On the second floor of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, recently renamed the Ministry for Business and Made in Italy, stands a golden statue of a naked woman holding a bound bundle of rods: a symbol of Italian fascism. The building was created by one of dictator Benito Mussolini’s favorite architects, Marcello Piacentini, and its interiors have remained largely unchanged over the decades, including the 1940 statue, which bears the name Autarchia.

The statue represents an era brought to life in historian Tara Zahra’s highly instructive and beautifully written book, Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars. In the interwar period, countries turned away from global trade and free movement of peoples. Instead, they sought self-sufficiency—autarchia—either through “internal colonization,” meaning rural development, or, for militaristic aggressors such as Italy, regional empires.

It is not hard to see parallels between these interwar “anti-global movements,” as Zahra calls them, and present-day discontentment with global integration. (Zahra writes that her book is “no less a history of the present.”) Yet while Zahra argues that both were driven by Mass Politics, there is reason to question whether either trend truly had grassroots origins. What is often considered anti-globalist populism nowadays is in many respects an elite project—and to avoid a turn “against the world” today, we need leaders who can offer a better kind of globalization.

This age of global freedom was freer for wealthy, educated white men than for many others. (Zweig recognized that “[i]t may be I was too greatly pampered…”) Still, people were on the move without as many obstacles; passports did not become ubiquitous until after World War I. It was only after the war and the Spanish flu—which, according to some estimates, killed as many as 39 million people—that many states closed borders and erected if not literal walls, then at least tariff walls.

The interwar period, in Zahra’s words, became a “quarantine era.” The Treaties of Paris divided the Habsburg Empire, once the largest free-trade zone in Europe, into six warring economic units. Countries raced to put up barriers to immigration. In the United States, the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act radically reduced the influx of immigrants. The eugenics-inspired law banned immigration from Asia completely and limited it from Southern and Eastern Europe: In 1914, 283,783 Italians landed in the United States; in 1924, the official quota was 3,845. Family separation kept apart relatives across the Atlantic: Those who had a spouse and children back in the Old World were denied U.S. citizenship, and families could only get to the United States if the man was already American—a bureaucratic catch-22 of which a figure like Stephen Miller, an advisor credited with shaping former U.S. President Donald Trump’s immigration strategy, may have been proud.

European countries began to see losing citizens to the New World as shameful. The Habsburg successor states, as well as fascist Italy and Francoist Spain, actively discouraged it. Instead of sending people abroad, countries bet on “internal colonization.” Zahra recalls the draining of the Pontine Marshes south of Rome—a major propaganda exercise for Mussolini—and the construction of fascist model towns such as Sabaudia in the Agro Pontino. Austria saw a major campaign for new settlements within its borders as well, with houses designed by modernist architect Adolf Loos, as did Germany, where the urban gardening movement had long held up Jedermann Selbstversorger—the idea that everyone could, and should, provide for themselves.

In the United States, meanwhile, New Dealer Harold Ickes presided over a new Division of Subsistence Homesteads, aiming to move people out of unhealthy cities congested with the unemployed masses. As part of a model project of this “de-urbanization,” the government moved workers out of Manhattan and into a new settlement near Hightstown, New Jersey.

The internal colonization enterprises were hardly shining successes. Still more Italians emigrated per year than found a new home in the Agro Pontino. The New Jersey settlement was labeled “Jewtown” by antisemites, and unions didn’t like it, because they saw it as weakening urban labor in the class struggle. Austrian settlers usually had too little food and too much alcohol. Everywhere, “homesteading” depended not only on maintaining a traditional division of labor, but on women, and sometimes children, doing enormous amounts of unpaid work. (In the Austrian countryside, women tended to work 13- to 14-hour days.) Tellingly, single men could not apply for the programs of the Division of Subsistence Homesteads to begin with.

Dreams of autarky did not fare so well at a national level, either. Italian fascism promoted everything homegrown, from “linguistic autarky” to “autarkic cooking,” which included “autarkic desserts” such as biscotti made from potatoes and rice. Germany’s National Socialists engaged in agricultural experiments to respond to a major lesson from World War I—that it needed to have sufficient supplies of fat during a global military conflict; in the process, the country created what one historian has called especially large “fascist pigs” fed with potatoes. The Nazis also experimented on humans—namely, prisoners of war—to ascertain how little food they needed without losing the capacity for hard labor. But no country quite realized the tantalizing goal that the statue in the Italian ministry symbolized.

It’s hard not to wonder, though, what exactly holds all the stories altogether. Which is another way of asking: Is there really such a thing as “globalism,” to which various instantiations of “anti-globalism” could be opposed? As Zahra herself recognizes, nationalism and internationalism are hardly ever neatly separated. Rather, individuals and institutions selectively engage with what is outside their borders. For instance, neoliberals, whose thinking first took shape in the 1930s, wanted—and still want—global markets, but not always global democracy or free movement of people. And not all interwar movements were invested in fantasies of self-provision and complete withdrawal from the world; fascists, for instance, had no problem cooperating across borders—just as nationalist far-right parties form alliances in the European Parliament today.

Part of the problem is that terms like globalism, cosmopolitanism, and universalism can be too casually run together. Not everyone who wants countries to open up for international business is “cosmopolitan” in the sense of knowing the ways of the world; in fact, plenty of trading and investing can be done without ever leaving one’s office. And not everyone with frequent flyer status is a universalist in the sense of believing in moral equality among all humans. Gandhi was both cosmopolitan and universalist, and it seems strange that he could end up serving in this book as an example of being “against the world,” at least in part, due to the campaign he waged in which he advocated for the use of khadi, a home-spun textile, to promote Indian self-sufficiency.

In her search for analogies to the present, Zahra actually shows just how different the past was. To be sure, we have seen an increase in trade for half a century, and technology has enabled billions to connect instantly with people at the other end of the world. There is also plenty of loose talk of “open borders” today, usually to foster panic about “invasions” and “great replacements” of native-born populations by foreigners. But we simply do not live in Zweig’s passport-less world of unrestricted movement. Zweig no doubt would have noticed that our supposed golden age of globalization is also characterized by a steady increase in the number of walls and border fences. (We forget that Trump did not start the wall-building business.) 

In the same vein, what is often lamented as protectionism today—including U.S. President Joe Biden’s efforts to bring manufacturing back to the United States—pales in comparison to efforts at autarky undertaken by governments, but also private business, in the interwar period. Zahra recounts how U.S. industrialist Henry Ford sought not only to build a self-contained factory world in Michigan, but also to create his own rubber facility in Brazil, aptly named Fordlândia (an effort that failed).

In the end, the major historical parallel Zahra seeks to highlight is the notion of a “popular revolt against globalism.” Democratization, she argues, created mass politics, and mass politics resulted in a rejection of the liberal, ostensibly elitist world of Zweig and Keynes. Yet then, as now, it is questionable whether anti-globalism, if it exists at all, was truly driven by grassroots pressure. Zahra herself deftly describes savvy political entrepreneurs, mostly on the right, who gave opposition to trade and immigration real force—and demonstrates that many of them actually sought an alternative (or at least selective) form of globalization, not total withdrawal from the world.

What is today sometimes described as an “illiberal turn” or “populist wave” is also an elite, rather than grassroots, phenomenon. As political scientist Larry Bartels has shown in an important recent book, Democracy Erodes from the Top, public opinion on issues such as refugees and the European Union has hardly shifted in Europe in recent years. What has changed is the behavior of elite actors: Established conservative forces are now willing to enter coalitions with the far right; implement far-right demands; or, at the very least, copy the far right’s rhetoric. The current British government, especially Home Secretary Suella Braverman, is a prime example of this, as is the de facto capitulation of more established Republicans to Trump.

Where citizens have developed more illiberal views—namely Hungary and Poland—the causal arrow does not point from grassroots to government, but down from aspiring autocrats at the top subjecting their populations to relentless propaganda for the sake of building what Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has infamously called an “illiberal democracy.”

Obviously, there are many good reasons to criticize the form globalization has taken since the 1990s. It is important to remember that, in the post-Cold War period, leaders portrayed globalization as inevitable (which was not true) and as benefiting everyone eventually (which was also not true). Then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair infamously asserted that debating globalization was like debating whether fall should follow summer—a gift to populist leaders who would rightly claim that one point of democracy is to have choices.

But we should be careful with drawing any supposedly timeless political lessons assuming, as Zahra puts it, “an immediate connection between democratization, the rise of mass politics, and the revolt against globalism.” When they actually do have a voice, everyday citizens will not necessarily be “against the world,” let alone clamor for a new age of autarky. Their choices, of course, depend on what kind of globalization they are being offered. Biden and a number of EU leaders—not least European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen—seem to have realized that populists might be right in one respect: Citizens will no longer accept Blair-style, technocratic talk about the inevitability of globalization. Instead, leaders must demonstrate political will in shaping global connections. And a muscular industrial policy or, in the EU’s case, a bold Green Deal is not incompatible with engaging with the world.