Before World War I, globalization was at a high point. Advances in technology, including the steamship and the telegraph, allowed people, goods and news to cross borders with extraordinary speed. Migration boomed. The economist John Maynard Keynes, conjuring an Edwardian version of Amazon, recalled how “the inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.” After drinking his tea (from India), sweetened by sugar (from Jamaica), that Londoner might later enjoy toast (made from wheat grown in Kansas), butter (from New Zealand), beef (from Argentina) and oranges (from Palestine).
Many people believed that this kind of internationalism was irreversible and that the interdependence of the global economy would guarantee peace and prosperity, even if it was also unsettling. It was an age, Keynes said, in which, to the Londoner, “the projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper.”
At the end of the 20th century, the world experienced the second great acceleration of globalization. Communism collapsed. The European Union expanded. Soon, China joined the world trading system. Migration once again surged. Today over 15 percent of people living in America were born abroad, surpassing a previous high of 14.8 percent in 1890. As was true then, many observers a century later saw globalization as an unstoppable and inherently positive force. The great-grandchildren of that Londoner, drinking their Indian tea in bed, followed world news on TikTok and had toast (topped with Mexican avocados) delivered to their doorstep, using phones designed in California and assembled in China.
Both moments of peak globalization came crashing down, in epochal, generation-defining ways. In 1913 the value of exported goods made up 14 percent of the world economy. By 1933, shattered by World War I and the Great Depression, it had slumped to 6 percent, and it did not recover until the 1970s. The backlash propelled the rise of right-wing authoritarian and fascist movements that promised to reverse or seize control of the forces of globalism. It ended in a catastrophic world war.
In our own time, the Covid pandemic, like World War I, killed millions of people and disrupted global trade and migration. Coupled with the long tail of the 2008 financial crisis, it helped antiglobal populists sweep elections around the world. America voted for Donald Trump again. Barriers, both financial and physical, are rising, capped in spectacular style by Mr. Trump’s plan to wall off America from the rest of the world with tariffs not seen in a century.
And now what? The lessons of history suggest several possibilities, many of them bad. Our current antiglobal moment could last for a long time. Illiberalism is alive and strong. Comparisons that once seemed incendiary or irresponsible now seem obvious. As in the 1930s, minority groups are being scapegoated as symbols and causes of globalization’s ills. For Jews then, read migrants or trans people now. Mr. Trump’s imminent betrayal of Ukraine suggests that we are moving rapidly through the 1930s and have already arrived in 1938. That’s when Western leaders in Munich decided to allow Hitler to dismember one of Europe’s few remaining democracies, Czechoslovakia. It was not worth risking lives over “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing,” reasoned the dangerously reasonable Neville Chamberlain. Less than one year later, Hitler browbeat the president of what remained of Czechoslovakia into accepting a complete occupation of his country.
There is room to argue about how much Mr. Trump and other right-wing leaders oppose globalization in its entirety. After all, they certainly cooperate with one another. As Quinn Slobodian has pointed out, capital has continued to flow across borders with relative ease. Jennifer Mittelstadt has argued that Mr. Trump may be better seen as a “sovereigntist” than an antiglobalist, seeking to impose American power over international institutions. That suggests today’s populist and authoritarian leaders seek globalization on their own terms, rather than isolation.
But it is undeniable that free trade and the free movement of people, two phenomena that made America rich and powerful, have come under intense and sustained political attack and that resentment about globalization has been a critical force in the rise of the global right. The echoes from the first third of the 20th century are loud and clear. So what can we learn about the current moment from the first collapse of globalization? Will it take a third world war to turn this ship around? Or are there other, less ominous possibilities?
Many writers and intellectuals in the 1920s and ’30s looked back on the era before World War I with nostalgia. “Before 1914, the earth had belonged to all,” the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, a self-described citizen of the world, wrote in his memoir. “There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I traveled from Europe to India and to America without a passport and without ever having seen one.” After the war, everything changed. Zweig linked the bureaucratic humiliations faced by travelers to a loss of human dignity and the lost dream of a united world. The requirement to carry a passport, introduced as a temporary wartime measure, was never lifted.
Zweig and Keynes were among the most famous analysts of the changes brought by World War I. They both understood that the golden era of globalization was at an end. At the same time, their nostalgia for a lost world contains clues about its downfall. Both men were myopic about the extent to which the freedoms they associated with globalization were the privileges of a narrow elite. The earth did not belong to everyone before 1914. It did, however, belong to people like Keynes and Zweig.
Wealthy, highly educated, white, European men could travel the world freely. They did not have to worry about the meddlesome interference of husbands, fathers or state authorities. In steerage, things looked very different. Migrants headed toward the United States around 1900 were subjected to the poking and prodding of doctors charged with excluding sick, disabled and “undesirable” migrants. Chinese people were categorically excluded. Millions of people in the world lived in deep poverty, denied political sovereignty and exploited economically for the benefit of Europeans, North Americans and residents of other empires. Sound familiar?
The rise of globalization in the late 19th century, like its contemporary counterpart, had clear winners and losers. If migrants themselves received higher wages, other workers often lost jobs or income because of competition with newcomers. While industrializing economies profited from inexpensive migrant labor, countries that were exporting their citizens worried about losing their best and brightest. Less expensive imports could be a boon to consumers but hurt many local producers. Even if free trade and migration benefited all economies in the aggregate, as many economists argue, it did not distribute those benefits evenly. In the United States and Germany, local shoemakers complained they could not compete with imports from interwar Czechoslovakia made by an anti-union shoe company. In 1929 a representative of the German shoemakers’ association complained about working conditions in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, where shoes were produced, “that are unthinkable in the civilized world.”
These disruptions collided with the rise of popular politics. That meant that people who were hurt or who felt hurt by globalization had opportunities to express their discontent at the ballot box or on the streets. For political parties and politicians, there were votes to be gained from campaigning against real and imagined forces associated with globalization, such as the gold standard, free trade, immigrants and Jews, who were frequently scapegoated as its agents.
Two additional shocks intensified antiglobal sentiments. The first of these was the war, which brought trans-Atlantic migration to a virtual standstill and severely hampered trade. Dependence on imports suddenly became an Achilles’ heel, one that the Allies eagerly exploited. In 1915 they imposed a naval blockade on the Central Powers that prevented food and critical supplies from reaching Germany and Austria-Hungary. Whatever the death toll, which is still being debated by historians, Germans and Austrians blamed the blockade for their loss of the war and the deaths of millions of people. The lesson they took into the postwar era was that they should never again be dependent on imports for food or basic supplies. During the war, Austrians and Germans began to plant potatoes under train tracks and raise goats on their balconies.
Economic independence became a goal in democracies and dictatorships, empires and colonies, small states and large. The Austrian architect Adolf Loos, a Social Democrat, was an early advocate. He observed that what was once considered Austrian cuisine actually comprised foods from across the Austro-Hungarian Empire: potato dumplings from Bohemia, schnitzel from the Italian-speaking borderlands, sweet cakes from Moravia. Now that the empire had dissolved into nation-states, it was necessary for Austrians to “create our own national cuisine” consisting solely of “local foods.”
Mussolini’s first great Fascist initiative was the Battle for Grain, inaugurated in 1925. “Today we are economically slaves of those who give us coal, slaves of those who give us wheat,” he declared. Italians would have understood that he meant “slaves” of the United States, which supplied Italy with more than 1.5 million tons of coal and 60 million bushels of wheat in 1921.
Italy’s traditional solution to overpopulation and unemployment had been emigration. But in 1924 the United States instituted a racist quota system that severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. That meant that new sources of work and sustenance had to be found. If mass migration created problems, so did the sudden closing of borders, which exacerbated the turn inward.
Mussolini wanted to transform would-be emigrants into farmers who would cultivate Italy’s swamplands. His campaign was immortalized with photos of the bare-chested Duce working the harvest in sun-kissed fields of wheat. In 1931, laws stipulated that bread and pasta had to be made from at least 95 percent Italian-grown wheat. A Fascist-era cookbook explained, “A people cannot be strong and dominate when it is dependent on others for food.”
Thanks to the Johnson-Reed Act, which restricted immigration, Ellis Island no longer needed to process millions of immigrants and was repurposed as a detention center for migrants awaiting deportation. The Ku Klux Klan was on the rise in the 1920s in the North and Midwest, as well as the South, targeting Jews, immigrants and Black people. Anti-Bolshevist fears were linked to myths about a global conspiracy of Jews. Prohibitionism fed on anti-Catholic sentiment. And, of course, the United States refused to join the League of Nations.
“Looking at Europe, from the British Isles to the Balkans, one is forced to the admission that after 12 years of the League of Nations, the International Court,” the American journalist Dorothy Thompson observed from Berlin in 1931, as well as “multilateral treaties, Kellogg Pacts, the International Bank and disarmament conferences, the whole world is retreating from the international position and is taking its dolls and going home.”
A more severe wave of antiglobalism followed the collapse of the global economy in the 1930s. People around the world learned the hard way that their lives could be destroyed by an economic crisis in Vienna or New York. Even the British Empire began to turn away from the gospel of free trade, relying instead on empire trade, which meant preferential treatment within its territories and dominions.
A popular solution was to return to the land. A 1933 Wall Street Journal advertisement urged readers to “buy an abandoned farm and live on trout and applejack until the upturn!” Henry Ford spread lies about Jews as agents of global finance and insisted that his workers keep subsistence gardens to grow their own food.
The Nazi Party also campaigned against globalization and liberal internationalism. The party’s early platform promised to protect small-business owners and artisans against those it scapegoated, including purportedly Jewish internationalist department and chain stores. Hitler strongly rejected both imports and international law. “The global economy is broken and will never again exist in its past form,” proclaimed one Nazi official.
Fascist and Nazi campaigns for self-sufficiency failed — as history shows repeatedly, countries that aim for autarky usually fail — and that made everything worse. German and Italian peasants and workers could not produce enough wheat, oil, wool or rubber to secure a high standard of living. One solution was to try to manufacture goods that were once imported. Both nations also turned to seizing land and resources through conquest. Hitler envied the United States for having built a continental empire vast and rich enough to provide for its population — even at the cost of millions of Indigenous lives. This was precisely the kind of empire he wanted for Germany. Poland, the Baltic States and parts of the U.S.S.R. would become Germany’s Wild East. Mussolini wanted to build a new Roman Empire in Libya and Ethiopia.
Is this where we are headed? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a déjà vu moment for historians of World War II. Will Greenland and Canada become the next Czechoslovakia and Poland?
Just as interwar antiglobalism did not spring out of nowhere in 1918, our antiglobal moment did not begin in 2024. One of the first signs of trouble was in 1999, when the World Trade Organization held its ministerial conference in Seattle. The delegates were confronted with tens of thousands of antiglobalization demonstrators, who had organized in part via the internet. The global economic crisis of 2008 did not lead to a second Great Depression, but it did devastate individual livelihoods and challenge people’s faith in the stability and fairness of global capitalism.
Domestic oil production more than doubled in the United States from 2010 to 2020, as fracking sustained a drive toward energy independence. In 2015 and ’16 a global refugee crisis prompted several European governments to resort to inhumane measures to deter and repel migrants from the Middle East and Africa. Mr. Trump, Brexit and populist regimes around the world sailed to success on antimigrant platforms almost a decade ago. Technology limited the rate of global communication in the 1920s and ’30s and may play a similar role today, through censorship, misinformation and the fragmentation of the population into political silos.
The Covid pandemic shocked and transformed the world beyond recognition, just as World War I altered the trajectory of the 20th century. The pandemic, which spread with lightning speed, thanks to global mobility, caused a sudden and shocking disruption of global trade, travel and work. People with means fled cities to work remotely. The pandemic revealed the fragility of economies dependent on imports for basic supplies. Shortages and snarled supply chains prompted governments and companies to consider moving operations closer to home, onshoring rather than offshoring production.
At the end of World War I there was rapid inflation, intensified by supply-chain breakdowns, which caused famines, riots and political upheaval. Similarly, the global inflationary shock that began at Covid’s end boosted Mr. Trump’s most recent presidential campaign and was an important political force globally. Incumbents lost around 70 percent of elections around the world from 2022 to 2024.
It might sound like a good time to build a bunker (using locally sourced steel). Instead, if we want to avoid the catastrophic outcome of globalization’s first collapse, we have other options, if we choose to embrace them. Most important, we need to address one of the fundamental byproducts of globalization, which is inequality.
Writing in 1944, Karl Polanyi, a Hungarian social scientist, argued that the rise of fascism was not a consequence of the Great War, the Treaty of Versailles, German militarism or Italian temperament. It was, rather, a response to the indignities imposed by economic liberalism and globalization. “Fascism was an ever-given political possibility, an almost instantaneous emotional reaction in every industrial community since the 1930s,” he wrote. Making the world safe for both globalization and democracy would require new measures to protect human dignity from the market.
Between the wars, fascist regimes expanded their social welfare programs. This was often done with racist and eugenic goals in mind, including financial bonuses for Aryan babies produced by German women. But it is hardly a coincidence that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs expanded the welfare state at the same time. Notwithstanding Roosevelt’s occasional antidemocratic tendencies, his success might have kept the American far right at bay when it was ascendant in Europe.
After World War II, few wanted to return to the old system. Addressing the inequities spun off by unchecked globalization was fundamental to postwar planning in the late 1940s, and it worked. Economists and politicians attempted to create what the historian Elizabeth Borgwardt has called a “New Deal for the World.” The Bretton Woods Agreement, signed in 1944, created international bodies such as the World Bank, which were intended to support development and decrease inequality. The agreement also reformed the international monetary system to allow states to participate in international trade while retaining greater control of their currencies and domestic economies. Policies that aimed at full employment, greater consumption and an expanded welfare state sought to carry people through shocks in the business cycle, create a safety net and address domestic inequality (without compromising democracy).
Many of these policies were undermined by the Cold War, but they helped to sustain a period of relative stability and growth between 1950 and 1970. And then the combination of deindustrialization and the rise of neoliberalism in the late 20th century — a package of ideas revolving around free trade, free flow of capital across borders, multinational corporations and international supply chains — turbocharged globalization anew. That increased inequality and simultaneously dismantled the international safety nets created after World War II. The reaction was predictable: the resurgence of an anti-immigrant far right in the United States and Europe.
This time around, it should not require the destruction of democracies and the death of 70 million people for us to realize that the current architecture of globalization needs change.
Of course, history demonstrates that there are unpredictable consequences to our actions. One takeaway from the first era of antiglobalism is that any effort to stop globalization will generate other forms of it. In the 1920s and ’30s, companies like the Bat’a shoe manufacturer in Czechoslovakia responded to high tariffs by shipping factories overseas instead of shoes. It employed local labor and advertised itself as a local company.
Internationalists did not pack up and go home, either. Experts in the League of Nations worked to create mechanisms to facilitate travel and trade in a more fractured world. Would-be migrants might have been deterred by mounting restrictions, but many temporary workers, fearing that they would not be able to come and go freely, settled permanently in their new homes and brought family members to join them.
None of this can happen unless we reckon seriously with the suffering and inequality that has been caused by global migration, as well as the benefits. Salvaging globalism would require caring about the welfare of the losers in Ohio and Pennsylvania as well as the winners in Manhattan and Silicon Valley. That could take many forms (Hint: A return to traditional gender roles on settlement homesteads is not the answer, however enticing it may seem on Instagram.)
Contemporary equivalents of the post-World War II settlement might include revamping the defunct international trade system (call it Bretton Woods II); more social spending in the United States, especially to address soaring health care, child care and housing costs; skills-based migration; and reducing the cost of vocational training and higher education.
Hopefully it will not take World War III to get us there. Hopefully we will not end up in a world in which we are further divided, isolated and estranged from one another. Hopefully we will not need to grow potatoes under train tracks or raise goats on our balconies. But it is clear that resolving tensions between globalization and equality is one of the most urgent tasks of our time and that our future rests upon it.
Tara Zahra is a professor of history at the University of Chicago and the author of “Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars.”
The post Globalization Is Collapsing. Brace Yourselves. appeared first on New York Times.
