Against the World

On the eve of World War I, the Hungarian feminist Rosika Schwimmer triumphantly hosted an international congress of women's suffrage activists in Budapest. A decade later, Schwimmer was a stateless refugee without a passport. Her fate was emblematic of the way the world changed after 1914. Prewar enthusiasm for the free movement of goods, ideas, and people around the world shriveled. Across Europe and the United States, support for internationalism and interconnectedness was replaced by calls for closed borders, autarky, and self-sufficiency. In her captivating and thought-provoking new book, Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars, Tara Zahra writes a history of this trend, exploring the multifaceted ways “individuals and governments attempted to pause, reverse or reorganize the globalization of their economies and societies” (p. 279). In the interwar decades, Zahra argues, anti-globalism moved to the center of politics, becoming one of the defining features of the era.Interwar anti-globalists were a heterogeneous bunch. They came from all parts of the political spectrum and were tied together only by their shared suspicion of internationalism and their desire to somehow shield their societies from the vagaries of the global economy. Zahra masterfully gives shape to her protean subject by organizing the book around a series of multifaceted and compelling historical figures. Some of these protagonists anchor a single chapter and others, like Schwimmer or American auto magnate Henry Ford, weave in and out of the narrative. The book is broadly transatlantic in scope, but Zahra concentrates on material from Austria, Britain (and British India), Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and the United States.Against the World is divided into seventeen short chapters, each focused around one or two case studies anchored to a specific city and year. The first ten chapters concentrate on World War I and its aftermath, exploring how anti-globalist sentiment swelled during and after the war, fanned by waves of refugees, food insecurity, epidemics, inflation, and, in Central Europe, dissatisfaction with the postwar peace treaties. Anti-globalists clamped down on the freedom of movement, replacing open borders with passports, visas, and immigration quotas. The remaining seven chapters (which comprise about half of the book's pages) examine a variety of popular movements and state policies aimed at increasing economic self-sufficiency in the aftermath of the Great Depression. These range from internal colonization schemes in Austria, the swadeshi movement in India, and the Jersey Homesteads (a homestead community for Jewish garment workers) to Italy's “Battle for Grain,” and Nazi boycotts of Jewish department stores. Zahra illustrates the depth of the era's anti-globalist sentiment by showing how even global corporations like Ford Motors or the Czechoslovakian Bat'a company (a major producer of shoes) echoed the values of anti-global settlement movements. Both companies pursued their own forms of autarky and had cultures that promoted an ethic of self-sufficiency and discipline among their workers.Anti-globalism, Zahra argues, emerged from the grassroots. It was a response to the very real issues of social dislocation and economic precarity that accompanied prewar globalization and to the fears of food insecurity and the feelings of resentment and injustice that stalked millions after the war, especially in Central Europe. Anti-globalism inspired diverse groups of people, including unemployed workers in postwar Vienna, who demanded land to grow their own food; anti-colonial activists like Mahatma Gandhi, who saw homespun cloth as a way to fight back against imperialism; and American life-reformers like Ralph Borsodi, who preached subsistence agriculture as a solution to the unemployment caused by the Great Depression. This popular anti-globalist sentiment was then picked up, amplified, and mobilized by political parties on both the left and the right. The popular mood, therefore, sometimes gave rise to the populist politician.Whatever their political persuasion, anti-globalists frequently linked the evils of globalization with Jews and gender equality. Against the World is littered with examples of how activists, business leaders, and state officials alike used anti-globalism to justify antisemitism and anti-feminism. An Austrian court denied citizenship to Moses Lym, claiming he was not really German, despite his fluency in the language. The Hungarian counter-revolutionary government refused to give a passport to Rosika Schwimmer, forcing her to flee the country illegally. Austria, Germany, Italy, and the US urged women to leave their jobs for unpaid farm work. The Bat'a company fired women when they married, but provided homes and other benefits to male workers with families. Even Gandhi said he could not “imagine a really happy home in which the wife is a typist and scarcely ever in it.” (p. 179)After 1945, anti-globalism was often associated with Nazism. While many Nazis did espouse anti-global sentiments, Against the World encourages us to see Nazism as part of a larger anti-globalist political culture. Zahra shows how the Nazis took a wide array of anti-globalist trends and ideas—such as allotment gardens, food autarky, internal colonization projects, and the fetishization of the single-family home as a man's palace—adapted them to their own racist perspective, and built them into their political program. Anti-globalism, including its antisemitism and anti-feminism, did not distinguish the Nazis from other political parties. Instead, anti-globalism provided a common core of concerns and aspirations that linked the Nazis to many other groups. The Nazis were able to appeal to an array of diverse constituencies in part through shared anti-globalist sentiments.While anti-globalism extended well beyond fascism, it nonetheless faded after fascism's defeat. The victors of World War II promised that they would create a better form of globalization, one that would lessen economic inequality both within and between nations. They did not, however, restore the freedom of mobility that existed before 1914. This remained a lasting legacy of the interwar anti-globalist moment. The postwar conviction that global stability depended on lessening inequality itself faded over time. In response, anti-globalist sentiment has increased yet again. As Against the World shows, anti-globalism, like globalism itself, is not necessarily good or bad; it can be a means of fighting for the downtrodden or a vehicle for racism, xenophobia, and imperialist war. What we will do with our anti-globalist moment

Enthusiasm · Globalization · International relations · Internationalism (politics) · Long nineteenth century · Politics · World history · World War II · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society