Globalization Is Collapsing. Brace Yourselves.

Opinion|Globalization Is Collapsing. Brace Yourselves.

Before World War I, globalization was at a high point. Advances in technology, including the steamship and the telegraph, allowed people, goods and news to cross borders with extraordinary speed. Migration boomed. The economist John Maynard Keynes, conjuring an Edwardian version of Amazon, recalled how “the inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.” After drinking his tea (from India), sweetened by sugar (from Jamaica), that Londoner might later enjoy toast (made from wheat grown in Kansas), butter (from New Zealand), beef (from Argentina) and oranges (from Palestine).

Many people believed that this kind of internationalism was irreversible and that the interdependence of the global economy would guarantee peace and prosperity, even if it was also unsettling. It was an age, Keynes said, in which, to the Londoner, “the projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper.”

At the end of the 20th century, the world experienced the second great acceleration of globalization. Communism collapsed. The European Union expanded. Soon, China joined the world trading system. Migration once again surged. Today over 15 percent of people living in America were born abroad, surpassing a previous high of 14.8 percent in 1890. As was true then, many observers a century later saw globalization as an unstoppable and inherently positive force. The great-grandchildren of that Londoner, drinking their Indian tea in bed, followed world news on TikTok and had toast (topped with Mexican avocados) delivered to their doorstep, using phones designed in California and assembled in China.

Both moments of peak globalization came crashing down, in epochal, generation-defining ways. In 1913 the value of exported goods made up 14 percent of the world economy. By 1933, shattered by World War I and the Great Depression, it had slumped to 6 percent, and it did not recover until the 1970s. The backlash propelled the rise of right-wing authoritarian and fascist movements that promised to reverse or seize control of the forces of globalism. It ended in a catastrophic world war.

In our own time, the Covid pandemic, like World War I, killed millions of people and disrupted global trade and migration. Coupled with the long tail of the 2008 financial crisis, it helped antiglobal populists sweep elections around the world. America voted for Donald Trump again. Barriers, both financial and physical, are rising, capped in spectacular style by Mr. Trump’s plan to wall off America from the rest of the world with tariffs not seen in a century.

And now what? The lessons of history suggest several possibilities, many of them bad. Our current antiglobal moment could last for a long time. Illiberalism is alive and strong. Comparisons that once seemed incendiary or irresponsible now seem obvious. As in the 1930s, minority groups are being scapegoated as symbols and causes of globalization’s ills. For Jews then, read migrants or trans people now. Mr. Trump’s imminent betrayal of Ukraine suggests that we are moving rapidly through the 1930s and have already arrived in 1938. That’s when Western leaders in Munich decided to allow Hitler to dismember one of Europe’s few remaining democracies, Czechoslovakia. It was not worth risking lives over “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing,” reasoned the dangerously reasonable Neville Chamberlain. Less than one year later, Hitler browbeat the president of what remained of Czechoslovakia into accepting a complete occupation of his country.