My Amazon Review of Tara Zahra's "Against the World: Anti-Globalism........."

The Revolt of the Masses

 

University of Chicago history professor Tara Zahra describes a world of growing trade protectionism, rising anti-immigrant sentiments, growing antisemitism, the rise of right-wing populist demagogues, and the fear of a global pandemic. This sounds all to familiar, but she is not discussing the world of today, but rather the inter-war period of 1919-1939. The primary difference is that the wheels have yet to fall off the global economy.

 

In the halcyon era for the global elite before World War I, all was right with the world bringing ever-growing prosperity for those plugged into the global economy. However, just as today many were left behind and there resentments were smoldering beneath the surface and when World War I upset the global apple cart, those resentments exploded which in its extremis brought fascists to power, especially in Germany and Italy. In central Europe, the dependence on imported food brought with it massive starvation as the allied blockade starved out the population. Hence, after the war the goal was to become initially self-sufficient in agricultural commodities and later, as was the case for Germany, to go as far into autarky as possible. Along the way, according to Zahra, democracy fell by the wayside.

 

What Zahra has ignored in this important book is that it was not only the elite who benefited from globalism but is was also the rising middle-class in all of the countries that the global economy touched. And when the global economy started to circle the drain in 1929, it was the middle class that went down with it planting the seeds of the authoritarianism that was to come. She also ignored the role of left-wing populism in reinforcing the power of the right. The fear of Bolshevism pushed many otherwise sensible conservatives into the hands of the far right.

 

The way out of the deglobalization trap, was, according to Zahra, was a form of global Keynesianism, where each country would prop domestic demand, making it easier to accept imports from the outside. Throughout her book, Zahra humanizes what happened with vignettes about leading industrialists and liberal-minded internationalists. In many ways this is a scary book, because it seems that history is rhyming in its own way today.

For the full Amazon URL see: Revolt of the Masses (amazon.com)