Old Lesson Learned Anew: Cross-Border Capitalism Doesn’t Deter Wars

Today on TAP: As Bob Kuttner has frequently noted (including today), the myths of capitalist globalization have been shattered.

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Among the terrible casualties of Russia’s war on Ukraine, there’s one—and so far as I can see, only one—that deserved to die: the myth that cross-border economic integration (or, more accurately, the creation of a global capitalist order of production, trade, and consumption) will deter wars. As my colleague Bob Kuttner wrote in his Prospect column today, that idea has been violently dispelled in the past two weeks, much as it was in the summer of 1914.

As Bob also noted, the belief that the creation of cross-border European investment and culture in the first decade or so of the 20th century would deter future wars was profound. Norman Angell’s 1910 book The Great Illusion made that case very compelling to Europe’s elites. I’d stress, however, that it’s usually elites—those who either gain from cross-border investments, or those in a position to access the best of different nations’ cultures—that buy into this myth. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Wagner’s operas were viewed as a defining high point of European culture, notwithstanding their German nationalism and antisemitism. Indeed, as cultural historian Carl Schorske documented in his terrific history Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, it was Theodor Herzl’s love—not hate—of Wagner that helped inspire him to lead the Zionist cause. Just as improbable, the first production of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion—on, among other things, the class basis of differences in British speech—took place in 1913 in Vienna in German translation, one year before it first opened in English in London. (In later years, Shaw noted that it had been impossible to translate Pygmalion into Swedish, because Sweden’s economic egalitarianism had obliterated class differences in speech.)

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But then, cosmopolitanism and select cross-border cultural appropriation has historically been more of an option for the wealthy—note how Tolstoy’s Russian aristocrats speak French. As the 20th century progressed, that option spread among the well-educated and, in the 21st century, the well-wired. Today, the gap between more prosperous and cosmopolitan cities and more impoverished, provincial, and nationalistic rural areas increasingly defines politics throughout the world.

That said, the belief that we’re on the brink of some war-deterring global harmony has been, first and foremost, a claim made by international investors and their advocates, who also insisted that the coming of capitalism to Russia and China would mean that those nations would ipso facto become democracies. Whether the Wall Street bankers who most assiduously promoted this myth actually believed it or just felt it was politically necessary remains a somewhat unsettled question. By dint of their universal opposition to unions, none of them seem inclined even to tolerate a smidgen of democracy within the workplaces they control.

But a different species of globalization has also grown over more recent decades, as a common culture has taken root, chiefly among the urban young. Some of it is merely an immersion in capitalist consumer culture, but some of it is also a belief in liberal and democratic norms, which we see displayed among the anti-war demonstrators who keep coming out to the Red Squares of Moscow and other Russian cities despite their knowledge that they risk imprisonment. The globalization we have yet to see, alas, is the one that Marx called for in the closing line of the Manifesto, that of the workers of the world. Capital can easily cross borders, which has also become increasingly the case in recent decades for professionals. But once the production workers of Pittsburgh were pitted against the production workers of Shenzhen in the absence of global work standards and global worker rights, a proletarian we’re-all-in-this-together sensibility wasn’t likely to emerge. And it isn’t, so long as workers aren’t protected against the transnational arbitrage that is the very heart of global capitalism.

And now, as in 1914, we learn again that global capitalism not only facilitates a nationalist reaction among workers, but also is no deterrent to wars. So much for the Peace of the Action.

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