The global financial crisis has swept all this away. Gordon Brown, famed as co-architect of the new global economy, was hailed as its saviour in April 2009 when the leaders of the world's largest economies met at a crisis summit in London. But this did not save him or New Labour in the May 2010 general election. Instead the new Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has to tell the country it faces a budget deficit of 12.8 percent of its GDP, the largest in the world for any major economy.

So what went wrong and are there any lessons for China in this latest British experience? In answer to the first question one can point to Britain's failure to make a clear distinction between globalization as a process, where countries make policy choices on how open they want their borders to be, and all those global issues, like climate change and nuclear security for which every country needs to take its share of responsibility. The former poses pragmatic choices, the latter moral imperatives.

Intoxicated by their adoption of a new global role, the British lost the sense of proportion and all things global became confused with each other. It would seem the trauma of loss of Empire still remains to be overcome. Could there be lessons for other powers in the post-imperial experience of globalization of that small island?

Perhaps the first lesson is that globalization does not in itself provide a national role or mission and cannot be equated with the national interest. And this applies to the most powerful country, even to a hegemonic world power like the US that has failed to understand that globalization is not Americanization. As early as the 19th century, American national poet Walt Whitman called America the "globe of globes".

Fortunately China is prepared by its history to resist the temptation to see the globe in the national image. Always the Middle Kingdom, it has never aspired to rule the world. And the philosophy of the "middle way", a pragmatism that avoids extremes, can serve it well in treating globalization for what it is: a process of social change like any other to be managed to the advantage of a country's citizens and for the welfare of humankind. The more testing challenges for the future will be how China defines its role on global issues. The world awaits its responses with growing anticipation.

The author is a senior visiting fellow at LSE Global Governance and emeritus professor of the University of Wales.