Thinking about the legacy of his Fourteen Points speech that launched American power into the first world war, President Woodrow Wilson said it would “break the heart of the world” if that world could not be “safe for democracy”.
The project of peace without victory, indemnities or annexations, never did come to pass, and not only because Wilson didn’t have the US Senate votes to support the nascent League of Nations. It was also derailed by the steep rise in the 1920s and ’30s of anti-globalism — popular forces pursuing freedom and self-determination against the failures of imperial liberalism — that Wilson’s moralised vision could not restrain.
In Against the World, Tara Zahra, offers a panoramic history of how radical discontent with what is conventionally called globalisation, developed between the first and second world wars. Told through a series of short, deftly drawn chapters mixing cutting-edge scholarship with affectingly human stories and connections, a longer-term and very worldly backdrop to current concerns about democracy, deglobalisation, and the so-called “left behind”, comes into view.
Her argument has three strands. First, we see the rise of mass politics from the late 19th century to the first world war, an initially European phenomenon that goes global as international congresses and networks tried to fix the political coordinates of everything from female suffrage to trade disputes. In this world, migration was both promise (of a better life) and threat (to “traditional” gendered family values). Then, courtesy of the planned pursuit of economic control in Allied policies of wartime blockade, parts of the world were brought together as never before, while others were excluded from food and resources.
We then watch that world fracture, through contrasting responses to the influenza pandemic of 1918 and the legacies of wartime defeat; the closing of borders (Ellis Island went from reception centre to an alien internment camp); and the hypocrisies of the Versailles peace settlement that failed to deal with minority rights, conscripting mandated territories to follow models of statehood that permitted old imperial politics to continue under new international organisations such as the League of Nations.
Finally, we move into the deeply unsettled worlds of the late 1920s and the period following the Great Depression, where mirror images of globalism and anti-globalism pointedly connect, with some depressingly contemporary resonances.
Here, fascists such as Mussolini tried and failed to literally drain their own swamps, for population resettlement. Older “national socialist” ideas of autarchic settlement and internal colonisation of the homeland for the breeding of a healthy stock, were presented as hygienic native solutions to a war borne of the forces of imperialistic globalisation.
“Alimentary autarchy” became crucial and feeding the people (as well as breeding more of them) brought forth refashioned models of self-sufficiency and the good life. New versions of old peasant recipes were recast to match a return to “family” values, and migration was strictly controlled. Elsewhere garden cities, urban allotments, and new forms of housing appropriate to this, were vigorously debated.
Few people were more clear eyed about how reactionary it all sounded, than the Bolshevik, Leon Trotsky, who pointed out that 20 years earlier “all the school books” put the global division of labour and international competition as the driver of human development. By 1930, cries of “Homeward ho! Back to the national hearth”, were heard everywhere.
Few tracked the transition from antimilitarist internationalism to antisemitic anti-globalism more pointedly than Henry Ford. Believing that “money lenders” had provoked the first world war, the great automaker proposed to send a “peace ship” to neutral capitals, picking up delegates who supported world peace as best for business. Thereafter, he lent support to the views expressed in the antisemitic hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and agreed to Nazi demands that Ford use German parts for German products in its plants.
And in this new world where independence meant both spiritual renewal as well as economic self-sufficiency, few were more recognisable than Gandhi, whose focus on spinning and domestic khadi — hand-spun cloth — production was foundational to his sense of how self-determination both for India and for individual Indians, could be realised. It was an ideal he pressed on sceptical cotton workers in Lancashire, telling them to try the same if they wanted better working conditions.
As a brilliant historian of migration and of central Europe, it is no surprise that Zahra, who teaches at the University of Chicago, tracks so many of her concerns through the decline of the Habsburg empire and the ebb and flow of its migratory politics.
Before the Great war, Austria-Hungary was the world’s largest free-trading zone, dually sovereign, manifestly composite, impeccably modern and archaically traditional. It was both the “world of yesterday” brought vividly to life by novelist Stefan Zweig, but whose imperial pomp and circumstance were viciously mocked by contemporaries such as Karl Kraus and Robert Musil, as wholly unfit for purpose. Its disintegration into at least seven competing nation states and smaller territorial units, made it ground zero for experiments in a new world order, where hyperglobalisation and anti-globalism mixed unstably, as they continue to do.
Consider the didactic, megalomaniacal Czech shoe merchant Tomáš Bat’a, who flew his aeroplane from Zlín over Europe, the Middle East, and India, to establish vast production and supply networks with the ambition of shoeing the barefooted millions of the Indian subcontinent, soaring above Europe’s tariff walls below.
Bat’a made a fortune doing so until, like so many in Zahra’s story, he was tarred with the virulently conspiratorial brush of being part of a shadowy Jewish elite somehow in control of international finance, profiting from globalisation while others stagnated.
It has never been certain that democracy, markets, and nation-states, can reliably foster forms of globalisation that bring peace and profit rather than war and depravity. But it remains depressingly obvious just how pervasive the antisemitic lineaments of modern anti-globalism are, and there seems little to suggest their diminution any time soon.
Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars by Tara Zahra WW Norton £27.99, 400 pages
Duncan Kelly teaches political thought at the University of Cambridge
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