Against The World: Anti-Globalism And Mass Politics Between The World Wars, by Tara Zahra

It is easy to tell that the author’s own sympathies are definitely globalist, and the characters she most identifies with are ones that I would consider to be highly problematic for their leftist political leanings. The author clearly identifies with the pre-World War I internationalist socialists, feminists, pacifists, and other naive idealists who sought to create a world without borders where they could move happily from one country to another and engage in various conferences and political meetings and with like-minded globalist elites. This world came to a crashing end in World War I and did not recover until the period after World War II. The author, despite her obvious leanings, though, deals with a topic that must be unpleasant to her for multiple reasons in looking at the inevitable backlash that took place to globalism in the period between the two wars. This time was painful both for what it dealt with in its own right–the collapse of the orderly(?) Hapsburg empire into feuding successor states, the rise of barriers to travel and immigration, and the rise of mass-politics that was hostile to Jews and other groups–as well as its own analogues in our own times in the age of Covid and the rise of populism. The author clearly wants to understand anti-globalism even where she clearly opposes it, perhaps with the aim of making globalism stronger this time around in the face of its enemies (among whom I must include myself).

In many ways, the rise of anti-globalism and the existence of mass politics are highly related to each other. Mass politics by its very nature includes at least the influence of populism, and when populism is in the rise, there are clearly issues that common people are dealing with that are often hostile to corrupt and cosmopolitan political elites (like the author and her cronies, past and present). This does not mean that populists always pick the right target for their concerns about national culture and identity when they see their identity being threatened by too much undesirable culture change and undesirable people trying to take advantage of their nation and its limited resources, but that in times of crisis in general outsiders tend to fare poorly among restive native populations who want to be left alone to pursue their private pleasures without having to deal with high crime and people who do not understand or share their values disturbing their peace and safety and prosperity. While the author focuses most of her attention on the personalities involved here, as a reader I found myself more interested and drawn to the underlying patterns that the author was dealing with in showing how it is that out of touch cosmopolitan elites and would-be elites simply did not have a grasp on the seriousness of the situation and their need to deal with ordinary people who felt left out and unrepresented by those who considered themselves to be the leaders of progress and improvement. These problems remain today, and the author and her ilk do not appear well-equipped to respond to popular concerns in a reasonable fashion, as the evils of contemporary politics bears out to a great degree.

In terms of its contents, this book is almost 300 pages in length, divided into three parts with numerous relatively short chapters. The author begins with a lengthy (and interesting) introduction. This is followed by a discussion of the breakup of the prewar globalist world during World War I (I), with chapters on the supposed victory of feminism (1), the search for a way out in New York (2), a disastrous attempt at a peace conference sponsored by Henry Ford (3), and the abortive attempts by Central Powers to win before starvation defeated their nations (4). The author then tackles the breakup of world unity in the aftermath of World War I (II) by looking at the deadly effects of the flu (5), the reduced and impoverished state of Europe seen during Versailles and related treaty negotiations (6), the lack of faithfulness of the winners to promises to nations like Italy (7), the threat of the rise of Communism in Central Europe (8), the troubles stateless people faced in travel and emigration (9), and the defense of Americanism in Ellis Island (10). The third part of the book looks at the unsettled world of the interwar period (III), with chapters on internal colonization projects in Austria (11), the United States (12), attempts in England to encourage freedom through homespun industry (13), efforts at local globalism by a Czech shoe company (14), the rising desire to promote local foods (15), economic appeasement (16), and the search for space to breathe (17). The book ends with a conclusion about a new era of world cooperation, an epilogue, acknowledgements, a list of archives, notes, and an index.