Globalism, Sovereignty, and Resistance

Jennifer Mittelstadt and Quinn Slobodian in conversation

Photograph by Alvah Tilman, 1973, of anti-UN sign on her farm, near the road, JBS records, series 6, box 9, folder 17, Hull Hoag Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University.

“Globalism” entered public discourse in the 2010s as a target of Donald Trump and his on-again-off-again lieutenant Steve Bannon. “Sovereignty” has been a popular buzzword for the global right in recent decades too. We asked Quinn Slobodian and Jennifer Mittelstadt to discuss their research on the meanings of globalism and sovereignty throughout history.

Quinn Slobodian: There are two approaches to thinking about “globalism.” The first is nominalist, where you track the use of the term itself. This history begins in the 1930s and 1940s debates about whether U.S. foreign policy should embrace the entire planet or be more territorially limited. In newspapers of the time, you’ll find “globalist” deployed by critics to describe what they see as the crusading adventurism of the liberal establishment. From the 1960s onward, globalism became a byword for the dominant strain of U.S. foreign policy. In this sense, globalism has a fairly respectable pedigree within the profession of historical scholarship, appearing in titles of monographs over the years as a standard category for describing the perspective that takes the entire world as the space of political concern, potential legislation, and intervention.

At the same time, you will find the term globalism and globalists in conspiratorial, para-academic or non-academic ephemera, from pamphlets and brochures to websites. Sites like WorldNetDaily, LewRockwell.com, and Infowars became popular in the early 2000s and propagated an idea of globalists as a cabal with a hidden agenda operating beyond the grasp of governments and the ken of citizens. This notion of a secretive coven of financiers and media elites often had and has an implicit or explicit anti-Semitic tinge.

But a second way to approach the topic of globalism is in terms of its content. For me, a key story of the modern era has been the piecemeal construction of a legal framework to protect – or, as I call it, encase – property rights and free trade at a planetary scale. From the classical liberals through the neoliberals, there has been a demand that the world be made safe for monetized exchange, and that states should facilitate rather than obstruct the practice of business, commerce, investment, savings, and so on. My use of globalism is as a description of this ongoing project.

Jennifer Mittelstadt: Regarding its nominal usage by historical actors, I see a somewhat different timeline than Quinn outlines, and the term “globalism” arrives later to the scene than an earlier term, “internationalism.” This difference no doubt derives from my different research subject – grassroots right-wing activists opposed to internationalist organizations and ideologies. They don’t really use the term “globalist” or “globalism” until the 1980s and 1990s. Instead, they were much more likely to use the term “internationalism”  or “world government” as a stand in for a variety of impulses and ideologies vis-à-vis the new international, or global – those private and public structures proliferating from the early 20th century onward. Notably, they are also less interested in global political economy and more in global governance. When these activists say they oppose “world government,” they have in mind those supranational structures, beginning with the League of Nations, that, in their view, usurp national, state, regional, local, and personal “sovereignties.”  

QS: What distinguishes globalism from internationalism for me is the assumption from international law that sovereignty can be partially ceded through treaty to some kind of a supranational body that sits above and beyond the reach of the nation. In this style of internationalism, or we could say intergovernmentalism, nations remain at some level in the driver's seat. To me, globalism makes a stronger claim, seeking a framework that cannot be switched off by decisions of nation states. Realistically, that's a hard thing to achieve because international law relies on the consent of participating nations. Indeed, it is this dream of permanence in globalism that makes it both utopian and prone to both dissent and defection from participant states.

JM: Interestingly, I find that both those opposed to globalism, as you describe it, and those historically opposed to internationalism mobilized in ways that, for the historian, produce different “key moments” and alternate “periodizations” than traditional historiography focused on anti-communism and the Cold War. In my study of those opposed to internationalism in the United States, for example, the timeline is longer. World War I and the League of Nations debate is a key departure point, but even with the defeat of the treaty in the United States, internationalism only seems to grow for them as a menace in the 1920s and 1930s. Opposition to internationalism informs resistance to entrance into World War II on the side of the Allies. It animates one of the major groups that gets involved in the America First Committee, whose discourse will circulate through the sovereignty movement for decades. In subsequent years, this movement mobilizes around the United Nations, of course, seeking to restrict its power. It also rallies against UN actions. These include sanctions on the Ian Smith regime in white Rhodesia, and later in South Africa. They oppose the Immigration Act of 1965. They resist the ceding of the Panama Canal, a demand they understood as part of the UN plot of decolonization led by a dominant “Afro-Asian bloc.” These moments also reveal how additional issues beyond anti-communism really animated people’s investments in the politics of foreign policy. For me, the world wars and decolonization emerge as more important factors.

Studying anti-internationalism from the bottom up also sheds light on how the politics of “globalism,” seemingly distant from individuals’ everyday lives, in fact were perceived to have manifested in very local, intimate ways. In looking at bottom-up sources, I see how what, on the surface, may seem like paranoid conspiracy theories are actually generated by people in what they perceive to be real experiences at the local level. For example, in Jamestown, Virginia, in the late 1950s, officials decide they're going to fly the UN flag at the historic site. This is understood by local anti-internationalists as capitulation to the human rights covenant of the UN, pushed by the “Afro-Asian bloc,” and as an internationalist intervention to support desegregation of public schools and public places in Virginia. Reading the letters anti-UN activists write about this revealed to me how “internationalism” is understood to creep down to the personal, community level. Defending their sovereignty – their local and personal governance and jurisdiction and their nation’s  –  from these threats becomes more acute for them in contexts like these. 

QS: This is the version of libertarianism that someone like Murray Rothbard channels a lot. Some would describe it as a “settler sovereignty.” This is the dream of the homesteader and the person at the frontier carving out their patch of land, not interested in global markets nor the international division of labor, more tuned into local structures of supply and demand, and focused on keeping domestic enemies at bay, whether that is the Indigenous population or big government trying to get in their way.

JM: That element is there, for sure. At the same time, very few of the sovereigntists I'm looking at are uninterested in the international per se, and are really not what you would ever call isolationist. And here we might return to the present and think about globalism, internationalism, and sovereignty with respect to the Trump administration’s return. For my actors in the past, and for those active in Trump’s foreign policy world, the matter is not whether to engage with the world or not. The matter is the terms on which they choose to engage with the world. Bilateral treaties are great (and the transactional politics Trump so favors can flourish here), and no one is against private international law and trade per se. It is the imposition of ground rules by an international organization outside of the two parties wishing to make those agreements that troubles them. It is the binding of their fate, or the fate of the nation state, to decrees or bodies or judgements not directly determined by them to which they object. And also I think the current politics of sovereignty is very much still informed by the historic politics of right-wing anti-internationalist sovereignty, and its scorn for the rights to self-determination and sovereign authority of non-white nations, rights and sovereignty that international structures of governance and law confer.

QS: The distinction between private and public international law that you just raised will be important to keep an eye on with the return of a Trump administration. One can assume that third-party arbitration tribunals and international investment law remain of interest to someone like a Jared Kushner, even as he and his ilk become ever more scornful of the judgments of international criminal courts or the enforceability of anything like basic human rights, which they – not to mention the Biden administration – have made clear they do not care about.

I think a lot will push towards path dependency if you consider the coalition of Fortune 500 CEOs Trump is going to be assembling. It's an interesting case where, if you want to continue reaping the profits of American-led globalization under dollar dominance, then you can play with some things and not with others, and you can perform symbolic gestures around certain kinds of obligations to the so-called rules of the international community but what you can't touch will be almost as interesting as what you can. That was part of the story of Trump 1 and that will probably be the story of Trump 2 as well. Hence the importance of performative cruelty towards people at the border and people who have no legal recourse, the theater of sovereignty to satisfy the kind of frontier fantasies you describe. It is a sad fact that the fight against globalism often seems to manifest as a fight against people who have themselves been most rendered abject by global forces.

Jennifer Mittelstadt is professor of history at Rutgers University. She is author of From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945-1964 (UNC Press, 2005) and The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Harvard, 2015) and co-editor of The Military and the Market (Penn, 2022). She has held the Harold K. Johnson Chair in Military History at the US Army War College and has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the Dorothy and Lewis Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Quinn Slobodian is the Co-Director of the History & Political Economy Project. He is professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He is the author of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard, 2018), and his most recent book is Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (Metropolitan Books, 2023).