For decades after the Cold War, American capitalism was deeply if incompletely invested in liberalized global trade. NAFTA and other accords aimed to eliminate tariffs, free capital flows and open new markets, especially across the former Third World. In the creed of the Washington Consensus, neoliberal free trade sponsored prosperity and democracy, even if this stopped at the limits of U.S. geopolitical interests, as the experiences of Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela and others attest. In response — with the Seattle WTO protests of 1999 setting the tone — the left has tended to regard “free trade” as a vehicle of corporate labor arbitrage and extractive development, a triple threat to worker power, economic sovereignty and the environment.
Yet today, the world’s two capitalist behemoths are locked in a lopsided trade war. Donald Trump loudly touts tariffs as an industrial panacea; in May, bipartisan majorities endorsed President Joe Biden’s climate-illiterate 100% tariff on imports of Chinese-made electric vehicles. The time is ripe to rethink the coordinates of left trade politics. For this, University of Exeter historian Marc-William Palen’s surprising new book “Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of Free Trade” is an invaluable historical guide. As Palen shows, a long line of voices across the progressive wing of modern politics — from revolutionary socialists, including Karl Marx himself, to liberal reformists — have seen free trade as integral to a more peaceful and egalitarian world. Palen recovers the largely forgotten stories and legacies of this “economic peace” movement, and its long struggle against destructive modes of economic nationalism.
I spoke to Palen via Zoom about this history and its contemporary resonance. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
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Colin Vanderburg: Let’s start with some definitions. Who belonged to these two broad political-economic camps — protectionism or economic nationalism on one side, and free trade on the other? How were these terms understood in the 19th century and early 20th century contexts that are the focus of the book?
Marc-William Palen: First, there were material interests at work: those who tended toward free trade were more export-oriented or consumer-oriented, focused on lowering costs for consumers, or on allowing for increased exports to new markets, freeing up domestic markets as well. By contrast, economic nationalist and protectionists tended to prefer high tariffs to protect domestic industries from the full force of global competition.
I try to show that there were also geopolitical aspects to both these positions that don’t get as much attention as their material aspects. The left-wing free traders in my book tended to associate free trade, economic cosmopolitanism, integration of markets and interdependence with a more peaceful world. Most of the economic nationalists tended to find themselves on the sides of empire, and the consolidation or expansion of empires, in the name of accessing new colonial markets for exploitation by the metropole. This is where the domestic and the international combine.
In the 19th century — especially in the U.S., but also in the Anglo-European context — the issue of the tariff dominated politics like few others. One reason is that, until the early 20th century, most governments actually got most of their revenues from tariffs. So rather than abolition of tariffs, free trade often meant levying tariffs for revenue only, as a common form of indirect taxation. Only when you start using tariffs to discriminate against foreign imports on behalf of domestic agriculture or industry, to give them a leg up, does it become a protective tariff. This in many ways was the battle: whether the best method forward was revenue-only tariffs and free trade, or protective tariffs to nurture infant industries to maturity.
CV: How did each of these camps understand the connections between trade and geopolitical conflict: war above all, but also volatile international and inter-imperial competition for territory, resources and wealth?
MP: Especially within the imperial world-system of the German, French, British, U.S., Japanese and Russian empires, the protectionists tended to be the main advocates of imperial expansion. In their realist worldview, this was very much a dog-eat-dog geopolitical system: for somebody to win, somebody else had to lose. And this was how they approached economics and the scramble for markets abroad. This is where they and the free traders agreed, at least to a certain extent: both groups recognized that protectionist empires needed to search for new markets to export surplus capital and to extract raw materials, which were then brought back to the metropole for use by the industrial center, to make finished products that were then sold in these new markets. This was what is sometimes called the neo-mercantilist system.
“It was a matter of whether it had to be this way, or whether there was a more peaceful anti-imperial path wrought from worldwide free trade.”
But they disagreed about whether this was how the world must operate. The free traders pointed out that the push to coercively access new markets abroad to export surplus capital was only necessary because of the inefficient domestic system of protective tariffs, which in turn distorted the market and gave rise to monopolies, cartels and trusts — groups which then exerted undue control over foreign policy decision-making. What the free traders in mid-19th-century Britain argued, and tried to impress upon the rest of the world, was not just that free trade brought cheap goods and cheap food, though this was a very important plank in a time of mass industrialization and poverty for the working classes in Britain. It was also that, by trying to undermine the tariffs on foreign wheat coming into Britain, the middle-class free trade movement was also seeking to undermine the economic power of the aristocratic landed elite, who controlled the nation’s agriculture and gained from these protective tariffs at the cost of British consumers. This in turn could weaken the aristocracy’s influence over foreign policy making, which tended toward militarism, and democratize foreign policy, making it more peaceful. Then you could lower military and naval expenditures, which means you can lower taxes.
So it was all connected, as far as the free traders were concerned. But in many ways, they were in broad agreement with the protectionists about the reasons for colonial expansion in search of new markets across the late 19th century and beyond. It was a matter of whether it had to be this way, or whether there was a more peaceful anti-imperial path wrought from worldwide free trade.
CV: I once came across a catchy line, attributed to Japanese economists in the late 19th century, that “free trade is the protectionism of the strong” — the implicit target being Britain. Can you explain how this British “free-trade imperialism” took shape, and why in this case free trade was seen to strengthen, not weaken, imperial domination of colonial and other non-Western economies?
MP: I think we’re dealing with two aspects here. One is the reality of free trade’s coercive implementation by the British after the 1840s, and the second is the perception, especially among Britain’s rival imperial powers, that British free trade was being manipulated to undermine their own national projects of industrialization through protective tariffs. This Anglophobic bogeyman of the free-trade British would then be used to bolster these protectionist projects, often very successfully, as in the U.S., France and Germany.
From the late 19th century on, as the only free-trade empire, Britain did coercively enforce free trade in its formal or informal colonies that were deemed too “uncivilized” to control their own trade policy — including India, Ireland, Egypt and to an extent in China through the Opium Wars and the violent opening of Chinese markets. By around 1900, India’s lack of control over its tariff levels provoked a strong and organized nationalist backlash in the Swadeshi movement to promote Indian-made goods and boycott British imports. At the same time, also by around 1900, the so-called white settler colonies of the British empire — Canada, Australia, New Zealand — were all given tariff autonomy. Yet interestingly, as soon as this autonomy was granted, practically the first thing these colonies did was turn to infant-industrial protectionism on the model of the U.S. and Germany, rather than British-style free trade. U.S.-style economic nationalism ruled the day, not British-style free trade.
CV: The book’s earlier chapters are structured in part by the intellectual legacies of two radically different thinkers: the German economist Friedrich List (1789–1846) and the British politician Richard Cobden (1804–1865). Could you talk about these men, their key ideas and their political contexts? Let’s start with List.
MP: Until recently, List had become a somewhat neglected figure, despite his importance to the creation of the global economic nationalist system of the late 19th century and the way he ushered in a challenge to British free trade from the 1840s on. List was German-born and came to the United States in the 1820s, where he was thrust into the era’s protectionist politics in Pennsylvania, later becoming an American citizen. He eventually returned to Germany, where he published his magnum opus, “The National System of Political Economy.”
The book is a kind of amalgamation of his experiences at different points in the imperial economic order, in Germany, France and the United States. Starting from the mercantilism of the early 19th century, he takes into account the growing left-wing fervor and activism in Britain in the late 1830s through the early 1840s — led by Richard Cobden, who spearheaded the main middle-class free trade pressure group, the Anti-Corn Law League. (In fact, List would be in London to witness the death knell, so to speak, of British mercantilism, with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.) List saw this transformation as bad for Britain and even worse for Britain’s less industrialized, less advanced imperial rivals, especially Germany and the U.S.
Friedrich List’s “The National System of Political Economy” is a kind of amalgamation of his experiences at different points in the imperial economic order, in Germany, France and the United States.
So List put forward a rather fascinating prescription for protectionism at home, to nurture infant industries and counteract the free-trading British. On top of that, he encouraged these young nations to consolidate nationally and to acquire colonial markets. It was a vision of how Euro-America should colonize the rest of the world, in seeming perpetuity, and exploit the supposedly indolent tropical regions that, he thought, should instead be producing raw materials for Euro-American exploitation. This connection between protectionism and colonial expansion would take hold among a lot of the leading imperial architects in these rival states — the U.S., Germany, Russia, France, Japan, the Ottoman Empire — as well as among Britain’s own colonies.
Richard Cobden was what’s called a liberal radical in British politics: he supported a variety of left-of-center political causes, including the abolition of slavery and the international peace movement. Thanks to his success in overturning the protectionist system in Britain, he also became the figurehead of modern free trade advocacy. His close association of free trade not just with cheap goods for consumers and prosperity at home, but with international cooperation, imprinted a strong pacifist and anti-imperial element on the ideas of David Ricardo and Adam Smith, updating them for a modern global market system. Against the perpetuation of a mercantilist system of empires carving up the world, Cobden imagined an interdependent, prosperous and peaceful world system that didn’t need empires. I build a lot of the book around this ideological conflict between these two figures and their ideas, which would shape the economic order for decades to come.
CV: How and why did List and Cobden come to so embody these opposing visions of international trade? They can seem like quintessentially 19th century figures, but the longevity of their influence is remarkable. As late as the 1940s, for example, then-U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull was hailed by some supporters as “the Tennessee Cobden.”
MP: From the last decades of the 19th century until World War I, the economic cosmopolitan disciples of Richard Cobden in Britain and beyond became leaders of the international peace movement that would develop in opposition to the colonial and imperial conflicts of the time. This movement would gather even more steam during World War I, with increasing numbers of socialist internationalists embracing free trade and starting to work more closely with these liberal radical capitalists in the name of world peace. The feminist peace movement coming out of the war was a big part of this, too. These left-wing free traders remained the grassroots leaders of this ever-changing international peace and anti-imperialist movement, culminating to an extent, as you say, with Cordell Hull becoming secretary of state under FDR in 1933.
“Left-wing free traders remained the grassroots leaders of an ever-changing international peace and anti-imperialist movement.”
Hull came of age in the late 19th century amid these debates around the tariff, and he fell solidly into the free-trade camp, which was then associated with the Democratic Party. But for Hull as for many others, World War I had ingrained the idea that a war on this scale was caused in no small part by economic nationalism and ensuing geopolitical conflict. The great takeaway was the need to build a more interdependent world through freer trade, and this is what he set out to do, backed by left-wing pressure groups that I trace in the book, among them Christian pacifists, socialists and feminist liberal radicals. All these groups came together to work closely with the State Department to try turn the U.S. away from Listian protectionism, to liberalize its trade policy and encourage the rest of the world to follow suit. This overlooked free trade internationalism helped shape and drive the international peace and anti-imperialist movements of that century between the 1840s to the 1940s. This is Cobden’s legacy.
But in many ways List and his disciples succeeded for a greater part of this period. After a brief flirtation with free trade from the 1840s to around 1870, one rival empire after another turned toward economic nationalism, or neo-mercantilism. In part, this was sparked by the so-called Long Depression, which struck in 1873 and lasted for many years. As we’ve witnessed in our own times, during economic crisis, nations very often turn inward, seeking self-sufficiency instead of interdependence. This is exactly what happened across the German, American, French and Russian empires; by around 1900, the Japanese empire got in on it, and the Ottomans a bit after that. Amid this economic nationalist global order, Britain stood out as an empire that stuck to free trade, up until the early 1930s. What I try to show is how explicitly people at the top of these imperial projects — like the influential intellectuals of the German Historical School in imperial Germany, imperial Russia’s finance minister and prime minister Sergei Witte, and the Japanese empire’s Mōri Hideoto — were drawing on List’s ideas to create what I call the imperialism of economic nationalism, which the left-wing free traders were at the same time working so hard to overturn.
CV: One fascinating outgrowth of this is the emergence of rival Marxist currents, which you call the “Marx-Manchester” and the “Marx-List” traditions. Marx himself was sharply critical of List and broadly supportive of free trade, though for different reasons from those of a liberal radical like Cobden. Yet a fusion of Marx and List appealed to some European socialists and many anticolonial leaders. What were these two traditions, and when and where did they take hold?
MP: Friedrich Engels was living in Manchester in the early 1840s, when it was the hotbed of middle-class free-trade activism, the home of Cobden and the Anti-Corn Law League. Engels claimed to have attended hundreds of their speeches and rallies. Once Marx arrived a little later in the 1840s, the two were together in Britain at the high tide of free trade radicalism, and this inspired their own political imagination. Just a couple years after the repeal of the Corn Laws, Marx gave a speech in Brussels, arguing that socialists around the world should support free trade. He believed this not because it would bring about a world of peace and prosperity, but because it was small-P progressive, accelerating the development of capitalism, and hence a necessary step closer to social revolution; integrating world markets would also help unite the world’s workers.
Around this time, Marx and Engels were also attacking List and dismissed protectionism as retrograde, a regressive system of capitalism. And here their critique was very violence-tinged, in ways that Cobden and his disciples would agree with: Marx and Engels argued that protectionism turns on the nation that practices it, as well as turning rivals into geopolitical enemies. So Marx’s critique of protectionism was actually closely in line with that of the Manchester School, laying the seeds of what I call the Marx-Manchester free trade tradition.
“Marx and Engels argued that protectionism turns on the nation that practices it, as well as turning rivals into geopolitical enemies.”
One of the fascinating things I found was the legacy of this socialist free trade advocacy. Half-hearted as it was in the mid-19th century, by the early 20th century, leading socialist internationalists — Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, you name it — were also calling for free trade. The world economic order had become more and more protectionist, and many on the left thought this was the economic cause of World War I. These critiques picked up in a big way with the Marx-Manchester school, who wanted to free world trade. However, their aim was not to speed up capitalist development, or even to hasten socialist revolution; they wanted to create a peaceful world. The Cobdenite, Manchester liberal aspects had won out; free trade was now seen as essential to a more peaceful order. Some more moderate socialist internationalists were even willing to work with the newly founded capitalist League of Nations in the 1920s.
The Marx-List tradition is also fascinating and again closely mapped onto questions of empire and war. In the late 19th century and increasingly by around 1900, the Fabian Society in Britain was one of these groups, under George Bernard Shaw’s auspices, and these traditions also continued in Germany and France. Essentially these Marx-List socialists only worried about the position of their own nations and empires, and even became advocates of imperial projects. You can see this in the contrast between the growing Independent Labor Party in Britain, which supported free trade, and the Fabian Society, which endorsed protectionism and imperial consolidation.
So, too, would the Marx-List tradition begin making ideological inroads in those relatively few colonies that had free trade forced upon them, like India and China, and among Pan-Africanists like W.E.B. Du Bois. The Marx-List tradition would become even more prominent after 1945, amid decolonization.
CV: You also devote a chapter each to the feminist and Christian pacifist strands of the economic peace movement, which were quite active and enduring. I think these are some of the book’s most original and surprising sections. Could you give an overview of these groups? How did they see their causes as connected to free trade?
MP: Yes, this was surprising — I honestly didn’t expect the directions these chapters would take. Feminist free trade advocacy began, once again, in the 19th century, with the early stirrings of first-wave feminism, and as a confluence of these liberal radical and abolitionist traditions. These women saw themselves as mothers of the world, as the more peaceful sex. By the early 20th century, they were also increasingly concerned with global food security.
With World War I, all these things came together in the rise of what one historian, Harriet Hyman Alonso, has called “the suffrage wing of the peace movement.” Leading lights of the women’s suffrage movement decided to become new leaders in the international peace movement. They argued that women and children suffered most from war, even though women didn’t at this point have any democratic say in the wars that broke out, and they deplored the continued starvation of women and children after World War I.
Feminist free trade advocates saw themselves as mothers of the world, as the more peaceful sex.
Groups were formed like the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, founded in Geneva in 1919 and still active today. The famous Chicago social reformer Jane Addams even became a figurehead of the movement, as WILPF’s inaugural president. Free trade was intrinsic to their desire to end the economic causes of wars and for a food-secure world where women and children would no longer starve or even die in wars.
Quite a few of these feminists, liberal radicals and socialists were also involved with the Christian peace movement, showing how all these pieces come together. The Young Women’s Christian Association is a very good example here and now claims to be perhaps the most powerful ecumenical women’s organization in the world, or at least the most numerous. The YWCA became an out-and-out peace organization in the 1920s and would become an out-and-out free trade organization, after years of debating the issue, in the early 1930s. It was around this time that they got put in touch with the new secretary of state, Cordell Hull, and started working together toward freeing world trade as a means toward world peace. So there are striking overlaps between the feminist movement and the Christian peace movement here. The latter was also motivated by millenarian visions of a new world order as God intended, one of true interdependence, a sharing of the world’s resources without the animosity, selfishness and conflict that protectionist politics tended to bring.
CV: In a review of “Pax Economica” for Jacobin, Lise Butler points out that labor unions and workers’ movements do not figure much in this history, even though, as she writes, they are “one of the constituencies most concretely affected by and vocally opposed to late 20th-century multilateral approaches to free trade.” Of course, labor movements have never been politically homogeneous; for example, before World War I, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) under Kautsky supported free trade and had a strong labor base. But it does seem true that the “peace workers” and campaigns you discuss were relatively disconnected from unions and other working-class organizations. How do you account for this? Were there missed opportunities for stronger alliances between the economic peace movement and the workers’ movement?
MP: I think I would give a historian’s answer — it depends on the time and place. And how all this affects labor unions and in the later 20th century is different from how it influenced the working classes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As you point out, the SPD in Germany figured prominently from the late 19th century on as a workers’ party. The Labour Party in Britain, formed around the same time, was likewise a workers’ party dedicated to free trade policies, as were British workers themselves, by and large. The Socialist Party of America was another free trade organization along Marx-Manchester lines, as was the Argentine Socialist Party.
“I also think the working-class and labor sides of this left-wing story are still present and important, especially within the Marx-Manchester tradition.”
The co-operative movement also figures significantly in all of this. This was a worker- and consumer-oriented third way between collectivism and capitalism, which also originated near Manchester in the 1830s and ’40s, and by the 1920s and ’30s it had grown internationally to rival the international labor union movement in sheer numbers. Co-operativists were dedicated to organizing trade along co-operative nonprofit lines and lobbied the League of Nations and various national governments to try to bring this about. And after 1945, the Fair Trade movement developed alongside the co-operative movement to support an alternative globalization that embraced labor issues more.
It is true that leadership of this commercial peace movement remained mainly white and middle-class, and the Jacobin critique is fair to an extent. But I also think the working-class and labor sides of this left-wing story are still present and important, especially within the Marx-Manchester tradition.
CV: You write that after 1945, the Bretton Woods system, decolonization and the Cold War cumulatively drove a global realignment of trade policy around “three ideological ‘-isms’ — neocolonialism, neomercantilism and neoliberalism.” These are mostly familiar terms, but not often combined in this way. What was behind each of these trends, and how were they connected?
MP: Neocolonialism was a critique, coming mostly from the decolonizing Third World, that this postwar economic order was just Western economic imperialism by another name, that the Bretton Woods institutions — the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and so on — were perpetuating Western imperialism, just a bit more informally. Neomercantilism is a term for the continuation of the old 18th- and 19th-century imperialism of economic nationalism, updated for a globalized and industrializing world. Western neomercantilism continued well after 1945, a protectionist element during a period that is more commonly depicted as a new era of Western free trade. And neoliberalism is, of course, a new variant of free trade ideology, associated with the political right. In the context of the Cold War and decolonization, neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek increasingly saw democracy as an impediment to maintaining a free trade system, whereas for the left-wing free traders, democracy had long been an accompaniment to free trade. So this was a very different kind of free trade movement, which started to take ideological shape, as some have shown, in the 1930s, but politically would only come into being from around 1970, and then was implemented in a much bigger way under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and more so still after the end of the Cold War. Interestingly, since 2016, we’ve seen a gradual dismantling of this neoliberal free trade regime.
CV: You write that “historians have long emphasized how Western, U.S.-led neocolonialism was a new form of free-trade imperialism,” but that “the Third World remained far more critical still of the protectionist policies of the neocolonial powers.” So rather than simply reacting negatively against the imposition of free trade by the U.S. and its allies, what came to be called alter-globalization was, you argue, an effort to reconcile “economic interdependence” and “economic sovereignty.” Can you say more about this countermovement, and how your account differs from others’?
MP: Most of the chapters end with the rise of this new Pax Economica from the ashes of World War II, in which the left-wing free traders had quite a bit of say, and with Hull as their figurehead, helped to shape a lot of these Bretton Woods institutions, especially the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. From 1947, the GATT initiated a massive slashing of tariff rates by its signatories; in 1995 it would become the World Trade Organization. And of course the United Nations itself at least seemed to have more teeth than the League of Nations in maintaining a freer trade system, in Hull’s vision — hence why he was known not only as the Tennessee Cobden, but also as the father of the United Nations. So in the late 1940s, things looked very different from the century before; it seemed as if the left-wing free traders might finally get their long-sought Pax Economica.
By 1950, however, the Cold War had begun, along with decolonization, which brought new demands for infant industrial protectionism from the decolonizing world, to try to make up for decades or even centuries of colonial exploitation. So much of the historiography here is about the protectionist decolonizing world versus the pro-free trade capitalist West, alongside a kind of autarkic Soviet sphere carving up and separating half the world from the other half, combining to inhibit global market integration. So you have this Manichean division. On top of that, you end up with a rather simplistic portrayal of the US this Western free trade imperial power in the post-1945 years.
“In the late 1940s, things looked very different from the century before; it seemed as if the left-wing free traders might finally get their long-sought Pax Economica.”
But I try to show that it is also not terribly accurate to describe this neocolonialism, as it was often called, as a kind of Western free trade imperialism, with the U.S. leading the way, forcing open the markets of the world. If you look at the main criticisms coming from the decolonizing Third World at, say, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964, their opposition to Western economic imperialism focused instead on continued Western protectionist policies, for which the 1962 U.S. embargo of Cuba became emblematic. Their argument was that the imperial powers — the U.S. and Europe — weren’t practicing what they were preaching, that they were continuing economic nationalism domestically while calling for the rest of the world, the Global South, to open up their markets on a free trade basis. It was this hypocrisy, much more than free trade itself, that was the target, leading Che Guevara to rail at the 1964 UNCTAD against the “trade discrimination practiced by the imperialist metropolitan countries against the socialist countries” as “a danger to world trade and world peace. This conference must also establish in plain terms the rights of all peoples to unrestricted freedom of trade.”
CV: I think a bastardized version of the economic-peace tradition survived into the early 21st century, exemplified in Thomas Friedman’s homily in the late 1990s that “no two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.” Although that particular claim was quickly disproven, it captures an idea — that the ties of globalized capitalist trade and development are naturally stabilizing and pacifying — that became dominant after the end of the Cold War. How would you contrast the book’s earlier commercial peace visions with those of Friedman and his ilk?
MP: I think this goes to the question of alter-globalization rather than anti-globalization, which is another important point I make in the book. I increasingly wonder how often we’ve labeled protesters as “anti-globalization” who were, in fact, advocating for alter-globalization and were critiquing the lack of labor or environmental protections in major international trade agreements, or in WTO decision-making processes, and so forth, but were not necessarily opposed to economic interdependence. So on top of the critiques of the decolonizing world and the Global South, we also see this reinvestment of grassroots energy from the left. This would lead to something of a renaissance for the international co-operative movement in the 1950s and ’60s, and from around 1968, the launch of the Fair Trade movement, which is today a familiar label on chocolate bars and bags of coffee. This Fair Trade movement argued that the West should be willing to pay a bit more for products from the Global South, as a kind of subsidy, but also as a guarantee that labor was not being exploited in these parts of the world.
I would argue that this ethical Fair Trade vision is very much a continuation of the left-wing free trade tradition. After the Cold War, there was no longer a Manichean split between the capitalist West and the Soviet East, and suddenly the other half of the world’s markets seemed open and ready for neoliberal free trade. In the era of the Washington Consensus, both Democratic and Republican leaders were broadly supportive of trade liberalization regionally as well as internationally, through, say, NAFTA and the WTO, and this was bound up with the rhetoric of peace and democracy — though famously these values were not always reflected in the policies themselves, leading to the protests of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999.
“I would argue that this ethical Fair Trade vision is very much a continuation of the left-wing free trade tradition.”
But I would say that, although it’s not nearly as prominent, elements of the left-wing free trade tradition and the commercial peace movement are still at work. WILPF, the YWCA, the Fair Trade movement and international co-operativism are all still active. Maybe some have lost their original messaging on economic peace, but I can’t help but wonder if the new economic nationalist order we’re now seeing emerge might revitalize this older left-wing free trade tradition and bring these faltering movements back into the limelight.
CV: The years since Donald Trump’s election have seen a U.S.-led Western realignment toward a new protectionism. Today the target is China: the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 seeks to insulate U.S. semiconductor manufacturing and other industries and to blunt China’s competitive advantage. In May, President Joe Biden approved a 100% tariff on Chinese-made electric vehicle imports to the U.S. How did we get here? Do you see this moment as a genuine rupture or reversal, or instead a revival of tendencies that were present even during the notional high tide of neoliberal free trade? You also write, while noting some exceptions, that “opposition to neoliberalism has encouraged the anti-war Left to seek a new foreign policy agenda bereft of any vestiges of liberal internationalism.” What prospects do you see for a renewed left commitment to “economic cosmopolitanism and regional integration”?
MP: Looking back at the 1990s and early 2000s, it’s striking just how brief the moment was when so-called neoliberal free trade reigned supreme over international policies and ideologies. In many ways, we can think of the economic nationalist turn in the U.S. and elsewhere since 2016 — with Trump’s tariffs and trade wars, and now Biden’s — as a return to the status quo. I make this point at the end of the book, that our new economic nationalist order bears a remarkable resemblance to the protectionist and economic nationalist imperial system of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that what we’re seeing now is in certain aspects reflective of this previous era, as are the forms of globalization and geopolitical conflict that came with it.
What’s remarkable to me is that since the 2020 election, and now with the 2024 election, not only is the Republican Party — long the party of protectionism — returning to its roots under Trump’s control; we also see the Democratic Party becoming increasingly economic-nationalist and anti-immigration. (That’s another aspect of this story, the way anti-immigration politics often go hand in hand with protectionist politics.) We see the same bipartisan alignment in both major parties in Britain now, as well. That degree of bipartisan consensus is rather unique to our moment, signaling a retreat from the older Washington Consensus that prevailed from the 1990s until 2016. And as with the American system of protectionism throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this U.S. economic-nationalist revival is trickling into right-wing populist movements across the globe, accelerating this turn against free trade as well as against migration. As in the even sharper turn away from free trade after the Great Depression hit in 1929, the Great Recession of 2008-2009 deserves some credit for this. It was then that we started to see the early populist rumblings that Trump ended up successfully tapping in 2016.
A renewal of a left-wing commitment remains to be seen. One of my hopes for this book is that we can better see these broad parallels between what came before and what’s coming next. I think left-wing internationalists have been doing a lot of soul-searching in recent years, in no small part because of the neoliberal bent of world trade that left them rudderless. Where do they go from here? Do we have socialism for one country, as some seem to be leaning into? I imagine that many on the left, not just socialists, but liberal internationalists as well, are confused and looking for a new foreign economic policy to meet the challenge of this new economic nationalist order. I hope that the book will help us to see how previous generations of left-wing internationalists would come together, building coalitions and to an extent actually achieving their goals, even if the post-1945 multilateral institutions they helped create didn’t end up taking quite the form they had hoped for.
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