A worker labels products at a healthcare facility in Singapore. (AFP)

Singapore, March 5: This shimmering city-state was the house globalisation built.

When world trade boomed, Singapore’s seaport at the crossroads of East and West became like Chicago’s ’Hare airport of freighters and supertankers. Singapore Airlines took off despite serving a country with no domestic air routes. Nearly everything manufactured here is made for export. One out of every three workers is a foreigner.

But as the world enters a period of deglobalisation, Singapore is a window into the reversal of the forces that brought unprecedented global mobility to goods, services, investment and labour. With world trade plummeting for the first time since 1982, the long-bustling port has become a maritime parking lot in recent weeks, with rows of idled freighters from Asia, Europe, the US, South America, Africa and West Asia stretching for miles along the coast.

“We’re running out of space to park them,” said Ron Widdows, chief executive of Singapore-based NOL, one of the world’s largest container lines.

Thousands of foreign workers, including London School of Economics graduates with six-digit salaries and desperately poor Bangladeshi factory workers, are streaming home as the economy here suffers the worst of the recessions in southeast Asia. Singapore is an epicentre of what analysts call a new flow of reverse migration away from hard-hit, globalised economies, including Dubai and Britain, that were once beacons for foreign labour.

Economists from Credit Suisse predict an exodus of 200,000 foreigners by the end of 2010. Singapore’s exports collapsed by a stunning 35 per cent in January, mirroring much of the rest of Asia. The export boom here was tied to credit-fuelled buying sprees in the US that stopped abruptly and may take years to return, if ever. Manufacturers are grasping for a Plan B. But none of the options — mining domestic markets, or trying to tap consumers in still-growing China and India — offers a truly viable solution.

Adding to fears of a years-long depression for exports is a rising tide of trade protectionism in countries including neighbouring Indonesia.

The scene in this port city — along with a glimpse inside two of its reeling neighbours in export-dependent southeast Asia — illustrates the ebbing of a golden age of trade, innovation, wealth accumulation and poverty reduction through globalisation.

“The collapse of globalisation... is absolutely possible,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a noted American economist. “It happened in the 20th century in the wake of World War I and the Great Depression, and could happen again. Nationalism is rising and our political systems are inward looking, the more so in times of crisis.”