Ulrich Menzel
Ulrich Menzel (born July 21, 1947 in Düsseldorf) is a German political scientist. Biography. Menzel attended the Humboldt-Gymnasium Düsseldorf until his Abitur in 1967. He studied political science, history, philosophy, sociology and German studies in Düsseldorf, Cologne and Frankfurt am Main from 1969 to 1974. In 1978 he received his doctorate in Frankfurt with a dissertation on "The Chinese Development Model in Theory and Practice" under Dieter Senghaas. In 1982 he habilitated in political science, also in Frankfurt, with a thesis on "Autocentric Development despite World Market Integration". After completing his doctorate, he taught and researched in  the University of Bremen, University of Tokyo, Frankfurt, University of Duisburg and Braunschweig before being appointed to the Chair of International Relations and Comparative Government at the Institute of Social Sciences at the Technical University of Braunschweig in 1993. He served as Dean (1995-1997) and Vice President (2001-2003). From 2004 until his retirement in 2015, he was managing director of the Institute of Social Sciences. In 2009, a festschrift was published in his honor, and his overall work has been discussed by several authors: Menzel's teaching and research fields are the theory and history of the international  system, hegemony in world history, development theory, development politics and North-South relations, international political economy and peace and conflict studies. His regional interests lie mainly in East and Southeast Asia (especially China and Japan) and Europe. His major work, "Die Ordnung der Welt". "Imperium oder Hegemonie in der Hierarchie der Staatenwelt". (The Order of the World) was published in 2015. In the course of his research on globalisation, he provided a definition: globalisation is the intensification and acceleration of cross-border transactions with their simultaneous spatial expansion, or shorter is the compression of space and time. On the occasion  of the COVID-19 pandemic, he predicted the possible end of globalisation because the discourse of globalisation has become defensive.