The New National Question

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

The contemporary scholarly literature on economic nationalism is vast; some recent works were discussed in these pages by Nicholas Mulder a few issues back.footnote⁶ The aim of this contribution is more immediately political. How far a new era of economic nationalism will really go to banish globalization from the international scene may be unknowable as yet, but it is worth asking whether such a dispensation could prove more hospitable than its predecessor to the forces of the radical left. As suggested by the use of Trump to symbolize it, the national turn in ideology and political economy is a development associated to date with the populist right who have done most to champion it. Nor has the technocratic centre-left altogether missed the moment, as witness the stabs at green dirigisme—tax credits for producers of renewable energy and purchasers of heat pumps or evs—in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, or Brussels’s ‘west-shoring’ switch to more expensive us natural gas in response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

By rights, parties and movements of the left should be well-placed to capture and direct any shift from neo-globo economic passivity to the reassertion of the state’s prerogatives, having inveighed against a liberalized and deregulated economic order throughout decades when this was a lonelier activity than it is today. For now, however, the sundry national lefts that sprang up in the 2010s have done little to capitalize on the troubles of globalization: a problem in need of some explanation, and even more of a solution. The background to recent nationalist stirrings is after all a gathering worldwide eco-crisis—economic and ecological both—that the mass of humanity can hardly afford to see met by deadly, vying nationalisms of the more familiar capitalist variety: a suggestion of the high stakes of the question at hand. What follows will explore the problems and possibilities that a post-globalization order may present to today’s lefts, examining some critical-theoretical approaches and prognoses. First, though, it may be helpful to touch on the pre-history of present-day economic nationalism, to learn how past tides can help situate the current wave; and to see what lessons can be gleaned on the advent of a new worldwide economic arrangement from the history of globalization itself.

The old regime

Whatever the shape ultimately to be taken by twenty-first-century economic nationalisms, the large outlines of the ancien régime of neoliberal globalization are clear enough, as the coast appears to slip from view. Here was a tendentially planetary model of economic life in which national economies became ever more integrated at the level of finance, by way of international capital flows more or less unregulated by the state; ever more intertwined at the level of physical and digital commodities, by way of a global supply chain provisioned by internationally competitive firms largely independent of state support; and also ever more blended together in the department of national populations, as cheap transport together with formally or informally relaxed immigration regimes encouraged that form of international arbitrage in skilled and unskilled labour that goes under the heading of migration.

The main direct benefit of this universal arrangement was held to be continuously increasing prosperity across the globe (even if, for the bulk of rich-country populations, incomes plateaued in absolute terms and declined in relative ones: a problem, much analysed over recent years by Milanovic in particular, that eventually grew impossible for politicians either to ignore or remedy). The main collateral benefit of neoliberal globalization was meanwhile held to be the prevention of war between states henceforth too economically integrated with one another to sink to hostilities.footnote⁷ Politically, such a benign dispensation would commend itself to regular ratification by democratic publics, to whom its advantages must be obvious. And, last but not least, globalization was, culturally speaking, to foster cosmopolitanism, as the worldwide circulation, in ever-wider orbits, of commercial entertainment and enterprising individuals—not to mention ‘that pirate lingo’ the English language, as the American pragmatist philosopher Pierce called it—wore down prejudices of all kinds.

This at any rate was the stated programme, and for several decades, before and after its widespread public enunciation in the early 1990s, the deregulating dictates of globalization were more and more borne out in practice, huge shameless carve-outs like European agriculture or American aerospace notwithstanding. World trade, or the overall share of imports and exports in global gdp, grew from about one quarter of total international output in 1970 to 60 per cent in 2008; after a brief swoon during the global financial crisis, and another in 2020 for the pandemic, it reached 68 per cent in 2025. Annual cross-border capital inflows, for their part, were running at $11.4 trillion in 2007 and have since contracted to around $4 trillion.footnote⁸ In other respects, too, globalization seems to have stalled or to have become shadowed by contraflows. As a supposed age of international peace it had been compromised from the start, but is now riven by major wars between Russia and Ukraine and the us/Israel and Iran, co-prosperity be damned. As a mandate for liberal democracy, it has been confronted by the stability and apparent legitimacy of a Chinese party-state that never held elections to begin with; by sham elections and popular repression in a Russia that during the 90s appeared en route to emulate the West; by the unembarrassed apartheid enforced by an allegedly liberal-democratic Israel, spoiled favourite of the West itself; and by formidable projects of ‘illiberal democracy’, mixing personalist authority with the protocols of the franchise, from national leaders in democratic countries big (the us, India) and small (Hungary, again Israel). Finally, as a cosmopolitan enterprise, globalization has seen its values of ‘racial and gender equality’ and ‘multiculturalism’—as Milanovic calls themfootnote⁹—not so much die, as he says, but fall back into a defensive stance against a reinvigorated sexism and racial bigotry posting tribunes at the summits of power. Together, these reversals mark the deep crisis of a process—of the progressive unification and promised amelioration of human life under the sign of the (us-underwritten) free market—that not long ago appeared to have graduated over a few short decades from eccentric utopian scheme into unstoppable reality.

The heyday of globalization—as the ostensibly irreversible undertaking was designated tout court by journalists and politicians who typically spared their publics the words neoliberal or capitalist—lasted for only about a dozen years in the realm of establishment rhetoric, say from 1996–2008. As an emergent and later dominant economic regime, on the other hand, its infancy might be located, as by David Harvey in his Brief History of Neoliberalism, in 1978–80, when Deng ‘took the first momentous steps toward the liberalization of a communist-ruled economy in a country that accounted for a fifth of the world’s population’; when Volcker took the reins at the Fed in the us; and when Thatcher and Reagan were first elected to lead their respective countries.footnote¹⁰ Of course, as Quinn Slobodian, Dieter Plehwe and Philip Mirowski have explored in detail, neoliberalism itself, as a rising political philosophy—which, by rejecting the ambition of nation-states to shield workers and firms from international competition, always contained the ideal of globalization—enjoyed an even longer ascent, starting as far back as l’entre-deux-guerres.footnote¹¹

But to trace the rise and crisis of neoliberal globalization is not to account for either development; here it is enough to note that the new regime required, first, a prior crisis to which it presented a resolution; and, second, the political agents necessary to enact it. The 1970s of course furnished the sponsoring crisis, when a widespread model of welfarist transfers to poor households and the corporatist management of industrial relations, together with oil shocks induced from abroad and wildcat strikes among domestic workers, provoked so much inflation in first-world countries as to menace both corporate profitability and consumer purchasing power. Robert Brenner, in ‘The Economics of Global Turbulence’, later located the source of the 1970s crisis elsewhere, in the reduced profitability of industries suffering from international overcapacity, which sunk overall rates of growth, from Japan to the us to West Germany, below the levels of the prior two decades.footnote¹² At any rate, accelerating inflation and slowing growth together created a constituency, among owners and workers alike, sufficient to install leaders willing to abandon the ‘embedded liberalism’ or Keynesian compact of the first postwar decades in favour of experiments in neoliberalism or (in the preferred language of Reagan and Thatcher) ‘free enterprise’. In the 1980s, the imf and World Bank then imposed the same ‘Washington Consensus’ prescriptions—free capital flows, deregulation, privatization, fewer trade barriers—across much of Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia, as the price for rolling over the debt burdens incurred during the developmentalism of the 1960s. In the 1990s, us experts prescribed shock therapy across the former Soviet Bloc; the Congress Party substantially deregulated India; and European states were squeezed by the convergence criteria for joining the new currency. In 2001, China was welcomed into the free-trade club.footnote¹³

Harvey in his Brief History describes neoliberalism in terms of ‘the restoration of class power’, and the owners of wealth naturally warmed to an economic philosophy promising to cut their taxes, by shrinking state outlays, and reduce workers’ wages, by confronting trade unions. But of course the enthusiasm of capitalists alone could not deliver the neoliberal era, and Harvey observed at the same time that appeals ‘to tradition and cultural values’, trained on voters whose economic interests didn’t obviously align with those of shareholders, also ‘bulked large’ in the success of neoliberal parties of the right. In fact the economic and ‘family-values’ programmes of neoliberalism coincided, so the Australian sociologist Melinda Cooper stresses, paying particular attention to the us case: the less assistance the state provided with respect to housing, unemployment insurance, health care or education, the more must the family household be relied on and so restored to the centrality that for moral and religious conservatives it deserved.footnote¹⁴

Still, the astonishing ideological supremacy achieved by neoliberalism during the 1990s and after could hardly have come about had neo-globo remained the exclusive property of the right. Its dominance was sealed when the traditional parties of the working class, first Clinton’s Democrats and then Blair’s Labour Party, pledged themselves to neoliberal principles with at least as much zeal as their precursors on the right. Some of this conversion—later repeated by socialists on the Continent (e.g., Schröder of the spd in Germany) or populists in Latin America (e.g., Menem the Peronist in Argentina)—no doubt came from sincere belief in the historical inevitability of neoliberalism, which it would be folly to resist. But it also represented a pragmatic surrender to liberalized international capital flows, which might flee the sovereign debt of any country that over-enlarged its fiscal deficit with too much spending on social programmes (or industrial policy). Just weeks after his inauguration in 1993, Clinton expressed astonishment, to his top economic advisers, that ‘the success of my programme and my re-election’ depended on the Fed and a bunch of bond traders.footnote¹⁵

Politicians of the centre-left may have submitted reluctantly at first to the dictates of neoliberalism—but Clinton and others, in the us and abroad, soon enough discovered the electoral potential inside the Washington consensus: if major parties left and right insisted alike on neoliberalism, then that large part of the working class not yet lured rightwards by chauvinistic appeals to so-called tradition would have no choice—whatever its lingering attachment to a class politics no longer on offer—but to vote for the centre-left as the more humane or ‘social’ wing of neoliberalism, at the same time that metropolitan professionals who perceived benefits to themselves in neoliberal globalization (as investors in global equity markets, purchasers of cheap imports or consumers of non-unionized ‘services’) could from now on express their social progressivism without fear of contradicting their economic interests by likewise supporting the centre-left. In other words, it was the former parties of socialism, social democracy or the labour movement that, in one democratic country after another, certified the victory of ‘the most successful ideology in world history’.footnote¹⁶

If this—violently stylized—history of globalization offers any guide to the economic nationalism bidding to succeed it, its lessons may be at least twofold. First of all, economic nationalism, like neoliberal globalization before it, will surely require a true crisis of the established order to gain a chance at replacing it; and there, in point of crisis, present-day history shows strong signs of obliging, for reasons to be explored below. And—secondly—any accession of economic nationalism fit for comparison with the half-century-long reign of neoliberalism would likely be confirmed, as in the case of the latter, by a new consensus on its behalf, such that mainstream political actors across the spectrum combine to espouse economic nationalism, whatever their dramatic differences otherwise. Indeed, economic nationalism sharply contrasts with neoliberal globalization—which always foresaw international convergence on the same policy of laissez-faire—in just this way: there exist very dissimilar ways of going about economic nationalism, some of them fiercely at odds.

National systems

Economic nationalism—whatever exactly the term turns out to mean—of course enjoyed a long career prior to its twenty-first-century recrudescence. As suggested by the subtitle of The Nationalist Dilemma: A Global History of Economic Nationalism, 1776–Present, an impressive survey by the German economic historian Marvin Suesse, the phenomenon can be considered virtually coeval with the nation-state itself and has recurred during decisive periods in the life of countries across the world, from Bismarck’s Germany to Nyerere’s Tanzania and Perón’s Argentina to Mahathir’s Malaysia. The strength of Suesse’s book accordingly lies in its chronological sweep—from the fresh founding of the us two hundred and fifty years ago to the curdled advent of Trump and his international epigones today—together with its geographical range, boasting compact but detailed studies of some two dozen countries, from the era of the American and French Revolutions to the late-nineteenth-century national imperialisms, the interwar period, decolonization, re-globalization and the national programmes of Latin America’s ‘pink tide’.footnote¹⁷

Suesse reconnoitres his vast terrain with a close eye for topographical resemblances. For one example, economic nationalism in ultimate state policy often relied on intellectual prophecy beforehand, whether from the tariff-boosting Henry Carey in the antebellum us (for Marx, ‘the only American economist of importance’) or, most notably, Friedrich List, whose major work, The National System of Political Economy (1841), must still be the single most important theoretical warrant for vernacular experiments in such systems. Strategizing the paths by which Germany, the us and other powers could develop their economies in the face of England’s global manufacturing and naval predominance in the post-Napoleonic period, List combined the German idea of a strong domestic market for industrial goods with the examples of American expansionism and self-sufficiency and French dirigisme, aimed particularly at the build-out of railroads and general infrastructure.footnote¹⁸ The Listian ideas of external protection and internal direction have, in different combinations, formed the theoretical basis of economic nationalism ever since. Other instances of nationalist vindication include the less well-known Theory of Protection and International Trade (1929) and The Century of Corporatism (1934) by the Romanian Mihail Manoilescu, Foreign Minister for a few months in 1940, when he attached his country to Mussolini and Hitler, and a decisive influence, a hemisphere away, on the Estado Novo of Vargas in Brazil.footnote¹⁹ (The intellectual cosmopolitanism of economic-nationalist thought is notable.)

Later on, philosophical advocacy and practical statecraft came sometimes to be more durably united. In Ghana, the socialist Nkrumah, President from 1960 to 1966, wrote books advocating pan-Africanism against neocolonialism: a continental campaign to be advanced in good measure by economic planning on the part of distinct states. In Malaysia, the backbencher Mahathir in 1970 put out The Malay Dilemma, where he denounced ‘monopolizing’ Chinese trade associations for rolling up the national economy to the exclusion of patriotic ethnic Malays and proposed ‘constructive protection’ for the latter as managers and entrepreneurs, an initiative he likened to the tariffs necessary, according to the more canonical precepts of economic nationalism, to shelter infant industries before they faced mature international competition; the same Mahathir would of course later serve as prime minister for almost a quarter century. So does Suesse regard the Mao of ‘On Contradiction’ (1937) as one kind of prophetic economic nationalist—‘the contradiction between imperialism and the Chinese nation is the principal one’, which thereby recommends ‘a prudent policy toward the national bourgeoisie’—and the quixotic us presidential candidate Pat Buchanan as another. Buchanan may have finished fourth in the 2000 race, but his anathemas both against immigrants (Mexico ‘exports its jobless to us’) and an American ‘elite’ that ‘force-marched the nation into the Global Economy of its dreams’, let alone his call to ‘Make America First Again’, prefigured the rancid populism of Trump in 2016 and after. Buchanan’s complaint that ‘money has no flag’ may be the most concise slogan of economic nationalism.footnote²⁰

Mixed motives

This historical miscellany provides some idea of the protean shape of the thing, in Suesse’s account as well as others. Economic nationalism can be said to characterize the European imperialisms of the belle époque, or southern countries struggling for liberation from the same empires after the Second World War. The description can cover socialists as well as fascists. Economic nationalism has likewise been invoked in the cause of ethnic harmony and regional integration—as in postwar pan-Africanism, or more recent initiatives such as Mercosur, established in 1991, in Latin America—at the same time that it has designated competition between states to the point of war, or absolutized ethnic rifts within national borders: Mahathir’s favouritism of Malay over Chinese enterprise is as nothing compared to the systematic theft of property from outcast groups under Nazism or Zionism. So is economic nationalism also at times the watchword of comparatively rich and powerful countries, or poor and weaker ones. Such funhouse reflections of an—allegedly—single body provoke the question of whether the idea possesses enough coherence to be useful at all.

Suspicion that the term supplies a vacant formula is most justified when it comes to statements of political intent. Are not all economic policies of nation-states perforce nationalist ones? Few if any statesmen, elected or otherwise, fail to claim that their policies promote the national interest. The rhetorical obligation applies not only to tariff-wielding developmentalism or industrial dirigisme but also to the blithe doctrine of free trade, most obviously in Gladstone’s Britain or Reagan and Clinton’s us. (Milei in Argentina and Modi in India today are only the latest to conjoin liberalizing policy and nationalist language.) Clinton’s words from 1998 make clear that neoliberal globalization—in recent discussions the opposite number to economic nationalism—not long ago belonged to a crusading American nationalism in its own right: ‘The nations of the world should savour the fruits of the victory over totalitarianism: free markets, free elections, free peoples.’footnote²¹ The fruits might be laid out as a global feast, but Americans were to eat best in terms of both national prosperity and post-Cold War pride.

The result is that ‘economic nationalism’ only achieves real—if still somewhat elusive—meaning when the phrase describes certain strategies and not others, regardless of the identical ends in view. Suesse summarizes ‘the nationalist dilemma’ as a choice between economic isolation or economic expansion. In this scheme, isolation typically aims to protect existing assets from foreign ownership, for the sake of maintaining incomes and minimizing inequality among the national population, even at the cost of rapid growth; expansion, on the other hand, typically shelters or subsidizes emerging industries in hopes of faster growth, even at the risk of increasing domestic inequality. The characteristic policy of the first approach is tariffs shielding domestic farms and workshops from international competition; of the second, industrial policy nurturing national champions who can contend with foreign firms. But Suesse has hardly framed his alternatives before the schema falters. In his introduction, he allows that neither ‘all attempts at isolation’ nor ‘all proposals calling for economic expansion’ need be nationalist, since such approaches may also be justified ‘on grounds of individual welfare’. The criterion of avowed motive fails for the reasons given above: a national politician must claim to cherish the welfare not of isolate individuals but a whole population, or at least that large portion of one held to embody the true nation as against minority interlopers. And in his final chapter Suesse makes another concession that saps his overall framework: ‘In many cases’, he says, ‘a mix of expansionist and isolationist motives is likely to occur simultaneously.’footnote²²

The distinguishing features of economic nationalism must lie elsewhere—and Suesse gropes towards better typological criteria when he somewhat offhandedly explains the ‘scant attention paid in this book to Europe and the United States in the immediate postwar decades’. When so many economic formations qualify for him as nationalist, why not those of postwar Europe and the us? ‘In situations where perceived economic inequality is minimal, both globally and within the nation, or where these inequalities do not correspond to salient political divides, nationalist approaches to economics may not be powerful.’footnote²³ The cloudy passage calls to mind several features of the long expansion of les trente glorieuses. First, governing parties of the left or right, in Europe and North America, accepted the increasing integration of national economies—the European Coal and Steel Community; the Common Market; the initial us openness to German and Japanese exports—as the path to a common advanced-capitalist prosperity, across borders and within them. Meanwhile, the convergence of the same economies towards a welfarist norm during this period evidently escapes the charge of nationalism—in spite of the state interference with the labour market entailed by any regime of social provision—for the simple reason that such policies were pursued more or less in parallel, justified by anti-communist rivalry for the allegiance of the working class, rather than as eccentric deviations from an international consensus.

Finally, Suesse proposes that economic inequality both within and between states must be minimal if they’re to resist the allure of economic nationalism. And yet the era of postwar harmony got underway under conditions of starkest inequality, with the us possessing an economy twice the size of that of its western European trading partners put together. Nor did devastated European countries recover at anything like the same rate: the Federal Republic’s Wirtschaftswunder saw rates of growth several percentage points higher than in Italy or France, and more than double those of the uk. Postwar economic cooperation didn’t originate from shared prosperity, then, so much as it promised such a condition as a result.

It’s nevertheless worth sifting through Suesse’s muddy formulations for conceptual ore, in order to contest the facile idea—inherent in much recent discussion opposing economic nationalism to neoliberal globalization—that states either assert control over the national economy or else deliver themselves up to the free market. The postwar decades evoked by Suesse by no means saw state intervention rejected in favour of laissez-faire; nor did the subsequent period, from the crisis of the 1970s to that of 2008, really witness the withdrawal of the state either, neoliberal doctrine notwithstanding. True, during this time government expenditures as a percentage of gdp on the whole ceased growing, but they did not shrink either. The state redirected rather than reduced its exertions. As Nathan Sperber notes, neoliberalism in practice ‘aimed less for a weakening or retreat of the state than for its repurposing as an effective guardian of market order’: ‘not so much deregulation as “reregulation” of economic life’.footnote²⁴ In the eu, this might take the form of increased reliance on the regressive vat, as opposed to income taxes, in raising state revenue; in the us, politicians preferred tax credits for middle-class homeowners over direct transfers to poor workers doomed to pay rent.

Neoliberalism in power did, as advertised, shift economic policy-making from nation-states themselves to international bodies (e.g., the wto) or multinational accords (say, nafta or the European Economic Area) which sought to curtail state intervention in global trade. A last gasp of the attempted substitution of liberalizing trade agreements for independent national policy came with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, laid out in the early 2010s by a dozen countries on either side of the largest ocean, which both Trump and Clinton opposed during their 2016 presidential campaigns, Trump withdrawing the us from the pact during his first month in office. In the event, however, even the most neoliberal of major states, the us and uk, were never above industrial policy (under cover of defence spending), resource nationalism (e.g., extraordinary taxation of North Sea oil producers), or agricultural protectionism (e.g., American subsidies to corn growers, or protection of tobacco farmers). None of these measures corresponded to the narcissistic self-description of global neoliberalism as the rightful reign of free markets.

At the same time, economic nationalism for its part has rarely spelled anything like full abstention from international trade or complete state control of the economy, exceptional episodes in the careers of Communist party-states notwithstanding. Overwhelmingly the world as we know it is a site of mixed economies, in which the state everywhere constrains or excludes the market to one or another significant degree, without coming close to forsaking it. Neoliberal globalization imposed limits on the state’s role in economic policy, together with increased—if always incomplete—submission to the rules of international trade; while so-called economic nationalism today announces a comparative reassertion of economic sovereignty, albeit one constrained by the tolerance of trading partners for self-serving policies and, absent strict capital controls, especially by the appetite of international investors for sovereign debt.

But if contemporary states can therefore aspire neither to libertarian self-abnegation nor to autarkic self-reliance, this hardly means that the widespread shift over recent years from globalization to nationalism is not real and significant. Where neoliberalism felt embarrassed at the responsibility of the state in securing the national income, and often excused its polices on grounds that the state’s hands were tied, the new nationalism advertises and even vaunts the state’s role. Where neoliberal globalization took it for granted that shared international rules promoted a common international prosperity, a revived economic nationalism assumes by contrast that one country or region’s gain often comes at the expense of another’s. Globalization always had going for it that it was a utopian enterprise, in which policies that in reality only shuffled the membership of the state’s clientele could be justified in terms of an asymptotic approach to the universal paradise of laissez-faire, where the state would have retired from all but its police powers, with the result of unending growth for all. Economic nationalism today presupposes a darker and more fractured vision, in which the self-interested policies and separate fortunes of competing states henceforth nakedly diverge, and the flourishing—or mere maintenance at a given standard of living—of one national population no longer implies the crescive well-being of others, whose economies at best go their own way. At worst they constitute rivals to be dominated or destroyed. In short, the new rhetoric of economic nationalism presents an agonistic rather than cooperative image of the world economy; and the state now emphasizes rather than downplays a role it never abandoned.

Left perspectives

These phenomena had already received close and imaginative attention from a set of writers on the left before Trump’s second inauguration. Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline, by Jamie Merchant, a Chicago-based writer, came out in August 2024; Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization, by the London-based political commentator Richard Seymour, in October of the same year; and the updated English translation of Taking Back Control?: States and State Systems after Globalism, by the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute at Cologne, in November 2024. Also considered here is Branko Milanovic’s The Great Global Transformation, which as the title suggests is more aligned with Polanyi than Marx in its view of the same prospect, namely a world in which neoliberal globalization has been succeeded by economic nationalism.footnote²⁵

Merchant’s Endgame, he says in his introduction, treats ‘the closure of an era of world history’, one in which, ‘from the conclusion of the Second World War to around the mid-2010s, the world economy was characterized by deepening integration’. The harmonization took place both on the treble clef of commerce, as most countries traded more, and more freely, with one another; and on the bass clef of production, as multinational corporations, cosmopolitan in ownership and borderless in the location of physical plant, accounted for a growing share of physical output. Endgame unfurls a black herald of changed times, complete with apocalyptic notes: the period ‘christened by a million forgotten thinkpieces as the era of “globalization”’ is passing away, ‘beset by twin plagues of war and pestilence’—or, in other words, the Covid-19 pandemic, encouraging the renationalization of previously global supply chains, and the war in Ukraine, stimulating the domestication or ‘friendshoring’ of energy production. In place of the increasing integration of national economies there now appears ‘a global process of disintegration’.footnote²⁶

Merchant is naturally alive to the glinting contemporaneity of his subject, seeing twenty-first-century economic nationalism as a contest over the new commodity frontiers opened up by, among other things, ‘robotics, artificial intelligence, advanced pharmaceuticals and 5G’, in the words, quoted by him, of a report on American Investment in the 21st Century commissioned by then us Senator Marco Rubio. Nevertheless, of the books to hand Endgame treats the digitized novelty of a twenty-first-century economic nationalism in the spirit closest to an old-fashioned or classical Marxism. For Merchant, the spreading appeal of economic nationalism is due to ‘a secular slowdown in the rate of growth of the transnational world economy as a whole’. As the world economy decelerates, it devolves into ‘a more existential, zero-sum affair, as growth for some can only come at the expense of others’.footnote²⁷ Adopting Brenner’s terminology, Merchant describes the period since the 70s as a long downturn marked by international overcapacity in manufacturing—then adds to this the Marxian law of the tendency towards a falling rate of profit, which Brenner rejects.

In this view, the free-trading heyday of globalization gave full expression to crisis tendencies always entailed by the pursuit of private accumulation but held in check during ‘the mid-century golden age of managed capitalism’. From the 1980s onward, globalization 2.0 approached the creation of a true world market for labour, represented and facilitated by the world money of the us dollar. The development liberated the basic penchant of capital across the planet:

At the global level, as particular mechanized techniques spread and become the general norm that capitalists everywhere are forced to adopt, the source of surplus value in unpaid labour time dries up, as the part of production performed by exploited labourers decreases relative to the total expenditures of private businesses.footnote²⁸

Endgame is of course recapitulating the famous argument in Volume iii of Capital, more fully elaborated by Henryk Grossman in 1929, that discovers the ultimate tendency of the profit rate to fall in the replacement of living labour by machinery, aka the rising organic composition of capital. Here the result is ‘a permanent condition of overproduction’, as waves of mechanization collapse into the flat surfs of permanently low profitability. Merchant connects this longstanding process to recent financialization: as private capital shrinks from productive investment, it increasingly pursues financial apparitions. This in turn promotes economic nationalism by way of crisis-managing dirigisme, in which the desperate efforts of central banks to buoy financial markets become routine, while ‘national governments must take ever more extreme measures to compensate for the paralysis of private capitalism’, producing ‘an ever-tighter fusion between state institutions and private financial markets’.footnote²⁹

Even so, the state’s rhetorical assumption of responsibility for the national economic welfare, and its practical assertion of control, can’t succeed in restoring prosperity. Merchant is categorical: ‘national policies cannot address the transnational origins of the system’s breakdown.’footnote³⁰ Taken together, nationalistic policies can only serve to depress growth and in this way exacerbate the global slowdown they seek to relieve. Throughout Endgame, Merchant’s style of argumentation is apodictic, and here he is declaring rather than demonstrating that no national government can stem the global crisis—by, for example, re-invigorating a domestic market for domestic production through capital controls; in other words, if national capital baulks at productive investment in its quest for international rates of profit, shouldn’t its passport be taken way? No doubt the revival of import-substituting developmentalism would represent a tall order when the rentiers of any country have become accustomed to capital’s international freedom of movement, but it’s not clear why it couldn’t also achieve some success, at least by comparison with the fortunes of other governments facing a stalling world economy; already the capital controls, however leaky, that China has put in place suggest as much. Endgame in its vision of ‘the mounting social turmoil of a terminal society’ allows for no such dimension of reformist possibility. Merchant has updated the revolutionary fatalism characteristic of Endnotes during the prior decade of faltering globalization—the ‘holding pattern’ of the 2010s—for a new period of nationalistic expediencies; and if he nevertheless concedes the possibility of proletarian revolution, it’s here that his argument, already somewhat formalistic, becomes truly abstract, the hoped-for emergence of a revolutionary class being neither glimpsed from evidence nor deduced from theory.footnote³¹

Epic history

Like Merchant, Milanovic in The Great Global Transformation sees in the present moment ‘the reversal of globalization’ and a corresponding excursion into economic nationalism. Trump, Xi and Putin embody a ‘pattern spread all over the world’: ‘nationalism is blended into domestic politics and narratives as a way to make policies look “tougher”’.footnote³² (Presumably, globalization, having imagined a world where one nation’s prosperity reinforced rather than jeopardized another’s, had no such need of ‘toughness’.) Milanovic, however, situates the national turn amid developments of more recent vintage—and bearing firmer empirical signatures—than the rising organic composition of capital. The first of these, in some sense containing the others, is the ascendance of China, ‘the most important economic fact of the past fifty or even one hundred years’. Milanovic is explicit: ‘the rise of China, made possible by global neoliberalism, made the end of global neoliberalism inevitable’. footnote³³

If the industrial revolution long ago unleashed a progressive divergence of the European and North American ‘West’ from the—preponderantly Asian—rest, the tendency was not truly reversed until the first years of the present century. What Milanovic defines as a country’s ‘relative income peak’—the maximum of its per capita income as a proportion of the global average—occurred for the us and Canada as long ago as 1952, but in Germany and Japan not for another four decades. France only crested in 2001, the uk in 2003. Thereafter the West declined relative to the Chinese juggernaut, which by 2015 had nosed ahead of the us in total gdp, at least in terms of purchasing power parity (ppp).footnote³⁴

Such numbers might have counted for little politically had these narrowing differences in national income not also brought with them a certain convergence of income distributions within national borders. In short the Asian middle class grew much richer and more numerous even as the pay of poorer Westerners stagnated in absolute terms and declined in relative ones, such that tenants of the lower deciles of European or North American distributions came, after the 90s, to occupy lower and lower percentiles along a global plot. True equalization of northern and southern per capita incomes remains out of view of course—but the trend is plain. By Milanovic’s estimate there may be as many Chinese as American rich people by the end of the century. The ‘great transformation of economic power’ across continents naturally unsettles the racial or civilizational amour-propre of many lower-income Westerners, along with curbing their consumer habits: Milanovic considers that ‘while in the past both a German metal worker and a German engineer were able to afford a vacation in Thailand (a global good), in the future only the latter may be able to do so’.footnote³⁵

Operating with a broader range of references than Merchant, Milanovic frames the us–China contest in terms of the classical debates within political philosophy over the connections between economic relations and war. From 1978 to around 2008, the economic and geopolitical interests of both sides led to the douces mœurs and peaceful convergence between them that Montesquieu, Smith and Ricardo would have predicted. The aftermath of the financial crisis led back to the world of Hobson, Lenin, Luxemburg and Schumpeter, where the surplus capital produced by high domestic inequality in the industrial heartlands is dispatched overseas in search of higher returns, and the home state’s military might mobilized to defend the acquisition of raw materials, control of colonial markets and exploitation of cheap labour against the claims of its rivals. At this point, as Schumpeter put it, ‘a bitter costly struggle begins’, in which ‘it is no longer a matter of indifference who builds a given railroad, who owns a mine or a colony.’footnote³⁶

Asian triumph and Western crisis are critically linked as cause to consequence: the low growth and stagnant real wages of Middle America are ‘attributable to a significant degree’ to ‘imports from China and outsourcing to China’, which damaged manufacturing employment in the us and labour’s bargaining position.footnote³⁷ For Milanovic, economic malaise and American ‘middle-class’footnote³⁸ discontent, mobilized in the mid-2010s against the ‘liberal elites’ by the rabble-rousing Trump, were the prime movers of his ascent. Here, liberal-democratic politics met a crossroads:

There were two possible responses to the ‘China challenge’ to the Western middle classes. One was to change the rules of globalization so that it no longer hollows out Western middle classes; the other was to improve the income position of the middle by taxing more the domestic rich and redistributing income from the top to the middle. The latter could have substituted for the anti-Chinese stance. But that policy found many opponents among the rich . . .footnote³⁹

The economic nationalism of Trump consists largely of his having taken the former path, that of blaming China for the economic troubles of Middle America. But Trump has also been alert to the other feature of the dilemma laid out by Milanovic, namely the schism between foundering middle- and lower-income sections (not self-conscious or organized enough to count as ‘classes’ in a political sense) of the national population, and the rich whose fortunes have only improved in the era of China’s geopolitical arrival. Milanovic analyses the special affluence of the Western rich as a historically novel case (‘arguably the only development in modern capitalism that would surprise Marx’) of homoploutia, whereby the rich command both high labour incomes from their professional positions and high capital incomes from their portfolios. Because the jobs of these ‘meritocratic’ elites are not subject to international competition, these super-managers (as Piketty called them) look less anxiously to the East than their compatriots. The self-contained prosperity of this ‘globalized elite’ meanwhile attracts the resentment of less-fortunate voters, hypocritically exploited by Trump and kindred right populists who denounce the cosmopolitanism represented by such elites rather than attacking, by way of redistribution, the inequality they embody.

In his penultimate chapter, Milanovic nominates what he calls ‘national market liberalism’ as the most probable ‘successor order’ to neoliberal globalization. This politics, ‘likely to remain long after Trump is gone’, would substantially preserve the present-day scope of market exchange and so remain a form of liberalism, as well as being continuous with neoliberalism in features such as light taxation of capital income and inheritance—but so would it wield tariffs rather than celebrate globalization; champion ‘politically motivated sanctions and state-led industrial policy’ rather than pretend to isolate economics away from politics; reject mass immigration in favour of ‘walls and fences’; and promote chauvinistic instead of universal standards of human worth. In matters of foreign policy, such a politics would also reject unipolarity (us domination) and universalism (liberal capitalism as planetary norm).footnote⁴⁰ Indeed, though Milanovic doesn’t say so, the Trump Administration already conceals declining us influence behind boasts of an American superiority beyond all emulation.

While this scenario of proliferating economic nationalisms seems plausible, it ignores the very problem that Milanovic alludes to when he dryly notes that redistribution finds ‘many opponents among the rich’. Degrees of plutocracy vary by nation-state, but extravagant homoploutia has surely in many places, and certainly in the us, so concentrated political power among the wealthy that a downward redistribution of income is scarcely more likely under nationalist than neoliberal arrangements, a circumstance hinted at by Milanovic when he suggests that low tax-rates on capital gains and legacies are a more fixed feature of contemporary political life than the very architecture of world trade. The allure of economic nationalism has largely derived from the anticipated rescue of middle- and lower-earners, but no such deliverance seems likely so long as nation-states are discussed without serious reference to socioeconomic classes. Much of the political right has wagered in effect that steep income inequality is more tolerable under nationalism than neoliberalism, thanks to the symbolic sops the former serves up; either way, inequality is taken for granted. The redistributive impasse suggests that economic nationalists in the years ahead may do better at grabbing power than hanging onto it. Failed both by neoliberal globalization and (rightwing) economic nationalism, what might electorates do then?

Impressive as The Great Global Transformation is as a statistical evocation and political anatomy of the present-day world, it concludes on a note of weak psychologism: ‘Where does nationalism come from? From greed’—or pleonoxia, defined by Aristotle as the insatiable desire to grab more than one’s fair share, at the expense of others. Nationalism takes fright at the possibility that the inhabitants of another country ‘might ultimately have more things than us’, and sees the nation-state as a device ‘to prevent such an outcome’.footnote⁴¹ Leaving aside that in that case envy seems the more besetting sin than greed, such a simple account of political motives won’t do. Greed or envy is too durable a trait of the species to account for any temporary historical predicament, not to mention that even today the average resident of any given country surely lacks a vivid enough picture of the commodities enjoyed by his counterpart on the other side of the planet to assess his own happiness chiefly by the light of this comparison. Nor is it entirely convincing that the us ‘pivot’ against China was driven from below; if anything, popular anger at Wall Street in 2008–09 was diverted ‘from above’ against the supposedly job-stealing prc. The strengths of The Great Global Transformation lie elsewhere, in its conjugation of economic inequalities and geopolitical rivalries on a world-historical scale.

Far-right miasma

Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism—a book that deliberately opts for a psychoanalytic rather than economic register—offers a subtler and more persuasive account of the psychological phenomenon that is twenty-first-century nationalism. It’s not that Seymour ignores economic considerations; his introduction notes that those who on January 6, 2021 rushed the us capitol building on Trump’s behalf were ‘disproportionately drawn from the downwardly mobile business and professional classes’. Like their ideological confrères on the Brazilian or British right, ‘they had done well out of the boom years, only to be hurled into debt and even bankruptcy’.footnote⁴² Seymour’s disaster nationalism is a disposition or mood—nothing so composed as an ideology—in which the real and present disaster of an ecocidal, inegalitarian and sputtering capitalism eludes the perceptions of its angriest subjects, in favour of a perceived disaster of cultural and racial threat. To be sure, this outlook often entails economic nationalism, but as a political tendency it far exceeds a mere economic programme, much as any explanation for it soon exhausts its economic determinants: ‘It isn’t the economy, stupid.’ In his first chapter, Seymour observes that rightwing voters in a dozen countries across North and South America, Europe and Asia ‘have recalcitrantly refused to be especially poor or disenfranchised. More importantly, they have shown little interest in their personal economic well-being.’footnote⁴³

Disaster Nationalism accordingly deploys another vocabulary altogether, one of ‘paranoia’, ‘fantasy’, ‘fear’, ‘social contagion’ and so on. The book might be described as an investigation into the mental aberrations arising in the absence of that lucid class-consciousness which Marxism once proposed would both follow and prompt the emergence of an international workers’ movement proportionate to its task. Seymour’s disaster nationalists don’t belong to any collective so self-consistent as a class of workers or owners, or even a national population. Much of the interest and frequent horror of his book comes instead from the fact that the nation with which these nationalists identify corresponds so little to the relevant national population as defined by the census count, whether in terms of class, gender, race or ideology. In Seymour’s telling, they react to economic insecurity or ecological peril without satisfactory concepts for either strait; they instead rebel against the promulgators and apparent beneficiaries of the more trivial rules of ‘liberal civilization’—‘such as the use of correct gender pronouns’—by which they feel adjudged as outcasts in their own countries. The resultant injuries are of status, not class. In a book resistant to summarization, Seymour approaches a précis when he writes:

Disaster nationalism today harnesses the insecurity, humiliation and miseries of heterogenous classes and social groups, including some of the poorest, to a revolt against liberal civilization, with its pluralist and democratic norms. It offers the balm of vengeance, the promise of national self-love and the cure of restoring society to a more pristine, harmoniously hierarchical state through condign violence.footnote⁴⁴

So does humiliation misunderstand itself as superiority.

Seymour tracks this state of mind as so many eruptions of environmental conspiracy theories; racialized and porn-soaked anxieties about women’s choice of partners; spasms of both ‘lone-wolf’ and pogromist violence; and initiatives towards dictatorship and genocide. As for the economic facet of this many-sided chauvinism: for all its complaints, the new nationalistic right lacks ‘a coherent alternative to globalization’. In France and Hungary, far-right parties have promised stronger social safety-nets while also cosying up to big business and threatening to penalize paupers, dissidents and migrants. In Modi’s India, Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Milei’s Argentina, neoliberalism itself has been commended as a method for winnowing social ‘winners’ from ‘losers’. But such doctrine is hardly consistent across the right. The same social Darwinist accents can accompany anti-neoliberal policies, as when nationalists advocate protectionist measures in defence of ‘native’ over foreign and migrant workers, or state-level industrial policy on behalf of national champions. So does the rhetorical belligerence of far-right nationalism belie the timidity and confusion of a strategy still blinkered by markets and liberalism: economically speaking, disaster nationalism at most

modifies the cutthroat competition it otherwise vigorously embraces with national preferences or alleviates its effects for certain voters with cash transfers. Nor does it idolize the state as classical fascism did. While it is aggressive in its use of the repressive arm of the state to pursue national enemies, it is usually hostile if not paranoid about the state’s welfarist or medical interventions.footnote⁴⁵

Seymour emphasizes that disaster nationalism is ‘not yet fascism’. It expresses a bemused and bitter attitude too parasitic on the neoliberalism it rejects to achieve coherence. One is struck above all by the loneliness and desperation of Seymour’s online rightists, for whom the nation seems to name an organic community of which they lack all experience. In the parlance of the social-media platforms where they thrive, they are trolls—capable of sardonic offensiveness toward liberal capitalism but not cogent opposition. Such intellectual confusion only compounds the impression of an incommunicable solitude groping in vain for mass belonging.

The trouble with this prismatic picture is simply that of all psychoanalytic accounts of politics. They alter the tenor of political thought so that a writer on the left is no longer trying to speak convincingly to a collection of citizens but plausibly about them, with that tragically elevated quotient of plausibility over certainty inherent to psychoanalytic speculation, especially about minds other than one’s own. The irrationality of contemporary politics, above all on the right, may compel such an approach, even as the same approach dismally confirms the public sphere of the 2020s as a place swarmed by unconscious fantasies. A left politics with real aspirations to power would be one of more empirical claims and arguments more subject to debate. But Disaster Nationalism does help to clarify the subjective grounds on which today’s far rights are such mediocre economic nationalists. While they may back protective tariffs, they lack List’s expansive, inclusive and avowedly democratic understanding of an imagined national community, and are egotistically outraged when other countries reciprocate with protectionist measures.

Re-democratization?

Neither Merchant’s explanation of the recent national turn through the falling rate of profit, nor Milanovic’s, through the dialectics of neo-imperialism and inequality, nor Seymour’s, by way of psychopathology, offers much in terms of a political strategy. The distinction of Wolfgang Streeck’s Taking Back Control? lies in its attempt to acknowledge—and reinforce—the new nationalism while bending it to left purposes. Like the other authors, Streeck identifies the present as ‘a historical moment when neoliberal globalization is breaking up’, potentially devolving its prerogatives back to the nation-state. He departs from standard accounts of the crisis of neoliberalism, however, by concentrating as much on the democratic as the economic shortcomings of ‘the three decades of globalist-neoliberal capitalism after the apparent “end of history”’.footnote⁴⁶ Streeck’s account here builds on the periodization that he elaborated in 2014’s Buying Time.footnote⁴⁷ In this narrative, nation-states in the postwar period, chastened by the memory of the Great Depression and corresponding flights into fascism, had adopted the ‘mission of protecting their societies from the pressures of capitalist markets’, chiefly through welfare measures that safeguarded workers and capital controls that corralled investment within national borders.footnote⁴⁸

But this ‘marriage of historical convenience’ between capitalism and democracy fell apart in the neoliberal era, when elected governments attempted to solve the crisis of capitalist stagflation by throwing national economies open to stateless capital. In the process ‘democratic politics dissociated itself from the political economy by preventing itself from discretionary intervention in market opportunities and outcomes’. The state’s abdication from egalitarian redress of market outcomes deprived the working class of meaningful political representation, even or especially by the historic parties of the left, and set centre-left governments the task of promoting the ‘post-material’ middle-class social values appropriate to individual advancement in a capitalist society, hence a ‘materially emaciated “identity politics”’.footnote⁴⁹

At the level of the governing political parties, the forces of democracy essentially responded to neoliberalism by changing sides. Much of the centre-left, ‘having given up on the socialist ideal of a classless society’, to be pursued by forging a middle-class/working-class electoral bloc, opted instead for the neoliberal standard—instantiated by international bodies like the eu—of a ‘stateless society’ without borders and so ‘without a capacity for authoritative regulation’. ‘Democracy’ no longer referred to the institutionalized struggle of class-based parties for control of the national economy. In the vocabulary of neoliberal elites, it now designated an enlightened consensus that placed economic policy and social values above and beyond the arena of popular contestation, enshrined in constitutions by unelected legal experts, or issued as regulations by the faceless technocrats of ‘good governance’.footnote⁵⁰Abandonment of democracy in all but name on the part of the liberal centre-lefts then cleared the way for a revival of national-democratic claims from the jingoistic right, with calls to the ‘resident losers of hyper-globalization’ to ‘take back control’ soon issued by populist demagogues. Nor were these voters always losers in a strict economic sense—and here Streeck would agree with Seymour: ‘the sense of insult’ experienced in reaction to the liberal elite’s smug assertion of universal values supplies ‘one reason why right-wing “populist” counter-movements attract not only a declining working class but also a petty bourgeoisie’ which, while reasonably well-situated economically, takes umbrage at the rejection of ‘its claim to equal competence and dignity’.footnote⁵¹ Streeck’s rather abstract sociological language nevertheless successfully conjures up the resentful flesh-and-blood figures of Orbán, Trump, Le Pen, Farage and so on.

The object of Taking Back Control?—including the re-appropriation, or at least re-interrogation, of the eponymous slogan—is to wrest the banner of national democracy from the right and to renovate the nation-state ‘as the main arena of democratic politics under capitalism’, on behalf of a reformist left seeking ‘an acceptable new settlement between capitalism and society’. Honouring the insights of Polanyi, this politics would aim at subordinating the market to the needs of society, after a globalized neoliberal era when society appeared subordinated to the market. To this end, Streeck counters ‘the moral demonization’ of the nation-state and ‘the disparagement of its technical capacity to govern’ with a vindication, especially of nation-states of the smaller variety, on more or less anthropological grounds. The de facto constitution of the eu—consisting of ‘two effectively unreadable treaties’ between almost thirty countries, ‘each of them entitled to veto any change’—not only substitutes ‘unlimited capital mobility’ for democratic direction of the economy; it also usurps distinct national cultures with ‘the moral utopia of cultural unity engineered by technocratic rule’. The superstate the eu’s neoliberal architects aimed to create would effectively swamp democratic power and regional cultural particularity through its sheer size and centralization.footnote⁵²

According to Streeck’s ‘politics of political scale’, these anti-democratic liabilities can only be avoided by recasting the eu as a voluntary confederation and reasserting the prerogatives of the small state. Or perhaps one should say the small federated state, since devolution of power (in contrast, for example, to the ‘centralist superstate of the Nazis’) seems to count for Streeck as much as does absolute size of territory and population. At any rate the small state alone can respect both popular sovereignty and what, on the warrant of Gibbon and Polanyi, Streeck calls ‘the constitutive particularism of human socialization’: after all, ‘the differentia specifica of the human species is its lack of natural specificity’ and a corresponding multiplication of languages, cultures and worldviews along regional lines. Of course territorial states and cultural nations ‘are almost never coextensive’ and can only be made so through tremendous violence; but the small and likely federated state can accommodate heterogeneity without forfeiting unity, as a centralized European superstate could never do.footnote⁵³

In spite of humanity’s constitutive cultural diversity, Streeck holds open the possibility that ‘restored’ nation-states might converge—in an ironic allusion to Hayekian free-market ‘isonomy’—towards a shared response to world capitalism. Endowed with renewed democratic powers and mission, such states could take a series of measures to ‘unwind’ globalization from below: shorten supply chains for indispensable goods, thus reducing their vulnerability to both warfare and great-power domination; pledge themselves openly to ‘economic patriotism, and even protectionism’, the better to shield citizens from capitalism’s ‘adverse side effects’; shift economic policy towards internal growth, that is, ‘domestic production for domestic consumers’; decommodify the provision of collective goods such as public transport, education and health care; and create a substantially socialized system of national finance for domestic production and consumption, in keeping with Keynes’s 1933 dictum in the Yale Review:

Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel—these are things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun, whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national.footnote⁵⁴

The rediscovery by these means of national social democracy, independently attained by any number of dropouts from globalization, would then compose the sequel to the neoliberal age, establishing an inter-state system that would respect the sovereignty of alternative economic regimes. Here Streeck draws upon Polanyi’s case for the peaceful co-existence of diverse regional planning systems in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, before the Truman Administration pushed for their polarization into antagonistic blocs, as a prelude to the victory of ‘universal capitalism’.footnote⁵⁵ For Streeck, as for Milanovic, an important feature of the rise of China is that it makes such systemic pluralism a living reality, one that a democratized—or social-democratized—Europe might hope to expand and enrich, as its nation-states seek a ‘downward’ exit from neoliberalism in the post-globalist era.

It is nevertheless more fanciful than Streeck allows to discover the logic of such a development in the universal particularism of the species, since even ‘small states’, comprising millions or tens of millions of inhabitants, appear—on any anthropological timeline—as truly gigantic polities, reducing the individual citizen almost to oblivion. Surely genuine community, as opposed to hallucinated ‘belonging’, à la national sports-team fandom, must require a yet smaller scale. Meanwhile, the relative international uniformity in economic policy that, in Streeck’s vision, might be the common result of so many restorations of national sovereignty, implies some latent universalism no longer forthrightly declaimed by the left, and explicitly rejected by him. Together, these reservations—whereby the nation-state is bound to remain at once too broad for community and too cramped for universality—suggest that the new nationalism is more likely to represent a historical waystation than any final human arrangement.

But these are philosophical questions oblique to Streeck’s political argument, except in that they could be better explored in the pluralist, non-hegemonic international system that he, like Polanyi, advocates, rather than under a us-dominated globalization regime which sought to bind all states to one rule. His real achievement is a persuasive case for the left as the rightful beneficiary and director of a revival of national sovereignty and democracy, after their forfeiture to neoliberal globalization.

Rollback, how far?

Whatever their ultimate fate and political character, the scale of recent initiatives in economic nationalism—or, as Ilias Alami and Thea Riofrancos call it in a recent essay, state capitalism—is hard to deny.footnote⁵⁶ Alami and Riofrancos survey the changed landscape since 2000: sovereign wealth funds, in possession of less than $1 trillion in assets at the turn of the millennium, now control some $15 trillion; state-owned enterprises command $54 trillion, an amount more than four times larger than in 2000; and the period between 2017 and 2023 saw a ninefold increase in the announcement of new industrial policies. Tariffs, import bans and quotas have also multiplied the world over, even if Trump’s mercurial imposition and removal of protectionist measures hardly constitutes a long-term industrial policy and has more likely facilitated insider trading for Administration cronies.

And yet: international trade and finance continue much as before the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine war, their course not yet decisively altered by state interventions. Sovereign wealth funds after all take advantage of cross-border financial deregulation in the same way as private capital, and insofar as they raise state revenue from financial speculation rather than public taxation might be seen as buttressing rather than eroding neoliberalism. Chinese soes notwithstanding, state-owned firms are still dwarfed on a world scale by the private enterprises whose investment strategy largely dictates their own; and international trade as a share of the world economy in fact rose in 2025, in the estimate of the World Bank, to 68 per cent, its highest point ever. As the focus of Alami and Riofrancos on Trump’s chase after ‘critical minerals’ implies, the new economic nationalism remains so far a more sectoral than thoroughgoing affair.

In other words, neoliberal globalization has hitherto met with more ideological than practical defeat. But the intellectual and political comeuppance should not be minimized. Pundits and politicians across the world can no longer rely on neoliberal precepts—often the more effective for having gone without saying, in the hush of common sense—as justification for economic policies or the absence of them; they are unable anymore to salute neoliberal globalization in mute wonder or, more resignedly, plead their helplessness in the face of market actions. Not that the failure of neo-globo to bring about the generalized prosperity it promised need have spelled its ideological demise by itself; the rhetoric of inevitability (Thatcher’s ‘there is no alternative’) could always have been floated again where that of utopia had flopped. But such fatalism couldn’t withstand the towering Chinese example of mass escape from poverty and snowballing growth, achieved by something like state-capitalist methods. Such a lesson on this scale has broken in two the neoliberal pensée unique and opened up rich western countries to forthright essays in economic nationalism. The ideological consequences are immense: if states enjoy the possibility of securing national well-being in defiance of global markets, they also assume the responsibility of doing so.

To be sure, the revived economic nationalism of our moment entails as one possibility a narrow jingoistic clientelism, whereby governments favour selected firms or sectors claiming to embody the general interest, but which in fact reflect the most particular of concerns. Alami and Riofrancos point out that the Trump Administration has facilitated access to foreign ‘critical minerals’ for both an investment bank run by the sons of the Commerce Secretary and a venture-capital startup in which Trump’s elder boys hold a stake of undisclosed dimensions.footnote⁵⁷ Like other Trumpian scams, these nepotistic concessions look more like personalized efforts to loot a declining national economy than any real programme to consolidate overall growth on a new basis of industrial policy. But cynical or confused invocations of economic nationalism hardly preclude sincere and intelligent ones on the part of different political actors. Mainstream politicians will no doubt test how much state intervention on behalf of society at large they can venture without alarming constituencies still loyal to more-or-less unimpeded private accumulation. Socialist movements for their part will provoke even more resistance from capital for proposing the same kind of policies—even as they suffer less internal contradiction in doing so. Alami and Riofrancos point out the opportunity for the left implied by what are for the most part so far mainly rightwing or centrist excursions into economic nationalism:

Leftist projects across the world must engage in their own experiments, including reclaiming public institutional capacity, to exercise collective control in a rational and conscious manner over the infrastructure underpinning social, economic and ecological life.footnote⁵⁸

Naturally the debacle of globalization doesn’t ensure that success awaits economic nationalists right, left or centre. Historically, the most satisfactory response to Suesse’s isolationist-expansionist ‘nationalist dilemma’ has been first to isolate, then to expand: to protect select national firms and industries until they became internationally competitive exporters to countries without barriers to the import of foreign goods. In other words, economic nationalism in one country typically succeeded to the extent that other countries refrained from such nationalism, at least in the relevant departments of their own economies. Import substitution, on the other hand, aiming at the permanent replacement of imports by home-made alternatives, risked writing a recipe for the inefficient manufacture of overpriced goods; a scenario that could only be avoided by stimulating so much domestic competition that economies of scale would be lost through an overpopulation of firms always capable of collapsing, before long, into the opposite condition of monopoly. Not to mention that private finance invariably sought to give the slip to capital controls and seek higher returns abroad; or that high domestic wages, however desirable in their own right, must undermine the lifestyle of the domestic bourgeoisie just as they do the international competitiveness of exporters.

In short, even the most thriving efforts at economic nationalism have always constituted for any capitalist country an inherently unstable arrangement in which the totem of the national interest failed to reconcile the contradictory interests of separate classes. Much less will renewed international competition among states yield a common level of prosperity in the future, in conditions of stagnation, overcapacity and soaring debt; and any country lapsing into comparative poverty risks complementing its formal sovereignty with real domination at the hands of wealthier rivals. In other words, contemporary capitalist countries cannot escape from neoliberal globalization without running headlong into the traditional snares of economic nationalism. Indeed if Merchant is right that the recent national turn in political economy can only deepen the global slowdown from which it promises relief, the challenges attending economic nationalism will merely have been magnified during an absence from the world scene.

Openings?

The late rediscovery of economic nationalism would nevertheless appear to present a clear opportunity for a socialist left which never accepted the quarantine of economics from politics in the first place. But if so, why has the economic nationalism of the right—the familiar journalistic term is populism—so far found more favour with electorates than any economic nationalism or populism of the left? Figures describable as rightwing economic nationalists have won power in important countries across the planet, while Reform and the Rassemblement National wait in the wings. The left can claim no such laurels. In Greece, Syriza achieved a resounding victory at the polls in 2015 only to pledge itself almost immediately to austerity and the Euro. Over the next years, first Corbyn in the uk and then Sanders in the us launched plausible bids to capture the centre-left parties of their respective countries and fashion these into instruments of left populism, only to come up short. This echoed the larger-scale impasse encountered by Latin America’s ‘pink tide’ governments as they struck out against the neoliberal crisis in the Global South following 1998. Perhaps the most significant examples of left economic nationalism—if the term is not too grand—during the present decade have been Lula’s second presidency in Brazil, including the renewal in 2023 of the Bolsa Família and significant investments in rainforest preservation; and Sheinbaum’s mandate in Mexico, which saw the creation of the Women’s Pension for female labourers aged 60–64, in the informal sector or unwaged housework, as well as the establishment of in-home medical visits for the elderly and disabled. (Sheinbaum has also promised a minimal form of universal health insurance starting in 2027.) The modesty of these programmes is more striking than their ambition.

How to account for the relative failure of the electoral left to turn the revival of economic nationalism to its advantage? Unlike leftward parties, those of the right and the dead centre possessed unimpeachable capitalist credentials, which enabled them to promote state intervention without awakening the spectre of communism. Former social-democratic forces of the centre-left, by contrast, would and did incur particular suspicion when they called for significantly directing and restricting the market; but they were rarely inclined to do so, given the views and material interests of the more prosperous and professional-managerial parts of their constituency. Finally and perhaps most importantly, both the centre-left and the genuine or radical left came to be less rather than more disposed than other formations to restricting the free flow of that crucial factor of production known as immigrant labour. The frontiers policed by centre-left administrations in any developed country were of course far from ‘open borders’, but they represented an embarrassed ambivalence about mass migration, balancing cosmopolitan anti-racism and pleonoxic avidity for cheap labour, which lacked the vicious clarity of the nativist right. Here was a subject that leftward politicians generally preferred to avoid, unless—as in Frederiksen’s Denmark or Starmer’s Britain—bidding to match the right in the punitive enforcement of national boundaries.

Left populism or economic nationalism may nevertheless have a brighter future over the long run than indicated by the frustrations of Corbyn, Sanders and—so far—Mélenchon, or the ebbing of the Latin American ‘pink tide’. If noises of market intervention from the left still worry older voters, formed by the Cold War, the same rule doesn’t apply to a younger cohort for whom ‘socialism’ is more likely to conjure images of free buses and daycare than of Soviet privations. Not yet, but soon, it may become an asset to socialists that—unlike their liberal and rightwing counterparts who rely on the partisans of private accumulation for so much support—they can commit without compromise to the repoliticization of the economy. More importantly, the logic of contemporary capitalism contains the potential of reversing the political valence of mass migration, to the benefit of the left. Of late, the introduction into wealthy and mainly white countries of large numbers of darker-skinned immigrants has supplied a prized and politically successful complaint of the right. Never mind that such workers filled low-wage service positions and shored up the tax base to a far greater extent than they took jobs from native citizens; according to the ‘political dreamwork’ of the kind analysed by Seymour, their presence in one or another new country illustrated with their skin the real but invisible and unrelated threats to an ageing provincial population of deindustrialization, cultural eclipse and simple mortality. Much of the electoral centre-left has to its shame indulged or at best ignored this unduly respectable phobia.

A different and more lucid position on immigration awaits the politicians who will declare it. For years now, newspapers have bristled with a pair of contradictory stories: on the one hand, the native-born populations of rich countries are ageing and shrinking, thanks to low fertility rates, in a threat to the fiscal solvency of the state; on the other hand, the same populations resent the influx of overwhelmingly younger immigrants, with larger families. The right has no answer to this problem save for fantasies of white fecundity reinforced by pro-natalist policies like those that proved a signal failure in Orbán’s Hungary. So does mainstream or centrist politics stand baulked at the impasse, wishing to carry out deportations at a rate often equalling or exceeding that achieved by governments of the right, while refraining from unseemly avowals of racism.

Large rewards may be in store for a left that finally admits and embraces the logic of the situation and gambles that the manifest prosperity and dynamism available from mass migration trumps all resentful stagnation, especially as older voters die off. Such a left would celebrate and encourage large-scale immigration rather than merely tolerate it, a stance by no means incompatible with the exposure of new arrivals to a certain innocuous cultural nationalism bound to stir the pride of many native citizens: free anthologies of national literature and film, free instruction in national music and dance, a frank national commitment to freedom of worship.footnote⁵⁹ Other things equal, a growing population is a growing economy, and future decades may well wonder at the politics of the early and mid-2020s, which considered the arrival and enlistment of young workers to be at odds with attractive forms of economic nationalism.

Another opportunity for the left in the renaissance of nationalism is more remote and theoretical but scarcely less important. Needless to say, après List, the new economic nationalism takes issue with the sequestration of economy and politics so basic to neoliberal doctrine. So far, however, it has done so meekly and hesitantly. Among prominent politicians, the mouthpieces of economic nationalism are mainly anxious liberals playing for time by rediscovering the role of the state in economic life, or rightwing chauvinists whose fearfulness of neo-globo falls short of any cogent alternative to it. In different ways, Merchant, Milanovic, Seymour and Streeck all imply that so many nervous or glowering feints in the direction of economic nationalism will fail to relieve the inequality and slowdown they would confront. But might not this liberal-centrist or rightwing failure properly redound to the benefit to socialism or communism, since leftists, unlike right populists and temporizing liberals, can take to its logical conclusion the premise that the economy neither is nor should be isolated from democratic politics?

Many left thinkers have asserted that just such a formal separation of private economic decision-making from public policy is in fact constitutive of capitalism itself. In that case, refusal of that separation can never be more than tentative and piecemeal on the part of bourgeois politicians of any stripe. Only on the radical left can the reunion of politics and economics emerge as a comprehensive form of democracy, going past scattershot protectionism to surpass capitalism altogether and arrive at the thoroughgoing socialization—not necessarily nationalization—of the means of production, finance and exchange. The upshot is that, for bourgeois politics, economic nationalism may represent an improvement over liberalism or laissez-faire but can only ever be the ideology of a halfway house, rationalizing confusion and contradiction. For the left, it can in principle be something else, namely a portal to life beyond capital.

Shifting terrains

At all events, the economic nationalisms of today return to a global situation very different from that of the rapidly growing world economy that accommodated both poor-country developmentalism and rich-country Keynesianism during the 1950s and 60s, before the neoliberal landslide. Above all, the contrast of ecological outlook could hardly be sharper: from the early days of the green revolution, which dramatically boosted crop yields at the same time that it shrunk the global peasantry to a fraction of its prewar size, to the climate chaos of the twenty-first century, which threatens to destabilize food production in the decades ahead, along with other disruptions of like magnitude.

Almost all of the books discussed above at least acknowledge the seriousness of our ecological straits. Streeck, for example, suggests that small nation-states may be more open than vast bureaucracies to moral suasion by Greta Thunberg and her comrades about the need to tackle ‘the crisis of the global environment’.footnote⁶⁰ But, with one exception, none truly integrates auguries of ecological peril into its vision of an ascendant economic nationalism. In this sense, these books are guilty of what Jason Moore criticizes as ‘green arithmetic’: ecological understanding merely added on to the critique of political economy without transforming it, as if capital might accumulate and environmental deficits mount in pristinely separate columns of our intellectual and political ledger.footnote⁶¹ To be fair, answering Moore’s critique is more easily said than done; but an attempt at least needs to be made, if twenty-first-century nation-states are not to appear as empty outlines on a map, vacant of the physical terrain and climate where national populations find their happiness, or not at all. Plenty of drama has already been imparted to the careers of nation-states from the fact that their populations can admit of big changes across small sets of years; more drama will emerge from the combination of this fact with another one, namely that landscapes and territories—rivers, glaciers, tundra, forests, fields, coastlines—are henceforth no more ecologically stable than populations are demographically static.

Seymour in Disaster Nationalism provides the exception to the rule that considerations of the new economic nationalism overlook the ecological ground or natural environment on which it stands. He notes projections that climate change and associated natural disasters will displace 1.2 billion people by mid-century and allows that this deluge of refugees may ‘intensify nationalist pressure for more violent border regimes’, even if such outcomes are always to be regarded as political choices rather than natural processes in their own right. Seymour likewise conjectures that the widespread destruction of fixed capital—whether in fertile fields or industrial plant—by extreme weather might retire enough over-accumulated capital to inaugurate a new and more robust cycle of accumulation. Of course these bleak possibilities don’t rule out the emancipatory potential also present within ecological disaster, but about this utopian rider to his overall inventory Seymour is decidedly abstract: ‘It is in historical movement that consciousness is raised and democratic life is built.’footnote⁶²

The premise of any economic nationalism rests on the stable and ongoing availability of the rudiments of prosperity and security within national borders—and it is just this premise that an era of ecological calamity seems set on cancelling for most nation-states. True, a few exceptionally large and ecologically various countries, like the us, China, Brazil and Russia, may be able to absorb widening and more frequent droughts and wildfires, hurricanes and floods, polar vortices and heat domes, without consigning so much of their territory to disaster relief that national prosperity is jeopardized. But the majority of—territorially smaller and more uniform—states are unable to hedge their ecological bets in the way that enormous ones by their very nature do. Regional environmental disasters are in consequence likely to become economic disasters of national scope, in which a state is thrown back on its own resources just when least capable of self-reliance. Such episodes are hardly calculated to revive the waning allure of neoliberal globalization, which always left beleaguered states to fend for themselves and pray for charity—but nor would they seem to recommend an over-strict economic nationalism, aloof from international cooperation and mutual aid. Such isolation simply entails too much vulnerability to unpredictable distress.

Far more attractive, it seems, would be emplacement within a network of bi- or multilateral agreements among—ideally, ecosocialist—states, who would limit their own resource consumption and environmental pollution to levels consistent with the viability of complex societies and agree to rebuild one another’s damaged infrastructure and shelter one another’s displaced residents according to need. However improbable such pacts may appear at the moment, the alternative to them today is global climate treaties only honoured in the breach—and, tomorrow, the centrifugal social and natural degradation of isolate nation-states. One can picture a situation in which states that, for the time being, remain more or less environmentally intact, ransack or invade their less fortunate peers, taking for their own the victim state’s diminished but still valuable agricultural capacity, industrial plant, housing stock and raw materials—a sort of ecological Hitlerism.

For now, the recent rediscovery of economic nationalism tends to presume that the nation-state can still be regarded as a discrete unit, somehow independent of the borderless realities of the climate and biosphere. The presumption is in bad faith. In ecological terms, the nation-state is not a sealed compartment but a mental compartmentalization. Squarely faced, the novel ecological reality of the twenty-first century—the insistent and yet unpredictable susceptibility of all countries to ecological spoliage—also furnishes a reminder of one of the oldest and most traditional principles of left politics, namely that no worthy nationalism is without an accompanying internationalism. For all its querulousness and complications, the so-called national question in classical Marxist debate centred on a pair of simple premises. On the one hand, the overwhelmingly working-class population of a given territory are those who deserve to determine its politics, in the teeth of all outside claims: hence the support of Marx and Engels for Irish and Polish independence, and of Lenin for national self-determination in general. The end of formal imperialism hardly retires the principle.

At the same time, the vision of some comprehensive socialist—or, today, ecosocialist—integration of the world has beckoned Marxists from a future in which workers of all lands might unite and national populations at last enjoy enough true sovereignty to dilute it into, in Luxemburg’s words, ‘a socialized economy conducted on a worldwide scale according to a uniform plan’.footnote⁶³ The weakness of the classical Marxist consideration of the national question was always its theoretical neglect of the intermediate stages between solitary self-determination and comprehensive world revolution: how do self-determining socialist nation-states combine to fortify and enlarge one another’s efforts in a world that remains substantially capitalist? With luck, this issue of the formation and growth of multistate left blocs will regain some practical importance yet again in this century.

Neoliberal globalization briefly came closer than any prior episode of history to a single kind of economy ‘conducted on a worldwide scale according to a uniform plan’. This amounted to an inverted and farcical realization of the universal aims of the revolutionary left as Luxemburg understood them. Our tragedy is that now, a few decades later, no socialist or communist counter-order can come about except in conditions of planetary ecological degradation never envisioned by the original theorists of the national question. The situation reverses Marx’s proverb, so that (neoliberal) farce precedes (ecosocialist) tragedy. But the simple proposition that ecosocialism is to be preferred to ethno-barbarism relies on no such ironies. Is it outlandish to hope that it may carry the day, from country to country?