LPutin’s Russia is resurrecting nationalist imperialism. Right-wing populism is on the rise in the West. Protectionism is the new consensus in Washington. World trade is fragmenting. Food prices are soaring. Our “brave new nationalist world” recalls the imperial protectionist decades of the late 19th centurye and the beginning of the 20th centurye century which resulted in two world wars.
Those who opposed this early era were left-wing free traders who wanted an interdependent, prosperous, and peaceful world order. That the notion of free trade can be left-wing may seem surprising, since this concept is today rather associated with right-wing politics and conservative economic theories.
The now forgotten left wing of free trade finds its source in the middle of the 19th century.e century, in the coalition of liberal radicals, socialist internationalists, feminists and Christian pacifists. These capitalist and socialist internationalists shared a vision of a prosperous, peaceful and anti-imperial order arising from a global free trade market.
In 1846, Richard Cobden, the radical liberal leader of the British free trade and peace movements, outlined how this vision could “to bring men together, to banish antagonisms of race, belief and language, and to unite us in the bonds of eternal peace”. Two years later, Karl Marx in turn gave his socialist blessing to free trade, explaining that it represented the next phase of capitalism on the path to socialist revolution.
Promise of world peace
For left-wing globalists, free trade allowed access to affordable food for the most disadvantaged by giving everyone the opportunity to buy their food where it was cheapest. It thus weakened the monopolistic economic power of the aristocratic land-owning elites who had long profited from artificially high prices. The aristocracy’s influence over foreign policy would also be weakened, limiting its penchant for waging wars and maintaining costly empires. Left-wing free trade promised to end world hunger, abolish monopolies, democratize foreign policy, dissolve empires, and bring about world peace!
At the end of the 19th centurye century, in response to a series of economic panics, the rivals of the British Empire (Americans, Germans, French, Japanese, Russians and Ottomans) turned one after the other towards economic nationalism. For left-wing free traders, this protectionist orientation led to the proliferation of trade wars, colonialism and geopolitical conflicts. At the beginning of the 20the century, socialist internationalists such as Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky in Germany, Bertrand Russell in the United Kingdom, Norman Thomas in the United States, and Abe Isoo in Japan allied with their radical liberal capitalist counterparts to oppose imperialism and wars induced by protectionism.
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