The Anti-Globalization Backlash, With Peter Trubowitz

LINDSAY:
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Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is the anti-globalization backlash. With me to discuss the reasons for the rise of anti-globalism in Western countries and its consequences for world order is Peter Trubowitz. Peter is a professor of international relations and the director of the Phelan U.S. Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He's also an associate fellow at Chatham House. Peter is the co-author of the new book, Geopolitics and Democracy: The Western Liberal Order from Foundation to Fracture. He and his co-author, Brian Burgoon, have also written a related piece, "Make the Center Vital Again," for Foreign Affairs. Peter, thanks for being patient during that long introduction, and for joining me on The President's Inbox.

TRUBOWITZ:
Jim, great to be with you. Thanks very much for the invitation.

LINDSAY:
Well, let's get to it, Peter, and I want to begin with the fact that much has been made in recent years about the rise in erosion of what has been variously called the liberal international order, the rules-based order, or maybe just the American-led order. Now, most of those discussions focus on the conditions in the international arena that made that order possible, particularly the preponderance of American power. You've spent much of your career looking at these questions from a very different perspective, namely how domestic conditions enable or hinder foreign policy. So help me understand from your perspective the link between the liberal international order and domestic politics.

TRUBOWITZ:
Well, that's a great question, Jim. And basically, the liberal international order that took form in the late 1940's, and let's say the early 1950's, rested on assumptions and institutional arrangements, domestic institutional arrangements, that helped ensure support for policies like free trade and institutionalized cooperation in the form of things like NATO or the IMF and the World Bank in Western democracies, and the basic principle of multilateralism. And what was key during that period were, really, two things. One was international, and one was domestic. The international side of the story was the Cold War and the competition between ... the bipolar competition between the Soviet Union and its allies in the United States and its allies in the West.

That had a kind of disciplining effect on domestic politics inside Western democracies. It made it very difficult for parties on the far left or on the far-right to get political traction. And in a sense, what it did is it reinforced the authority and the legitimacy of what we might call centrist parties, parties that ran from the center-left—Social Democratic Parties in Europe, the Democratic Party in the United States—to parties on the center-right—Christian Democrats in Europe, Conservatives, Republicans in the United States.

LINDSAY:
So essentially, this created guardrails on public debate, sort of narrowed the conversation, let's say between the 30-yard lines. I can use an American football expression.

TRUBOWITZ:
Absolutely, Jim. And so in other words, if you were too far left, you were seen as being too soft on communism, on the one hand. And if you were too far-right, you were seen as too belligerent and risky to be kind of basically given the keys to the car, that you might cook everybody's goose through nuclear conflict or nuclear escalation and potentially Armageddon. So that's part of the story. But the other part of the story is that that order—or what you're talking about, the game in between the 30-yard lines—is rested also on social protection and the development of the social welfare state in Western democracies. And they basically provided a level of security, economic security, for working families in Western democracies so that in a certain kind of protection, so that they were willing to allow their governments to engage in a kind of managed form of international trade and greater international openness, certainly than what the world experienced in the 1930's so that they could go down that path. 

And one of the interesting things about that period was that the Cold War actually reinforced Western democracy's commitment to the social welfare state. How so? Well, it basically encouraged or incentivized political leaders to invest in social welfare as a way of preempting claims that were being made on the other side, on the Soviet side, that they were offering a worker's paradise. The thing is, is the Soviet vision of modernity got traction inside Western democracies, and it put pressure on Western leaders to show that capitalism was every bit as good, that it could deliver the goods for working families every bit as much as socialism or communism. 

And really, the person that captured the basic idea very early on was Dean Acheson, former secretary of state for Harry Truman. In a speech that he gave to the Society of American Editors in 1950, he said, "Look, there's no longer any difference between foreign policy and domestic policy. They're two sides of the same thing. They are both essential." And what he understood is that countries required, Western democracies required, security, international security. But at the same time, they required ... If you were going to get a commitment to support liberal internationalism in those Western democracies, those governments had to guarantee that they had people's backs in terms of social protection and economic inclusion and economic security. So in a sense, in a very real sense, foreign and domestic policy were linked.

LINDSAY:
So what happened?

TRUBOWITZ:
So what happened is, the Cold War ended. I mean, if you were to boil it all down, what happened when the Cold War ended, it already ... the commitment to the social welfare state was being eroded. You know, it started in the UK with Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party rule. It started in the United States with Ronald Reagan and Republican control of the presidency. But in the 1990's, that position that the commitment to social welfare should be rolled back or there should be a greater investment in markets and deregulation gain traction on the political, kind of, center-left parties from Bill Clinton and the Democrats to Tony Blair and Labor. It gained traction in Germany and in France and in other countries. That's part of the story. 

But the other part of the story and the reason that that stuff got so much traction is because with the end of the Cold War, it was less necessary. There were the same geopolitical imperatives to invest in social welfare, to invest in economic security, was eased. And so you had these two things going at the same time. And it opened up, if you will, the political space for those parties who were inside the 30-yard line on the extreme left and the extreme right to gain political traction because as the, kind of, sword, the nuclear sword, was lifted, and the danger of geopolitical conflict and contestation was removed, it became easier for those parties on the far left and the far-right to enter the political conversation because they weren't viewed as, you know, beyond the pale, at least on the security dimension. 

Those parties were clever, especially the parties on the far-right, because what they did is they abandoned their traditional commitment to laissez-faire and to the free markets and aligned themselves more closely with the longstanding commitment to social welfare. And they coupled that with a commitment to immigration controls. And they created a cocktail that over time gained a lot of increasing political support inside Western democracies. All of this comes to a head, you know, in 2016, really, with Brexit and Trump's election, but the story really goes back to the 1990's, and I think, really, the end of the Cold War. And the meaning, I think the kind of domestic consequences of the end of the Cold War have not been fully understood, I think. And that's one of the things that my co-author, Brian, and I were both trying to bring to the front in this story, to tell a part of the story that really has not been fully appreciated.

LINDSAY:
So Peter, help me understand that part of the story because as I listen to the public debate, and I'm caricaturing it a bit, what I hear is people saying we've had this backlash against globalization fueled by resentment of free trade. People believe that free trade has done them wrong, it's undermined the social safety net, that while Americans, for example, can buy goods at Walmart for less because they're imported from China, they don't have jobs that allow them to go up the socioeconomic ladder. I take that, but I wonder if the story isn't more complicated than that. And I note that there's the issue of what people believe to be true, trade is what did us in, and there is what actually caused us to be in this situation that we are in.

To what extent is this really a story about trade or about other developments taking place on the domestic front? I can think of several ones: technology. I will note that it takes many fewer workers to make a car today than it did in the 1970's. One can talk about sort of the loss of historical memory. For people in the fifties or sixties, they had some vague notion of what happened in the thirties if you pursued economic nationalism, so they knew sort of what was at risk. You have to talk about elite capture, in that sense that sort of the people who got in first and controlled the upper echelons of government in the economy could protect themselves and their progeny, and everybody else got left outside. How do you make sense of all of those competing explanations for the rise of anti-globalism and nationalism?

TRUBOWITZ:
Yeah. So Jim, that's a very good question. And there's no doubt that there are many factors that explain the rise, or contributed to the rise, of anti-globalism in the West. And of course, it's varied in levels of intensity across Western democracy, so it's not like constant. You know, in some countries, it might be more intense in one period than in another. Automation is certainly part of the story, although automation and globalization—there's an endogeneity that two things are kind of interconnected. And so, it's hard to pull those apart. But automation, technological innovation is certainly part of the story, so is immigration. Immigration is, you know, became a hot button issue, and parties on the far-right really began to exploit that as early as the 1990's, recognizing that those who felt that they were losing jobs either to free trade or to automation were looking for explanations for what happened to them, and maybe kind of lowest common denominator explanations, and immigration was one thing that was very easy to kind of, you know, sometimes falsely, identify as the source of the problem.

What I would say here is, having said all that, trade and globalization is part of the story. I mean, the China shock in the United States was real. And there's a reason that members of Congress running for office in the manufacturing belt, you know, the Rust Belt in the United States, had played over and over that the Chinese professor ad, when they're running for office, about how China was going to eat America's lunch and was eating America's lunch, and the loss of their jobs was a function of kind of outsourcing those jobs to China to take advantage of cheaper labor pools and more lax environmental rules.

LINDSAY:
But Peter, the interesting thing there is that if you look across the board in the West, as you've noted, you see this anti-globalism sentiment surge regardless of whether countries are net exporters or net importers. I will note Germany, for example, has maintained a manufacturing surplus. Lots of reasons for that, yet, you still see the rise of anti-globalism in Germany. That's the part I'm trying to work through.

TRUBOWITZ:
So I think the crux of the problem, Jim, is that Western governments' commitment to domestic economic security and inclusiveness did not keep pace with the commitment to globalization. I mean, the problem is not globalization per se, it is the combination of doubling down on international openness and institutionalized cooperation through supranational institutions on the one hand, and an erosion of domestic supports of protections on the other. Just, it didn't keep pace. That's what changed, it seems to me. It began to really change and be embraced not only by the right, by the center-right, but by the center-left in Western democracies in the 1990's.

I think until Western leaders address both sides of that dynamic, those pressures are going to continue and likely to mount and become more destabilizing domestically and internationally. Geopolitics can't fix that problem. The war in Ukraine has not, despite many predictions that it would, has not put an end to anti-globalism and populism in Western democracies. In fact, we've seen a number of elections since that war began where populists and anti-globalist parties have gained traction, and in some cases, gained office like in Italy. And of course, in the United States, Donald Trump has a shot at getting elected president again.

LINDSAY:
Peter, I want to talk about how one might recapture what you have called "the vital center," a nod to the great Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.. But before we get to that, I want to ask your sense of why do you think it's important to try to salvage the liberal international order or the rules-based order because one reaction to all of this could simply be, it was an arrangement that's reached its sell-by date. We ought to move on and think differently about how to organize the international order. How do you respond to that?

TRUBOWITZ:
Well, I mean, I think that, you know, one way to think about what took place in the nineties when the U.S. and other Western democracies embraced what economists call hyper-globalization, made a huge bet on supranationalism, and we really haven't talked very much about some of this is in opposition, is frustration with the sovereignty costs that supranationalism entails, but a kind of-

LINDSAY:
Just explain briefly what you mean by sovereignty costs.

TRUBOWITZ:
I mean the loss or the sense of losing control to international institutions. You know, in the European context over here, it's losing control to Brussels bureaucrats. In the United States, it's fears about, kind of, the blob and losing control or support to Washington bureaucrats who control the foreign policy apparatus. And that, of course, is one of the things that Trump played on in 2016, and really, over the course of his presidency. And that has resonance with a lot of people in the United States and in Europe as well, certainly not a majority but enough that it provides political traction and allows politicians on the far-right—and in some cases, on the far-left—to get political traction. 

Anyway, back to the question that you asked is that ... on why should we care about, you know, the turn to, let's just call it the turn to economic nationalism, that we see kind of on display now in Western democracies, and some have criticized Biden for, you know, the heavy emphasis on economic nationalism with the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS act, and so forth. The great danger, I think, is a kind of overcorrection and an overresponse to the excesses of both globalization and the contraction of the welfare state, where you potentially—I'm saying potentially here—you kick off a race to the bottom. So if the United States were to turn increasingly inward to rely more on putting up walls or to rely more on industrial policy, there's going to be a response. Other countries are going to do the same thing, and in fact, we can see that taking place. And this is not to say that the U.S. should not rely at all in industrial policy, it's just one needs to be careful that you don't overcorrect.

LINDSAY:
When I have conversations with people who aren't political scientists or a member of the Washington bubble, they say, "What does this do for me?" It's like you keep talking about, American leadership like it's an end. American leadership to most people is just a means to something—prosperity and security. So why am I better off with this order?

TRUBOWITZ:
I mean, I would say, in response to this, so it's a very good question. And we can't go home again, if you will. We're not going to be able to go back to the post-war, World War II, liberal international order. And those who are pining for it, I think are kind of barking up the wrong tree. What we need to do is to reimagine the relationship between foreign and domestic policies. We need to look for new ways to reconnect policies in the international realm to recognizable benefits at home for working families, to address those people that you are talking about in the question who wonder, "What's in it for me? What stake do I have in an open international order, international openness, greater economic growth, and prosperity?" But it also needs to be couched in such a way, it leads to ... There's uneven growth that comes with it. There are ... not all communities benefit equally from it. And as a result, political leaders in, you know, Western governments—it's beyond the West, its governments in general—need to be mindful and address the unevenness and the economic insecurities that it generates. 

So in a way, what we need to do is we need to renew and update our commitment to economic openness abroad but also inclusive growth at home. And you know, it's not immediately obvious. I mean, investing in social transfers might be one of the ways, but I think anybody that lives in, has spent time in, the manufacturing, the traditional Manufacturing Belt in the United States or Northern England or Northern France knows these are problems that now have a real spatial dimension. They affect very large communities, regions, in fact. And so the effort actually has to be much more programmatic and much more community-focused, that seems to me, than it's been in the past. And so, I mean, I think there's an opportunity here for some innovative thinking, and that's the argument. The liberal international order has many benefits that accrue to Americans and to accrue to people in other ... I mean, many parts of the globe have benefited from international openness, from globalization, and so forth. But downside costs to it, and those need to be addressed in a much more programmatic way than they've been addressed, certainly in advanced industrialized economies in the recent past.

LINDSAY:
Peter, let's talk about that for a moment, because I think you've touched on something that's very important and worth keeping in mind, which is the spatial dimension of what has transpired over the last several decades. Whatever your sort of allocation of the blame is, the reality is in countries like the United States, like Great Britain, like France, you can find regions that really feel left behind, hollowed out. I will note, that probably led to the decision by the British back in 2016 to leave the European Union. The idea was that if you were sort of freed of the shackles of the EU that Great Britain would flourish. That doesn't seem to be the case. Is that largely because the notion that leaving was going to bring Britain to some post-liberal order Eden misplaced, or is it because the British government simply hasn't executed the exit well enough?

TRUBOWITZ:
I think both things are true there. I think the British voters were sold a false bill of goods and promises that Britain really wasn't in a position to fulfill, certainly not in the short-term. And the flip side of that is that, you know, all of the talk about, let's say in this country, leveling up, which means addressing those spatial inequities that—not only spatial inequities ... But clearly, those spatial inequities that you've referred to, let's say between London and the North, have not been systematically addressed. Frankly, it's been cheap talk. And so, until that is addressed and until resources are allocated, until you adopt policies that are essentially industrial policies in that they're very targeted policies aimed at certain sectors and aimed at certain communities and compensating for the failures of the marketplace, you're not going to see ... you're probably not going to see the kinds of ... the changes that were promised to people. 

So, you know, I think frankly at the time, there was a failure to appreciate the limits in this country, in the UK, the limits ... How should I put it? The limited mobility that they had. I mean, at the time, there was a lot of talk—this is going back 2016, 2017, on into 2018—how they were going to be trade agreements for the United States. And so that they were going to compensate for the loss of the EU by striking a deal with the United States, and this was not realistic. The United States at that particular point in time was not looking, and still isn't, investing in trade liberalization packages, even on a bilateral basis, let alone on a multilateral basis. And so it was kind of pushing in a direction where there just wasn't going to be much support. And so the UK, I mean, British prime ministers have found themselves shopping around, looking for trade partners.

LINDSAY:
Now, Peter, I take your point that if you want to rebuild support for the liberal international order in the United States in the West that it's important to restore balance between staying open and safeguarding economic security, and that you need to sort of work on both aspects. And on the openness issue, it may not just be becoming less open but rethinking the notion of how you have an openness on the trade front that serves people well. There are a variety of ways you can do trade agreements. But I want to close with a broader question, which is, do you think we can restore, reinforce, reinvigorate the rules-based order or liberal international order without also trying to find a way to get the countries of the so-called "Global South" to buy in as well?"

TRUBOWITZ:
No. I think that the U.S., Washington, and other Western capitals will need to get buy-in from the Global South. They'll need to get countries like India and Nigeria and Indonesia to, you know, kind of move in this direction. I don't think that's an impossible lift, but the United States and Western democracies now have competition with China competing for the same audiences. And it puts the Global South, countries like India, in a position where they can, in a sense, forum shop—where they can consider arrangements with who's offering the best kind of arrangements-

LINDSAY:
Yeah, they can play off one great power against another great power. It's as old as history.

TRUBOWITZ:
Indeed, indeed. And so it's not new there. What I would say, Jim, is my concern on the international front—and let's just focus on the United States here—is that this problem that the U.S. faces, where this anti-globalist backlash, that there's a temptation to try to solve it by stealing a page out of the Cold War playbook. And the idea here is to focus on a common threat to deflect the anti-globalist pressures at home and to restore a kind of common sense of international purpose. And there's different versions of this argument, but I think the one that gets most traction, especially in Washington, focuses directly on the China challenge. And simply here, the idea is to raise the international stakes by using great power confrontation with China to rekindle Western solidarity and domestic support for international engagement. 

And I think this is based on a sense that that worked during the Cold War and it can work again. And I would caution that there are limits to that analogy because during the Cold War, as I said at the very outset, the Soviet ... there was a very powerful ideological dimension to that confrontation between the West and the East, and there were different versions of modernity that were on offer. And the West ... And what that did, that competition reinforced the domestic commitment in Western democracies to providing economic security and—you know, with limits, I think—greater economic inclusiveness in the West. And it is not at all obvious to me that the China challenge will have the same kind of resonance domestically inside Western democracies.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Peter Trubowitz, professor of international relations and director of the Phelan U.S. Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the co-author of the new book, Geopolitics and Democracy: The Western Liberal Order from Foundation to Fracture. Peter, thank you very much for joining me on The President's Inbox.

TRUBOWITZ:
Jim, great to be with you. Thanks so much for having me.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We love the feedback. If you want to reach out to us, please email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed in The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance. This is Jim Lindsay, thanks for listening.