly emerged as a global financial center, on par with New York and Hong Kong. It is now the financial soul of Europe and beyond, providing the capital and infrastructure that helps French farmers plant crops, Saudi Arabian oil sheiks invest overseas, African finance ministers fund growth, and the Chinese government to diversify.

It became a cliché in Britain that London is another country from everywhere else. Londoners are now openly talking about having a different visa regime from the rest of Britain, even a different immigration policy. On the fringe, some are even talking about secession from England and forming some quasi-governmental alignment with England. A good bit of this may end of being noise, but London is undeniably at a defining moment.

AUTHOR: Sergey Ponomarev (Russian Federation)