fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Logic Of Globalism And Nationalism

Richard Spencer makes a fair point that the 19th century saw an impressive degree of global economic integration at the same time that modern nation-states were gaining strength. By the end of the “long 19th century” in 1914, the world was as interconnected economically as it would be until the post-Cold War drive for integration […]

Richard Spencer makes a fair point that the 19th century saw an impressive degree of global economic integration at the same time that modern nation-states were gaining strength. By the end of the “long 19th century” in 1914, the world was as interconnected economically as it would be until the post-Cold War drive for integration that we have experienced for the past twenty years. The “long 19th century” was indeed the age of nationalism, and so it was also the dawn of the age of mass politics and mass mobilization for warfare, and the results of this age discredited fanciful notions that economic interdependence promotes everlasting peace and brotherhood. Specifically in its nationalist character, that age was the forerunner and preparation of many of the nightmares of the last century, and it was the cauldron out of which the original ideas behind most of the other nightmares emerged.

To the extent that the ruin of remaining traditional European civilization in WWI can be laid at the door of mass politics, nationalism and mass mobilization for warfare, these elements of 19th century history offer warnings of the damage that can be done to social and political order as a result of breaking down barriers and loyalties as part of a political and economic project to consolidate power and organize resources inside larger nation-states at the expense of their various regions. Once nationalism was triumphant and nearly universal in Europe, it encountered some limited resistance from holdouts of traditional societies, which it mostly co-opted or marginalized, but then mostly faced the strongest competition from different varieties of international socialism. Nationalism eventually ate away at the latter from within because of its greater mobilizing power. After the second war, modified forms of liberal economic regimes had grown up in the midst of the social democratic West with an increasing emphasis on neoliberal trade abroad and a continuation of state capitalism at home. Finally, the social democratic West outlasted its communist rivals.

Inside the social democratic West, with some exception here in the U.S., nationalism was giving way to larger projects of political consolidation and economic “openness.” Within the U.S., nationalism was harnessed to what Bacevich has called “the strategy of openness” to make an American-led globalism palatable to people in the one Western country where there was still widespread resistance to transnational organizations and rules. For most Western nationalists, globalization is of questionable benefit both culturally and economically, but in the American context most globalists embrace American exceptionalism/Americanism to provide the popular rhetoric for their agenda and most American nationalists end up either supporting or acquiescing in globalist policies because they believe them to be necessary to preserve U.S. hegemony, which they, as nationalists, are unwilling to abandon, just as they are largely unwilling to reject the foreign wars fought theoretically to shore up or expand that hegemony. It should be the case that nationalism in the U.S. produces steady resistance to globalism, but in a way similar to the British experience in the late 19th and early 20th centuries our nationalists’ energy has largely been channeled into support for aggressive or ‘forward’ foreign policy, and so it is not really an accident that the most nationalist party in the U.S. also happens to be most in favor of globalist trade policies.

Actual Bastiat-style economic liberalism perished in the West as a matter of government policy in the latter half of the 19th century and never really returned, which has not stopped globalists from dredging up classical liberal texts, including those of Bastiat, to browbeat people on the political right into accepting their policies. More than a few libertarians and “economic conservatives” today recite the lessons from these texts whenever someone challenges some aspect of the state capitalist system, usually pertaining to trade or immigration, and they vehemently insist that in doing this they are protecting economic liberty against encroaching statism or something of the sort.

Speaking of state capitalism and related matters, I have a new article in this month’s Chronicles discussing Lincoln and modern Lincolnism. Be sure to check out the entire issue in print, and look in at Chronicles‘ website for online versions of some of the articles.

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here