Nationalism Isn't Replacing Globalism

Leon Hadar

Politics, Americas

The two are combining to create a new political order.

Much of the post-Brexit and primary election conventional wisdom seems to be stuck in a political narrative in which the Brexit vote and the rise of Trumpism in the United States are seen as symbols of the populist revolution. These symbols are combined with a nationalist tide has been sweeping not only the United Kingdom and the United States, but also many other parts of Europe, including Poland, Hungary, France, The Netherlands and Scandinavia, not to mention, Russia, Turkey, India and Israel.

According to this narrative, economic insecurity and cultural anxiety that reflect sociodemographic trends have given momentum to ethnonationalism and religious separatism in both the United States and the United Kingdom. The Rust Belt is pitted against New York City, and the Midlands against London.

The aging blue-collar workers and residents of the rural areas, remnants of the shrinking white English tribe—patriotic, God-fearing and hardworking—have lost their jobs in the declining manufacturing industries the never recovered from the Great Recession. They feel that they have been economically squeezed by the forces of globalization that are being promoted by the political and economic elites in New York and London, that they are culturally marginalized and threatened by nonwhite immigrants who are “taking over” their country, and that secular liberal elites are responsible for the cultural decadence that is supposedly inflicting their societies.

At the same time, gigantic metropolitan areas have been growing and prospering thanks to globalization and immigration: a flourishing globalized service economy; a concentration of young and educated professionals; immigrants that are mostly integrated into open societies; tolerance of the other and accommodation of changes in cultural mores, like same-sex marriage; a demographic balance that is swinging in the direction of unmarried men and women, the young and the purveyors of the “cognitive economy”, rather than those with large families, the old and industrial workers.