[Review of Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics
Between the World Wars by Tara Zahra (W. W. Norton & Company, 2023). ]
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SEARCHING FOR AN ALTERNATIVE TO NEOLIBERALISM AND RIGHT-WING
NATIONALISM  
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Sean T. Byrnes
February 21, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Review of Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics
Between the World Wars by Tara Zahra (W. W. Norton & Company, 2023). _


Workers label tins at the Jacob's Biscuit factory in Aintree,
Liverpool, 1926., Topical Press Agency / Getty Images

 

Among the many things the tumultuous last half decade has demonstrated
is that “deglobalization” — the reduction of ties between
regions of the world — is a traumatic process. Whether in a willful
form like Brexit or through the temporary quarantines of the pandemic
era, unstitching political communities from global networks of trade
and commerce has had dramatic effects: inflation, political chaos,
stalled factories, empty shops, and increased poverty.

That Great Britain has become the most salient contemporary example of
this is, of course, deeply ironic. For it was Britain that was at the
forefront of the great wave of European and US imperialism that
oft-violently stitched our globalized world together in the first
place. This was what the English historian A. G. Hopkins aptly
described as the “enforced globalization” of empire. Its memory
has tarred subsequent attempts at globalization, even those unaided by
gunboats. Hostility toward globalization is compounded by the fact
that, though planetary divisions of labor and networks of exchange
have created great wealth in the aggregate, these gains are so
maldistributed that a relative few see most of the benefits.
Meanwhile, globe-spanning hierarchies of wealth and power undercut
democracy, even in the wealthiest countries, spawning a resentment
that often manifests as xenophobia and other dangerous forms of
political reaction.

If there is a bright side to these seemingly insuperable difficulties,
it is that they are not new. As Tara Zahra’s superb new book,
_Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World
Wars_ [[link removed]], reveals, the past
century provides no shortage of examples of people and communities —
well-intentioned and otherwise — wrestling with just these problems.
Though nothing like a map of the way forward, her history of the
twentieth century certainly shows many paths to avoid.

The Rise of Anti-Globalization

As her title suggests, Zahra’s focus is on the so-called
“interwar” period between World War I and World War II. This is an
age traditionally understood as an era of extremist nationalism and
great ideological battles between the left and right: communism and
fascism fighting against each other and against a liberalism staggered
by the horrors of the Great War and Depression. While not rejecting
these traditional narratives, Zahra provocatively reframes the period
as one also defined by a broad “revolt against globalism,” thanks
to “mounting tensions between globalization on the one hand and
equality, state sovereignty and mass politics on the other.” Doing
so allows her to break free of the restrictions that the nationalism
and ideology narrative imposes, imaginatively linking movements as
diverse as fascism, Austrian agrarianism, New Deal liberalism, and
Mahatma Gandhi’s anti-imperial _swadeshi_ movement into a capacious
social history that speaks powerfully to present dilemmas.

Though globalization was a centuries-old phenomenon, it had
accelerated in the 1880s as new technologies made transporting goods,
people, and ideas in large quantities easier than ever before. The
great powers of the age — Britain, France, the United States, and
Germany — either controlled much of the world directly, or otherwise
enforced relatively liberal trade policies that facilitated close
integration of markets and peoples. For those in the right circles, it
was a time of incredible optimism; it seemed a better future for
humanity was just around the corner.

Wealthy elites like the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig and the English
economist John Maynard Keynes zipped across Europe by train without
ever reaching for a passport, the goods of the world seemingly a phone
call away. Meanwhile “scientists, artists, social reformers and
policy makers gathered at great congresses to exchange ideas” about
improving the world, with international solidarity seemingly reaching
a fever pitch.

From the cheapest cabins and train cars, the world “looked quite
different.” For the less well-off, international travel was still
challenging, and usually a result of economic need rather than
pleasure. While globalization certainly offered a way of escaping
difficult local situations, such as for women in relatively more
patriarchal societies, it often provided a path from one form of
tyranny to another: from an arranged marriage in what is now Western
Ukraine to the time clocks and chained doors of Manhattan’s Triangle
Shirtwaist Factory.

Indeed, regardless of the material situation, globalization stoked
great cultural resentment. For all those who appreciated the chance to
escape the constraints of traditional culture, there were others
aghast at such a disruption of gender roles, worried over the
consequences of depopulation in the countries producing migrants, or
fearful of the impact of their arrival in the lands receiving them. In
colonial territories like India, these economic and cultural tensions
were further inflamed by a racially stratified hierarchy that, despite
the claims made by its apologists, was clearly meant to enrich Britain
before India.

There was, Zahra notes, “nothing . . . contradictory about the
synchronous rise of globalizing and anti-global policies and
politics” for they were “two sides of the same coin.” Yet, as
the nineteenth century became the twentieth, globalization seemed to
have the upper hand, retaining an air of inevitability no discontent
could dislodge. A global future held together by imperialism seemed
the only world on offer, whether one liked it or not — right up
until the outbreak of war in August 1914.

The Two Faces of Anti-Globalization

World War I shattered the myths of inevitability that surrounded the
liberal-imperial globalizing project, as the great powers rushed to
tear up the infrastructure of globalization “damming international
flows of people, supplies, and intelligence” in the hope of
weakening their enemies and sustaining themselves. Boycotts, tariffs,
and blockades unraveled intricate supply chains, messages that
traveled the world in hours in 1913 took weeks by 1920.

Shipping and insurance costs spiked and remained elevated after the
war, as did prices for goods in general. The downturn was so severe
that global trade as a whole would not reach prewar growth rates again
until the 1970s. Some deglobalizing consequences of the Great War
lasted even longer — passports were instituted as an ad-hoc wartime
measure only to be institutionalized when peace resumed; they remain a
feature of international life to this day.

The same goes for restrictions on immigration, another product of
interwar deglobalization. World War I does not deserve the blame for
this alone. In a painfully relevant discussion of the 1918 influenza
pandemic — often erroneously called the “Spanish” flu — Zahra
documents how fears of disease were intimately tied up in the
immigration restrictions of the postwar era, as supposedly temporary
quarantine measures were made permanent in laws (like the 1924
Johnson-Reed Act in the United States). Flu-related fears mixed with
older xenophobic ideas about immigrants as biological, political, and
cultural contagions — developing into particularly virulent form
when added to antisemitism.

Indeed, for hate-mongering anti-globalists of all stripes, antisemitic
tropes provided a deep well on which to draw. In the antisemitic
imaginary, “the Jew” was already a figure somehow stateless yet
deeply entrenched; weak and yet all powerful; politically radical and
yet also allied with elite wealth — a symbol easily deployed as a
stand-in for inchoate fears about the global order. Returning home to
Austria in 1919 from his wartime refuge in Switzerland, Zweig lamented
how a once routine train journey had become instead a grueling
“Arctic expedition” to “a different world.”

All told, the war and its aftermath altered the balance of power
between globalization and anti-globalization, giving new impetuousness
to those looking to move on from prewar patterns of international
integration. Few wanted to stop that integration altogether, looking
instead to “alter the terms on which globalization took place,”
rejecting the liberal-imperial framework established in the nineteenth
century.

On the Right, the focus was on restoring power to the nation,
rebuilding the sovereignty and self-reliance supposedly lost to a
globalizing order. Particularly salient for nationalists in Central
Europe was the memory of the Anglo-French “Hunger Offensive”
against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Cut off from global
food markets by the Royal Navy — in 1914, Germany, for example,
relied on trade for roughly a third of its total food supply — the
central powers suffered cruelly from starvation and malnutrition.

Even Italy, ostensibly one of the Great War’s victors, faced
significant food disruptions during the war. Promoting agricultural
self-reliance was a central part of the program of the Italian
Fascists following their assent to power in 1922. Large land
reclamation projects and a “wheat offensive” were part of a plan
to reverse the outflow of migrants that had marked Italy’s prewar
relationship with the world. “No longer” Mussolini promised, would
Italy “send the flowers of our race to faraway and barbaric
lands,” when they could be settled on reclaimed land at home.

On the Left, attention was instead on how a globalizing world
disadvantaged workers rather than nations, leaving them at the mercy
of international markets for labor and goods. In the Global South, the
labor and nationalist perspectives mixed to produce an anti-colonial
nationalism that rejected imperial globalization _and_ national
competition.

Jawaharlal Nehru insisted that Indian independence from Britain was
not about promoting isolation from the world, on the contrary, it
promised true liberation for all. “Internationalism,” he argued,
“can indeed only develop in a free country.” Gandhi agreed, though
he wished also to see India achieve greater self-reliance through
reliance on _swadeshi_ or the goods “of one’s country.” At the
heart of this was a rejection of clothing produced abroad — in
Britain especially — in favor of handspun textiles made at home.
This rough khadi cloth might mean the sacrifice of ease or comfort,
Gandhi admitted, but India could “not be free as long as India
voluntarily encourages . . . the economic drain” of imperial
globalization.

Prewar internationalism did not die out completely, at least not right
away. The 1919 Paris Peace Conference did all it could to reestablish
the old order with some minor changes. International trade revived
briefly in the 1920s, Zweig’s trains began to run on time again, as
he returned to a life of ease, arts, and travel that, for a moment,
seemed a restoration of the world before the war. But the prewar model
proved unstable yet again, collapsing in 1929 as the Great Depression
halted incipient re-globalization.

Tariff barriers reached new heights, global capital networks
unraveled, and international cooperation plummeted. Out-of-work
Austrians moved from Vienna to the countryside as part of a wave of
interest in “internal colonization,” establishing self-sufficient
agricultural homesteads on unsettled land. A similar fascination with
agricultural settlement impacted even the United States — quite
capable of producing enough of its own food — as both New Dealers
and anti–New Dealers explored the possibility of returning
industrial workers to farms. Henry Ford, for example, wanted his
workers to do both, turning to the family plot after a shift in the
auto plant (therefore avoiding the need for “handouts” from the
government).

Across the globe, from the United States to Ireland and from Germany
to India, the Depression spawned or deepened interest in
“autarky,” an ideal of national economic self-sufficiency, that
blended particularly well with right-wing nationalism. Few pursued it
with such zeal as Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime after their seizure of
power in 1933. Nazi autarky incorporated Italian-style internal
settlement, tariffs, boycotts, capital controls, antisemitism, and
xenophobia — fundamentally rejecting all of the old model of
globalization in pursuit of a Germany that would supposedly be immune
to the slings and arrows of the broader world.

Yet, as Gandhi warned — and Great Britain is discovering today —
greater self-sufficiency required sacrifice. Zahra documents how, over
and over, the rigors of deglobalizing were more than many could bear,
whether that meant the poor struggling with less necessities or the
rich with less luxury. In Austria and the United States, the spartan
life of agricultural settlement had little long-term appeal, and in
India, khadi proved unpopular with members of the laboring and
managerial classes alike. For nationalists in Italy, Japan, and
Germany, meanwhile, domestic resources proved insufficient to sustain
their militarist fantasies. One by one, each turned to conquest as a
solution, a form of violent re-globalization on nationalist terms that
soon triggered another world war.

It’s impossible in a review of this, or any, length to do justice to
the richly layered tapestry Zahra weaves in the book, an in-depth
illustration of a troubled age. More than that, her story helps
explain the broader narrative of global history in the twentieth
century, how the world transitioned from liberal-imperial
globalization of the prewar era to the attempt at a managed
globalization under the Bretton Woods regime that followed World War
II. The latter, as Zahra notes, tried to balance the aggregate
productivity benefits of globalization with the interests of
individual nations and their understandable desire to protect their
own citizens and economies from the changeable whims of global trade
and finance.

Bretton Woods too, of course, failed, if less spectacularly than its
predecessors, leaving us with the neoliberal (and, arguably,
neo-imperial) order of the present. This represents something of a
reversion to the world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries — and its problems: a global economy growing wealthier in
the aggregate as the average individual grows poorer; an international
community that pays lip service to democracy even as large swaths of
the population lack power over the financial and commercial
institutions that shape their lives.

Reading _Against the World_ against the backdrop of the present makes
it hard not to conclude that the path forward lies not in more
deglobalization — or more globalization — but in more justice.

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Sean T. Byrnes is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in middle
Tennessee. He is the author of Disunited Nations: US Foreign Policy,
Anti-Americanism, and the Rise of the New Right, from LSU Press.

 

* Globalism vs Antiglobalism; World History; Interwar Period;
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