When historian Tara Zahra began writing her book Against the World, she told us, Donald Trump had just been elected President and Britons had fled the European Union to vote for Brexit. There was a migration and refugee crisis in the West, and populist parties with nativist programs were winning elections across Europe. Not long after, a global pandemic killed millions and prompted nations to erect barriers to entry. And war broke out in Ukraine, becoming the bloodiest in Europe since World War II, with nations everywhere vying for independence from Russian oil.
Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics between the World Wars
WW Norton & Company
384 pages
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It was a time when our belief in a stable international order was being tested. And given the actions of an aggressive China, the premises of global cooperation are still being seriously questioned. “The future of globalization,” writes Ms. Zahra, “seems very uncertain.” The world, she says, is unrecognizable as it was at the end of the Cold War, when the victors believed that “opening borders to capital and goods” was inevitable would lead to democracy and prosperity.
Ms. Zahra is Professor of Eastern European History at the University of Chicago. Her previous work The Great Departure (2016) was a wise and provocative study of the mass migration from Eastern Europe to America between 1846 and 1940. In her new book, she examines anti-globalism and nationalist politics between the two world wars, the first of which was a brought a long and lively era of international trade and immigration to an abrupt end. “Before 1914,” wrote the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, “the earth belonged to everyone.” After the war, nothing was the same. In Zweig’s words (quoted by Ms. Zahra), “The world was on the defensive against strangers.” Ms. Zahra believes that by better understanding that time, we can defuse the unresolved tensions between globalism and democracy in our day and age.
“Against the World,” Ms. Zahra tells us, “reshapes” the history of Europe (and to some extent America) in the interwar period as a struggle for “the future of globalization and globalism.” This perspective takes us beyond the conventional depictions of the period as a tussle between democracy and dictatorship. The revolt against globalism that followed between 1914 and 1939 was the product of two developments, she says: “the acceleration of globalization itself and the rise of mass politics.”
The pace at which globalization had taken place was a function of the rapid improvement in technology rather than a concerted philosophical embrace of internationalism. “Trains, steamboats, telegraphs, postal services, and press mail,” writes Ms. Zahra, “carried goods, people, information, and disease with unprecedented speed and in once unfathomable quantities.” Banking and finance were governed by the gold standard, which ensured a stable international exchange rate , more global. We learn that farm workers in Poland were aware (“and willing to cross the ocean to earn them”) of higher wages in the American Midwest, and shoe factories in Massachusetts competed with companies in Czechoslovakia. Advances in refrigeration bring Argentine beef to European plates.
By 1910 Britain was importing eight times more food than in 1850, and by 1914—that fateful year when war broke out—Germany was dependent on imports for a third of its food. This put it in a position of caloric vulnerability: when the war began, Britain used its sea power to prevent food from reaching the German people. Memories of extreme wartime hunger, followed by the humiliations inflicted on Germans by the Treaty of Versailles — which, Ms Zahra writes, led to Germany’s “involuntary deglobalization,” or exclusion from the world economy — fueled the rise of proponents of autarky ahead and autarky, especially the Nazis.
European fascists “moneyed on” anti-global policies and spread “the perception that the world economy was being manipulated.” Jews in particular became “lightning rods” for globalization paranoia.” They also became “emblems of globalization” as “nomadic people” “without a national home” and as profiteers in transnational trade, finance and trade networks. They were stigmatized by political movements seeking to crack down on global capitalism, the strongest of which sought their physical annihilation.
While the political right has been the most vocal in its anti-globalism, socialists, anti-colonial nationalists (like Mahatma Gandhi) and New Deal Democrats have also attacked the global economy. Unlike the fascists, however, the left tended to identify the workers or proletariat – and not the nation – as the “principal victim” of globalization.
Ms. Zahra’s story shows us how much, even eerily, our world today resembles the state of the earth about a century ago. Infectious diseases, she writes, are “one of the deadliest by-products of globalization.” While the death toll from the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic (at least 25 million, likely more) dwarfs death rates from the coronavirus, its global impact has not been dissimilar to that of Covid. Production declined worldwide. People and germs moved so fast that the death toll peaked in Paris, Berlin and New York at the same time. And even as the 1918 flu pandemic “brought forth new forms of international cooperation,” Ms. Zahra says, “it also exacerbated anti-globalism as individuals, states, and international organizations all tried to erect barriers to contagion.”
The most compelling 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. They include Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian-born suffragist who has spent her life fighting for a utopian form of world government. Schwimmer moved to the United States, but was denied citizenship because of her pacifist commitment. She appealed, but the Supreme Court ruled against her in 1929. (She died stateless in 1948.)
Other protagonists are Henry Ford and, most seductively, Tomáš Bat’a, dubbed the “Henry Ford of Europe”. Ford famously revolutionized manufacturing practices, which were then exported everywhere. But he was also, notes Ms. Zahra, “at the forefront of the anti-global turn” between the wars, particularly in his anti-Jewish sentiment. Bat’a, on the other hand, transferred dozens of his Jewish employees abroad at the beginning of the Second World War, thus saving their lives.
He was the king of shoes. From his base in Czechoslovakia, he built a global shoe empire that stretched across Europe, the US, Egypt and most notably India, where his factories employed thousands of local people (who, Mrs. Zahra told us, were paid significantly less than became their Czech overseers). He was, she says, “an uncompromising globalist in an era of anti-globalism.” Bat’a was as skilled with words as with shoes. “Just as no industrial enterprise can exist without suppliers and customers,” he said, “not a single country, not even a continent on this planet can call itself self-sufficient.”
Bat’a died in a plane crash in 1932. Were he alive today, he would be sad to see the economic retreat from globalization happening all around us – sad even that we struggle to answer so many of the same questions the world faces before stood for a century.
-Mr. Varadarajan, a contributor to the journal, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University.
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