The economic retreat from globalization

"Against the World

By Tara Zahra

Norton, 352 pages, $35

When the historian Tara Zahra began to write her book "Against the World," she tells us, Donald Trump had just been elected president, and the Brits had bolted from the European Union in a vote for Brexit. There was a migration and refugee crisis in the West, and populist parties with nativist platforms were winning elections across Europe. Not long after, a global pandemic killed millions, leading nations to set up barriers to entry.

It was a time when our faith in a stable international order was genuinely tested. And given the actions of an abrasive China, the premises of global comity are still under severe interrogation. "The future of globalization," Ms. Zahra writes, "seems very uncertain." The world, she suggests, is unrecognizable from the way it was at the end of the Cold War, when the Westerners believed that "opening borders to capital and goods" would lead inevitably to democracy and prosperity.

Ms. Zahra is a professor of East European history at the University of Chicago. Her previous work, "The Great Departure" (2016), was a wise and provocative study of the mass migration out of Eastern Europe to America between 1846 and 1940. In her new book, she sets out to examine antiglobalism and nationalist politics between the two world wars, the first of which brought a long and lively era of international trade and immigration to a shuddering halt. "Before 1914," wrote the Austrian-Jewish novelist Stefan Zweig, "the earth belonged to all." After the war, nothing was the same. In Zweig's words (cited by Ms. Zahra): "The world was on the defensive against strangers." Ms. Zahra believes that, by understanding this period better, we can defuse the unresolved tensions between globalism and democracy in our own time.

"Against the World," Ms. Zahra tells us, "reframes" the history of interwar Europe (and to some extent America) as a contest over "the future of globalization and globalism." This perspective takes us beyond the conventional depictions of that period as a tussle between democracy and dictatorship. The revolt against globalism that ensued between 1914 and 1939 was the product, she says, of two developments: "the acceleration of globalization itself, and the rise of mass politics."

The pace with which globalization had occurred was more a function of rapidly improving technology than of any concerted philosophical embrace of internationalism. "Trains, steamships, telegraphs, postal services and press dispatches," Ms. Zahra writes, "transported goods, people, information and diseases at unprecedented speed and in once unfathomable quantities." Banking and finance grew to be more global through the gold standard, which ensured a stable international rate of exchange. Farm workers in Poland, we learn, were aware of higher wages in the American Midwest ("and prepared to cross the ocean to earn them"), and shoe factories in Massachusetts competed with companies in Czechoslovakia. Advances in refrigeration put Argentine beef on European plates.

By 1910 Britain was importing eight times more food than it did in 1850, and as of 1914 -- that fateful year, when war broke out -- Germany relied on imports for a third of its food. This put it in a position of caloric vulnerability: Once the war began, Britain used its naval power to prevent food from reaching the German people. Memories of extreme wartime hunger, followed by the humiliations heaped on the Germans by the Treaty of Versailles -- which led, Ms. Zahra writes, to Germany's "involuntary deglobalization," or exclusion from the global economy -- turbocharged the rise of those who advocated autarky and self-sufficiency, most notably the Nazis.

European fascists "capitalized on" antiglobal politics, peddling "the perception that the global economy was rigged." Jews in particular became "lightning rods" for the paranoia surrounding globalization." They also became "emblems of globalization" as a "nomadic" people "without a national home" and as profiteers in transnational networks of commerce, finance and trade. They were stigmatized by political movements that sought to clamp down on global capitalism, the most potent of which sought their physical extermination.

While the political right was the most raucous in its antiglobalism, socialists, anticolonial nationalists (such as Mahatma Gandhi) and New Deal Democrats also assailed the global economy. Unlike the fascists, however, the leftists tended to identify the worker or the proletariat -- rather than the nation -- as the "primary victim" of globalization.

Ms. Zahra's narrative shows us how closely -- even eerily -- our present-day world resembles the state of the globe roughly a century ago. Contagious disease, she writes, was "one of the deadliest by-products of globalization." While the death toll from the 1918 Spanish-flu pandemic (at least 25 million, probably more) dwarfs the mortality rates from the coronavirus, its global effects were not unlike those of Covid. There was a decrease in manufacturing worldwide. People and germs moved so quickly that the death toll peaked simultaneously in Paris, Berlin and New York. And even as the flu pandemic of 1918 generated "new forms of international cooperation," says Ms. Zahra, "it also exacerbated anti-globalism, as individuals, states and international organizations all sought to erect barriers against contagion."

The most engaging sections of Ms. Zahra's vigorous and informative book are those in which she offers us biographical portraits of some of the players in the great game of globalization. These include Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian-born suffragist, who spent a lifetime campaigning for a utopian form of world government. Schwimmer moved to the U.S. but was denied citizenship because of her professions of pacifism. She appealed, but the Supreme Court ruled against her in 1929. (She died stateless in 1948.)

Other protagonists include Henry Ford and -- most beguilingly -- Tomas Bat'a, dubbed "the Henry Ford of Europe." Ford, famously, revolutionized production practices, which were then exported everywhere. But he was also, Ms. Zahra notes, "at the vanguard of the anti-global turn" between the wars, particularly in his anti-Jewishness. Bat'a, by contrast, transferred dozens of his Jewish employees abroad at the start of World War II, thus saving their lives.

He was the King of Shoes. From his base in Czechoslovakia, he built a global footwear empire that spanned all of Europe, the U.S., Egypt and, most famously, India, where his factories employed thousands of locals (who were paid, Ms. Zahra tells us, considerably less than their Czech overseers). He was, she says, "an unapologetic globalist in an era of anti-globalism." Bat'a was as deft with words as he was with shoes. "Just as any industrial enterprise cannot exist without suppliers and customers," he said, "not a single State, not even a continent, on this planet can call itself self-sufficient."

Bat'a died in a plane crash in 1932. Had he been alive today, he'd be saddened to see the economic retreat from globalization that occurs all around us -- saddened, in fact, that we're floundering to answer so many of the same questions that faced the world a century ago.

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Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University." [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: Putting Up Barriers, Yet Again
Varadarajan, Tunku.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 21 Jan 2023: C.9.