The globalization backpack on our children back - october 2025

I feel deeply honored to be among you tonight — and, frankly, not entirely sure I deserve such a special space in such a special gathering.

Thank you, Fiona. It truly means the world to be considered up to this task.

And let me confess: there is another very dear person to me in this room, someone who makes this evening even more special — a woman I value not only for her depth of judgment but, above all, for the strength of her character. She is Cherie Blair, and I will never thank her enough for having helped me, as a true friend, to overcome a dangerous prejudice — the idea that my professional work could not continue normally once my husband became Prime Minister.

Dear friends,

In a gathering as meaningful as this, it would make little sense to lecture anyone here about globalization — about what works and what doesn’t. But perhaps it makes sense to share the thoughts that the question “Are we still living in the age of globalization?” awakens in someone like me, who has crossed the tunnel of communism.

I was 28 years old when I first crossed the border and left my small country. The same age when I first used my Essential English textbook to speak with a foreigner; when I held my first American dollar bill and made my first currency exchange; when I entered a library filled with great foreign books.

It was 1992. I had just seen the light at the end of a very long tunnel. Our greatest dream was freedom — freedom to move, to vote, to speak, to believe or not believe in God, to work. The dream of freedom had taken us entirely, though we did not yet know what to do with it, or what it would bring into our lives.

At that very moment, the developed free world was chasing its own great dream — globalization. A world beyond the end of history: no ideologies, no walls, no borders — greater freedom and better living.

The memory of war and the wounds of deep divisions made the desire for unity and peace even stronger among nations. So, while we were escaping communism and dreaming of joining your world, you were dreaming of a global village — and rapidly realizing it. Fair to say, neither of us was fully aware of what awaited both.

For someone born in a country that has always produced more history than it could digest, the end of history felt like a blessing — and the opening of the ways, seas, and skies to rejoin your civilization, like a miracle.

Today, I know more. We all know more.

And although I would never go back, the comeback of history — with its turbulent seas and stormy skies — makes the way ahead far less reassuring than it once seemed.

We know the advantages globalization has brought to nations and humanity. It has connected humankind in previously unimaginable ways. Economies produce more, better, and cheaper — reaching even many of those who, without globalization, would have struggled to survive. Innovation flourishes through global collaboration in science and technology, bringing major breakthroughs in medicine, renewable energy, and communication. Music, film, and art travel freely, carrying talents, sounds, and stories across cultures — helping us understand and know one another better. Communication is faster and more pervasive than ever; cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and online interaction have deepened digital integration beyond anything we had ever imagined.

These are the advantages that allow even a small country like Albania to feel and act boundless — like its daughter Mother Teresa, who once said:“By blood I am Albanian. By citizenship, Indian. As to my calling, I belong to the world. ”She reminded us that identity is not a wall but a bridge; that belonging, when shared, does not diminish — it multiplies. Equally boundless are the works of Ismail Kadare, our great writer translated into more than 45 languages, and of Albanians like Dua Lipa, Ermonela Jaho, Mira Murati and many others, who have reached the summits of global art, science, and technology.

Without the benefits of globalization, Albania’s natural beauty would have remained isolated. Twelve million visitors came last year to a country of fewer than three million inhabitants. Every encounter, every shared meal, every photograph taken on our shores, mountains or among our cultural sites is Albania rediscovering its place in global history. Likewise, our European integration — reaffirmed in every international forum and supported by the overwhelming majority of Albanians at home and abroad — would have remained confined within fading dreams, had we not shared in the relentless forward motion that globalization brought.

But we also know that this “beautiful illusion that ran faster than its own heart,” as someone once described it, is not dead — merely “unraveling, undermined by its own contradictions,” as another rightly observed. Today, political globalization appears severely fragmented; the legitimacy of global institutions is dangerously questioned; poverty and inequality stubbornly persist; geopolitical rivalries are sharply rising; isolationist tendencies are reemerging; nationalist dreams are resurfacing; wars are spreading their impact beyond their borders; anti-migrant movements are growing; achieved rights are being eroded; social media and digital life disorient us; and uncertainty dominates the virtual world we inhabit daily, where our data vanish into a darkness we cannot see.

In 2025, what we once saw as humanity’s greatest story of progress is now doubted and daily bombarded with questions — while insecurities of every kind increase stress, anxiety, and intergenerational tension.

The reasons are surely broader than my capacity to grasp — but drawing from our communist and pre-communist past and last three decades of transition, I would pause on one crucial factor: We have not yet learned how to live and behave globally in these new circumstances.  We couldn’t have known how — and we still don’t know enough.

As globalization expanded its territories, our reflection and learning should have expanded too. But both reflection and learning have been insufficient when measured against the vast scale of globalization’s growth. Even though thinkers and researchers reach us today more easily through social media, podcasts, and countless programs, we still listen too little to philosophers, economists, sociologists, psychologists, technologists, linguists, or doctors. We listen even less to ordinary people and their daily struggles.

And so, we try to manage an extremely complex and dynamic world with the practices, beliefs, and constraints of the past — instead of understanding, learning, and adapting together with it.

Are we still living in the age of globalization?

Yes, we are — because, as Tony Blair said, “Globalization is not a choice; it is a reality.”

To close, while preparing these words, I couldn’t help but draw a parallel between today’s globalization stage— full of challenges and questions — and school backpack of Zaho, my 11-year-old son. Do you remember how, in our generation, school bags were carried by hand — and that’s why they were called “school handbags”? Today, no child carries a schoolbag by hand. They all wear them on their backs because over the years, little by little the school bags became larger, heavier, and so big that no little child can carry them otherwise. And so, our children go to and from school every day bent under the weight.Do you know why? Because in that backpack, on that child back, lie both the past and the present. Inside the backpack is the iPad or personal computer and also the traditional textbooks, the digital pencil and the pencil case full of other pencils, the calculator and the squared notebook where math logic is learned as in the old days, the notebooks for notes in each subject and notebooks of homework as before. In school, there are teachers who still do not know where the past ends and the present begins in their educational methods and behaviors — while they themselves must become students again to keep up with digital change.

And there are we, the parents, panicking about the mystery of the future, endlessly applying the rules of the past.

That is the backpack of globalization on Zaho’s shoulders — full of limitless opportunities to learn, yet heavy, confusing, and at times chaotic. We all carry that same backpack today. This is the backpack of globalization.

Dear Friends,

It is right to be deeply concerned when we see day-to-day decisions challenging the principles and goals of globalization’s original dream. But we should not be alarmed by its slowing down. That slowdown may actually be a gift — giving us time to reflect, to make the journey lighter, clearer, less stressful, and easier to carry for our children.

Thank you.