Nous dîmes adieu à toute une époque.’ Apollinaire dated this sensation—we said farewell to a whole era—to 31 August 1914, when, as he recounts in his great poem ‘La Petite Auto’, he and a friend quit the seaside resort of Deauville, in Normandy, to head south to the capital, in flight from the German advance. After driving through the night,
We arrived in Paris
Just as they were posting the draft
We realized my friend and I
That the little car had driven us into a New era
And although we were both already mature men
We had just been bornfootnote1
Apollinaire enlisted in 1914, suffered a head wound on the front two years later and died, aged 38, in 1918, a casualty of the global flu epidemic. He had been right to declare a new era. In the aftermath of the Great War, as Hobsbawm observed much later, ‘No old government was left standing between the borders of France and the Sea of Japan.’ The same historian put things more analytically in his book-length study of nationalism, noting that the period after the war was when the map of Europe was ‘for the first—and it turned out for the only—time redrawn according to the principle of nationality, and when the vocabulary of European nationalism came to be adopted by new movements of colonial liberation’.footnote2 Though it took until the 1970s for the last major spasms of decolonization to occur, formal—and frequently multinational—empires at length disappeared from the dramatis personae of world history, in favour of a near-uniformity of nation-states.
Apollinaire’s poem testifies to the fact that historical sea changes can from time to time be experienced as punctual annunciations, transpiring from one day to the next, even if their full consequences take generations to shake out. Last year, the Serbian-American political economist Branko Milanovic anticipated the date of Trump’s second inauguration in similar terms: ‘Almost never are witnesses to historical events aware they are observing or participating in a history-changing event . . . But on January 20, 2025, we shall watch one such event.’ The inauguration marked ‘a symbolic end to global neoliberalism’: ‘globalism has now been converted into nationalism’.footnote3 This assertion of a sudden Trumpian terminus to global neoliberalism can obviously be questioned, and Milanovic allowed that the main economic features of neoliberalism (‘low tax rates, deregulation and worship of profit’) might well survive the demise of globalization. Moreover, here in the second year of the Administration, many of Trump’s capricious tariffs have been deemed illegal by the Supreme Court; and even if successor initiatives, floated on different legal theories, prevail against their own juridical challenges, Trump’s ad hoc foray into protectionism hardly guarantees that future us Administrations will fiddle with the apertures of trade in the same way. But Milanovic was less concerned with neoliberal globalization as a stubborn economic regime than with its fate as a worldview: Trump’s victorious nationalism ‘represents a break with the ideology that ruled from the 1980s, and surely from the early 1990s, to today’. If Keynes was right that politicians are usually the slaves of defunct economists, the change of outlook will no doubt become significant in practical terms, too.
Indeed proclamations that the era of neoliberal globalization has come to a close, and a new epoch of economic nationalism opened up, have not been in short supply over the past few years, even before the us—the state most closely associated with neo-globo evangelizing from the 1990s onwards—for a second time elected as president a xenophobe openly contemptuous of trading partners and a proponent of zero-sum protectionism. In September 2024, the Financial Times ran a trio of articles under the rubric, ‘The New Economic Nationalism’. In one, the unsuccessful efforts of a Chinese mining conglomerate to invest in an Australian rare-earths firm through ‘a low-profile Singaporean entity’ specially chartered for this purpose (Canberra ultimately blocked the deal on grounds of national interest) adumbrated ‘a much bigger and more complex geopolitical trend’:
An intensifying rivalry between China and the us-led west is driving a fragmentation in the world’s economic order. Beijing, Washington, Brussels and other capitals have imposed a range of tariffs, export controls and other measures to protect their domestic markets and stymie competitors’ technological progress.footnote4
And in November 2024, just days after Trump’s second victory, the London Review of Books published Adam Tooze’s postmortem on ‘Bidenomics’, in which the outgoing Administration’s efforts to safeguard the domestic green-energy and semiconductor industries against foreign (read: Chinese) competition had made good on the somewhat feckless protectionist rhetoric of Trump’s first term. ‘National productivism’, Tooze wrote, has furnished ‘the common denominator of gop and Democratic politics since 2016’; in fact, ‘the minimization of China’s role in the [high-tech] supply chain . . . started with Obama’. Especially where tech (e.g., ai and its microchips) was concerned, Beijing understandably perceived America’s aim as ensuring ‘by any means necessary, including forceful interventions in private business trade and investment decisions, that China is held back and the us preserves its decisive edge’. Tooze found it ‘hard to overstate the decisiveness and importance of that position’ as ‘a departure from a purely economic understanding of globalization’.footnote5