Their Internationalism and Ours

It’s hard to believe that just twenty-five years ago, the global justice movement had to defend itself against the charge of parochial, narrow-minded nationalism. This was the accusation made by respectable, supposedly forward-looking outlets like The Economist and The New Republic. The protesters in Seattle and Genoa stressed that they had no problem with the idea of an interconnected world. What they objected to was the pressure to liberalize and privatize national economies. It was that particular form of globalization — the one being promoted through the World Trade Organization and the summits of the G8 powers — that they opposed.

Today the capitalist internationalism of the early 2000s is in headlong retreat. Members of the billionaire class who zoom around the world in private jets are embracing the nativist politics of the far right while the Trump administration is taking a sledgehammer to the idea of free trade. In these circles, “globalism” has become a dirty word, but capitalism is still beyond question. The Washington Consensus once stigmatized tariffs and trade unions as anachronistic barriers to the free movement of capital. Now tariffs are in vogue, while unions still face an uphill battle merely to survive.

At the same time, the US power elite has increasingly dropped the cosmopolitan rhetoric of nation-building and humanitarian intervention as it continues to wage war around the world. The rollback of globalization doesn’t mean a retreat from empire. On the contrary, it involves crude displays of imperial aggression without so much as a rhetorical fig leaf to conceal their naked rapacity. The “rules-based international order” was always a nice way for Washington to dress up the fact that it both made the rules and gave the orders. But even that veneer of multilateralism now seems to be too much of a burden for US leaders.

Are there any other geopolitical players trying to cultivate their own brand of internationalism? China long ago abandoned the idea of promoting world revolution. The Soviet Union, by contrast, still presented itself as a bulwark of international socialism right up to the late 1980s, supporting various states and parties around the world in the name of that commitment. But the Communist Party of China kept its focus on building up its own state capacity and economic infrastructure — one reason it’s still standing today, decades after the USSR collapsed. 

After a long period of domestic development, China’s rulers have grown more confident about asserting their role in global affairs. The confrontational turn of the US political class — a bipartisan policy that has extended from Donald Trump to Joe Biden and back to Trump again — gives them a powerful incentive to strengthen their geopolitical muscles. Chinese government officials have taken the opportunity to present themselves as the true defenders of multilateral institutions. But there’s little indication so far that Beijing can build a new international order around itself in the way Washington did after 1945.

For their part, European leaders combine rhetorical feints toward greater independence from the United States with practical steps to increase their subservience. Back in 2003, at the apex of American “hyperpower,” France and Germany took a stand against the invasion of Iraq at the UN Security Council, brushing aside the carefully framed arguments of Secretary of State Colin Powell. Today the major European states have collectively bowed their heads as Trump launches another Middle Eastern war that will hurt their economies far more than that of the energy-independent United States. 

European elites market their plans for rearmament by telling their citizens how important it is to achieve strategic autonomy from the Americans, so that Europe can fight its own battles and defend its own borders. In reality, the massive hikes in military expenditures amount to a payoff to the Trump administration from governments committed to a policy of appeasement. The strongest resistance to the bloating of defense budgets has come from the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, who is also the most forceful critic among his peers of Trump’s war on Iran and Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza. In general, however, Europe clings all the more tightly to the comforting illusion of a transatlantic partnership, as their would-be ally persecutes judges from the International Criminal Court and threatens to annex Greenland. 

Latin America is another region where the apparent decline of US power has narrowed the space for independent action. If Washington can no longer impose its will as broadly as it did two decades ago, this makes it all the more determined to keep hold of what it considers to be core territories. Heavy-handed election interference has boosted the fortunes of Latin America’s eagerly collaborationist far right, and the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president showed that nothing was off-limits in the pursuit of hemispheric domination. The governments of Mexico and Brazil are the most important ones standing against the tide of Trumpian slop, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be able to hold out against coercive pressure from the most powerful state in the Americas.

This recharged form of imperialism, it should be said, doesn’t have a strong popular base at home. It’s easy to forget that there was widespread backing for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from people who bought one of the various arguments that the George W. Bush administration used to build consent. It wasn’t until those wars had resulted in chaos and carnage that the balance of opinion began to shift decisively. Today Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth can barely manage to articulate what their war against Iran is meant to achieve, let alone forge a broad consensus in support of their goals. 

The citizens of other NATO member states are even less enthusiastic about the attempts to shore up US power. But their leaders are incapable of imagining an alternative to reliance on American weapons, technology, and financial infrastructure. The end of globalization in its classical, high-Davos form won’t lead to a resurgence of national self-sufficiency so long as the US tech giants monopolize the commanding heights of digital capitalism. 

Faced with this concentration of power, the internationalism of the global justice movement may seem like a fading dream, too weak to challenge the Washington Consensus at its high point or to take advantage of its demise today. But the last quarter century has seen many other forms of progressive internationalism, from the worldwide mobilization against the Iraq War to the left-wing projects in Latin America that showed what can be done with state power and transnational cooperation. 

The Arab uprisings of 2011 and the European movements against austerity, the climate strikes and the marches in solidarity with Palestine — they all represent different facets of an internationalist spirit that cuts against the logic of neoliberal globalization just as it cuts against that of postliberal deglobalization. Trusting in that spirit may seem wildly ambitious or even utopian. But it’s more realistic than expecting stability or prosperity to come from the erratic, destructive lurches of an empire on the downslope.