Ours is an age of extreme paradoxes. Wrist-watch telephones, driverless cars, and domestic robots that take care of mundane tasks like cleaning floors and shopping for groceries have become commonplace. Space travel is available to anyone who can pay for it. Soon, the Metaverse with its 3D virtual worlds promises to transform everything from industry and finance and city planning to healthcare and education and dating. Indeed, it could be said that we are living in the science-fiction future of the 1950s. However, the threats that we face today are nothing like the Giant Insects and Alien Invaders that titillated and terrified mid-century moviegoers. Dangers to the stability of the world in the twenty-first century are less exotic and more treacherous than that. In the most advanced nations, we have witnessed the rise of anti-intellectual movements. Bizarre conspiracy theories and a broad distrust of science and expertise have taken hold across the developed world. At the same time, extreme ideologies, on both the right and the left, have gained ascendance across Europe and the United States, effectively splitting societies in two.
If ever there were a period animated by a spirit of its own, we appear to be in the midst of one. But, in fact, this is not the first time that history has witnessed an epoch of such vast contradictions. The turn of the last century was a period of great social, scientific, and technological promise. It was an age of new modes of traveling, thinking, dressing, and interacting. An age that saw the end of monarchical rule in Europe and brought into being the “New Woman.” And still, despite all its hopes and prospects, the period went from the heights of science and rationality to the depths of irrationalism and hatred. The starkness of the transition is marked by the words of the prominent sociologist S. H. Swinny on the eve of World War I. In 1913, Swinny wrote, “it is in the modern world alone that we have seen the continuous development of science and the widening of the moral sphere, the recognition of the brotherhood of all mankind.”1 Only one year later the world would be consumed by one of the most destructive wars in history.
Is it possible that the explosive politics that erupted at the turn of both centuries is rooted in the very technological changes that brought humankind to its highest levels of sophistication? Might it be that mankind’s greatest achievements can produce toxic political upheavals? This book maintains that such is the case. The claim will be made that the reason the present has so many corollaries with the turn of the nineteenth century is that in both eras, seemingly miraculous technological innovations connected people, products, money, and ideas in ways that could not have been imagined. These changes made life easier in many ways, but also unleashed widespread social and political disruptions. As global capitalism took possession of the world, social protections that had been established were stripped away, inequalities were exacerbated, and national economies were made defenseless against the actions of faraway bankers and speculators. The very organization of societies came under threat. With social disruptions proliferating, self-seeking politicians were able to galvanize growing fear and anxiety to launch left-wing populist and proto-fascist movements. What emerged was an era of national populism—what is labeled here an era of defensive nationalism.
In the summer of 2017, a large assembly of torch-bearing protestors defiantly waving Nazi flags marched through Charleston chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” The bold-faced embrace of Nazism in the heart of the United States was a sign of how much the world had changed. It was, in fact, a symptom of something much larger. From 2008 to 2020 an explosion of populism and nativism erupted across the Global North on a scale not seen for a century. Nativist parties, which had existed on the margins of European politics, achieved significant and in some cases quite sizeable representation in parliaments across Eastern and Western Europe. In Italy, Greece, Hungary, and Poland, parties unabashedly identified themselves as fascist. Even in the USA, white nationalism, which had been a small fringe movement, had edged its way into mainstream politics.
During the same period, the progressive and far left, long dormant in Europe and the United States, were in ascendance. Far-left parties gained support across Europe, from Podemos in Spain (2014), to Syriza in Greece (2015), to the Left Bloc in Portugal (2015),2 to the far-left La Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et sociale in France (2022).3 In the United States and the United Kingdom, Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, both self-proclaimed socialists, credibly contested the highest political office in their respective nations in the 2010s. Concurrently, progressive movements erupted across the globe, including the “Me-Too” social movement against sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and rape culture; anti-femicide marches in countries as diverse as Mexico, Italy, Turkey, and Sudan; and Black Lives Matter rallies held in the United States, Europe, and even Kenya.
In response to these world events, a deluge of scholarship followed. As varied as this literature is, a rough convergence has emerged. It is now broadly held that today’s nativist and populist movements are interrelated responses to displacements created by globalization.4 A general acceptance has also developed as to what the attributes of nativism and populism are.5 Given the amount of ink that has been spilled on populism, nativism, and fascism, it is hard to imagine that much more can be said. But some puzzles do remain.
One rather important question that has not been fully answered is how populism connects or overlaps with nationalism. This may seem like a minor concern but understanding how and when populism and nationalism merge is critical to explaining the rise of early twenty-first-century politics. In fact, it is at the heart of the matter. The political movements that have engulfed Europe and the United States clearly share attributes of both populism and nationalism. But neither concept fully encompasses what we are experiencing.6 Identifying what the relationship is between the two, therefore, is central to explaining the politics of today.
The puzzling nature of the link between nationalism and populism has engendered a scholarly debate. On one side of the debate, it is asserted that populism and nationalism are quite distinct from one another and that, therefore, it is vital to analytically differentiate between the two.7 The proponents of this idea argue that the outstanding feature of populism is championing the rights of “the people” against the corrupt elite establishment. Thus, at its core populism is a vertically oriented dichotomy, meaning it is an opposition between “the elite” and “the people.” Nationalism, by contrast, is not concerned with how the “little guy” is being trampled by power and money. Quite the reverse, nationalism actually links “elites”: to “the people” in a sense of shared group membership. Its central concern is to ensure that the rights of the “true citizens” are safeguarded against the encroachments of “outsiders.” Nationalism is, thus, a horizontally oriented dichotomy that distinguishes between “us” and “them,” or as social scientists put it, “in-groups” and “out-groups.” The rebuttal8 to this argument is that these concepts are more interrelated than this characterization suggests. At the heart of both nationalism and populism is promoting “the people’s” interests. The existing gulf between nationalism and populism is not intrinsic to the concepts themselves. Rather, it is due largely to the fact that scholarship on nationalism has developed separately from studies of nativism/populism. We should thus be leery of using simple dichotomies to differentiate between them and instead work harder to understand how “the people” are constructed within and across both categories.
So how does the project of protecting “the citizenry” and safeguarding “the nation” intersect with defending “the people” against “the corrupt elite”? Can we reconcile these differences? This book argues we can; indeed, that we must if we are to better account for the movements that have swept across the Western world in the first decades of the twenty-first century. It seeks to answer these questions by presenting a new approach to the study of nationalism, which differentiates between creative, consolidating, and defensive nationalism. The central argument made is that both the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were “eras” of defensive nationalism. Defensive nationalism is defined here as a form of national populism that combines anti-liberalism and anti-globalization with economic nationalism, and which has both right- and left-wing expressions.9 An era of defensive nationalism erupts when many nation-states are assaulted by global economic and demographic changes at the same time.
What follows is a study of what defensive nationalism is, why it arises, and what its political implications are. This is achieved by examining parallels across the Western world during the Second Industrial Revolution (1860–1910s) and the Digital Revolution (1960–2010s). In both periods, profound changes in communications and transportation contributed to internationally contagious economic crises, great flows of labor migration, extreme wealth inequality, and international terrorist movements that spread fear and distrust globally. In both periods, these disorienting changes brought into being a surge of right- and left-wing defensive nationalists.10
Comparing the centuries also suggests possible political directions we might be headed in. We certainly know how things ended a century ago. In the early twentieth century, the United States entered an era of progressive politics, while Europe fell to communism, fascism, and World Wars. What does that bode for the twenty-first century? The jury is still out, but a central reason for writing this book is to consider how history might provide a template for the direction the Western world is moving toward over the next couple of decades.
Several scholars have examined the end of the nineteenth century to understand the rise of contemporary populist movements.11 This book’s contribution is to explore how the past might offer clues to the present by drawing on the works of two great theorists of the postwar era: Karl Polanyi and Joseph Schumpeter. Both were witnesses to the rise of communism, fascism, and World Wars. Acute observers of the social world, each developed a theory to explain the extraordinary changes that occurred in his lifetime.
In 1944, Karl Polanyi published his singular work, The Great Transformation.12 The book offers an inspired explanation for the tragedies that befell Europe in the early twentieth century. In it, Polanyi traces the dramatic global shift from liberalism to fascism and socialism that developed roughly between 1860 and 1930. Polanyi argues that a decisive break occurred in the world order in the mid-1800s with the rise of finance capitalism. Finance capitalism was a wholly new and much more insidious form of capitalism, in which the great houses of finance came to direct everything from domestic policy to international relations. Whether the Rothschild family with their several banks across Europe, or the powerful industrialist John Pierpont Morgan in the United States, the world’s financiers were able to prevent states from promulgating laws regarded as inimical to industry. National governments were also compelled to adopt the gold standard, effectively placing domestic economies at the mercy of international capital.
Thus, finance capitalism shaped a new globalized economy based on free-market values. But laissez-faire economics failed to produce the promised golden age. As market triumphalism took over, global economic downturns caused widespread suffering. Groups across Europe rose in opposition to the crushing conditions created by industrialization and finance capitalism. This ultimately led to the wholesale rejection of liberalism and the embrace of communism and fascism. For these reasons, Polanyi characterizes the late nineteenth-century period as a period of the “double movement”: a period of economic liberalism accompanied by anti-liberal political responses.
In recent years, many academics have turned to Polanyi to explain today’s social and political backlash. Polanyi’s theory of the “double movement” offers a tantalizing means for explaining our present age. It is not a far stretch to see that much of what Polanyi describes of the “double movement” is easily ascribable to changes afoot today: from the liberalization of markets starting in the 1970s, to hyper-globalization of the turn of the century, to the recrudescence of nationalism and protectionism in recent decades. So many passages sound strikingly descriptive of our own times, it would seem that the concept of the “double movement” could explain the contagious spread of nativism and populism across the globe. It might also offer some insight into what could be in store for us in the coming decades.
However, applying Polanyi to the contemporary world poses serious difficulties. Polanyi himself does not offer a concrete means for understanding how such a cycle might re-emerge. To the contrary, Polanyi believed the period of the late nineteenth century was wholly unique; so much so, that he characterizes the late nineteenth century as “sui generis.” Therefore, those of us who find the “double movement” a compelling concept are left asking: What exactly is meant by the “double movement,” and what conditions can be identified to explain its re-emergence?
To develop a means for analyzing how a second cycle of the “double movement” could occur, this study turns to the works of Joseph Schumpeter. As Polanyi, Schumpeter was interested in understanding how the great economic and industrial developments of the late nineteenth century put in motion the dramatic transformations that ultimately led to the rise of fascism and communism. In contradistinction to Polanyi, Schumpeter traces those changes not to finance capital and the gold standard, but to that which spurred intense financial speculation in the first place: railroadization.13 For Schumpeter, the driving force behind the economic and political changes of the first half of the twentieth century were the new technologies developed during the nineteenth century.
Combining these two theories, this study analyzes the emergence of Polanyi’s “double movement” in both eras as an outgrowth of sudden technological transformation. Indeed, the mid-1800s and the mid-1900s each mark the beginning of a dramatic period of innovation: the Second Industrial Revolution and the Digital Revolution, respectively. Both technological revolutions ushered in astonishing advances in communications and transportation that unified the world in unprecedented ways. These staggeringly rapid periods of modernization brought with them all manner of improvements for mankind; but they also produced widespread social dislocation. Eventually, the economic and social disruptions created by the new globalizing technologies engendered anti-liberal, national populist movements. In short, entrepreneurial innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution and the Digital Revolution made liberal globalization possible, which, in turn, engendered its opposite, an epoch of defensive nationalism—Polanyi’s “double movement.”
The book proceeds in five parts. In Part I, concepts and theories are contrasted and synthesized to produce a workable model for studying the “double movement.” Parts II, III, and IV then apply the theoretical model developed in Part I to history (see Table I.1). Finally, Part V goes beyond the theories of Polanyi and Schumpeter, to examine the political preconditions that existed prior to the double movement. Thus, where Part I explains how the “double movement” can be studied, Parts II through IV illustrate what is similar about these two epochs and makes them analytically comparable, and Part V makes the case for why high liberalism and finance capitalism emerged in both periods.
Table I.1 Similarities Between the Turn-of-the-Century Periods
| Revolution | 1860–1920 | 1960–2020 |
| Second Industrial | Digital | |
| Postwar Peace | Concert of Europe | Bretton Woods |
| International Hegemon | Britain (post Napoleonic Wars) | USA (post World Wars) |
| Economic Organization | Agricultural to Industrial Production | Mass Production (Fordism) to Flexible Production (Post-Fordism) |
| Int’l Monetary System | 1870s—Bimetallism to Gold Standard | 1973—Gold Standard to Fiat Money System |
| Transportation Innovations | Railroads/ Steam Engine | Turbo Jet Airplanes/ Shipping Containers |
| Communications Innovations | Printing Press, Paper pulp Telegraph, Ticker Tape |
Solid-State Computers, Satellites, Internet, Cell Phones |
| Communications Interconnectivity |
Popular Postal Systems Mail-order Catalog Mass newspaper/journal circulation Yellow Journalism |
Email Online Shopping Cable TV, Social Media “Post-Truth” |
| Inequality & Wealth Concentration | Robber Barons | Big Tech/Banking |
| Int’l Economic Crises | Panic of 1873 Long Depression 1873–1879 1893 Depression Panic of 1901 Panic of 1907 1929 Wall Street Crash |
1973, 1979 Oil Shocks 1987 Market Crash 2001 dot.com crash 2007–2008 Financial Crisis 2022 Global Recession |
| Global Pandemic | Spanish Flu 1918–1921 | COVID-19 2019–2022 |
| Mass Emigrations | From Ireland, Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe, China | From the Middle-East, Africa, Latin America, Asia |
| International Terrorism | Anarchist | Islamist |
| Political Outcomes | Progressive Era, Fascism, Communism, World Wars | ??? |
Part I presents the theoretical model that will be used to analyze the two periods of historical change. Chapter 1 begins by offering some background to how nationalism, populism, fascism, and nativism have been analyzed to date, and what the challenges are to understanding how they converge and diverge from one another. Chapter 2 introduces a new tri-part typology of nationalism: creative, consolidating, and defensive nationalism. The typology synthesizes elements of existing concepts and organizes them into new categories. The chapter ends with a stylized sketch of right- and left-wing versions of defensive nationalism. Chapter 3 discusses the theoretical construct of the “double movement” in greater detail. The chapter commences with a more in-depth exploration of Polanyi’s theory. It then examines the limitations inherent in Polanyi’s work. Last, Chapter 4 explains how Schumpeter’s theory of technology can be combined with Polanyi’s to overcome some of these constraints. The chapter ends by explaining why the concept of defensive nationalism can provide a valuable tool for applying this combined theoretical model of the “double movement.”
Part II explains the rise of liberal capitalism, or the first part of Polanyi’s “double movement.” Separate comparative histories of these two turn-of-the-century periods are presented to illustrate the unique magnitude of interconnectivity that characterized both. This section will show that innovations in communications and transportation allowed for the globalization of finance and trade and the spread of liberal ideology. Chapter 5 examines critical aspects of the period from 1860 to 1890. The chapter traces the impact of railroads, steamships, telegraphy, paper pulp, and the printing press on multiple aspects of society and the economy. Chapter 6 offers a parallel analysis of the mid-twentieth century, paying particular attention to the combined effects of turbo jets, containerships, satellites, computers, the Internet, and cell phones.
Part III and Part IV both focus on the second half of the “double movement.” Part III presents a series of chapters that describe the social and economic dislocations created by globalizing liberalism, while Part IV looks at the political responses to those profoundly disorienting changes. In Part III, three separate chapters analyze some of the more consequential disruptions of the eras. Chapter 7 examines how massive reorganization of the global economy impacted existing social structures and made domestic economies extremely vulnerable to global price shocks. Chapter 8 looks at the new forms of mass media that emerged and the effects those media changes had on society and political stability. Finally, Chapter 9 outlines the ways in which mass migrations and new forms of globalized terror further destabilized the Western world. Following this, Part IV examines how political elites were able to capitalize on these social and economic dislocations, to challenge the established order and mobilize anti-liberal, anti-global, economic nationalist movements. Chapter 10 identifies the defensive national movements that took hold across Europe and the United States in both periods. It looks at what motivated these new defensive national movements, who led them, and how the right- and left-wing forms compare with one another. Chapter 11 looks more specifically at the emergence of nativism and fascism in both periods.
The final part of the book moves beyond Polanyi and Schumpeter. For it is not enough to present a practical means to identify and study the “double movement.” It is also necessary to account for why it emerged, that is, what was distinctive about both periods that allowed for finance and trade to globalize to such extraordinary proportions. Accordingly, Part V provides an explanation for what precipitated the “double movement.” The section argues that the critical factor that accounts for the initial rise of liberalism and globalization was an extended period of peace among the global powers of the day. In other words, the “double movement” was made possible by unique interludes of cooperation among the most economically advanced nations. Chapter 12 catalogs how the negotiated peace settlement following the Napoleonic Wars, called the “Concert of Europe,” provided the space for trade and innovation to flourish. Chapter 13 will look at the how Bretton Woods accords that were reached after the two great World Wars also produced a period in which finance, trade, and innovation were able to reach historic levels, setting the cycle in motion for a second time. The book concludes with a discussion of the limitations of this historical comparison, but also considers how comparing our age to these bygone years might be fruitful for thinking about possible future developments.