Globalism must have its own hard look in the mirror

When my grandfather, a veteran of the Résistance, opened a wine bottle, he’d often say: “One more the Germans won’t get.” Actually, he used another word for Germans I won’t print here. He’d got the saying from his father, he told me, a stretcher bearer at Verdun who probably heard it from his own father: “One more the Prussians won’t get.” When in a blink of history his grandson started working in Germany, now our peaceful neighbor and top trading partner, he wasn’t at ease but he was grateful. “I’ll never like them, he once told me, but I’m so glad your generation can.”

This is what we built in two generations: the people my grandfather only met at the end of a rifle are my friends, my coworkers, my brethren in our precious Union. We forget how rare and improbable that is, the many other paths history could have taken. My grandfather never did. Only the men who’ve known war have for peace the reverence it deserves.

We were reminded of it on Sunday in the centennial commemoration of the end of World War I, which 60 world leaders attended in Paris. French president Emmanuel Macron made a rousing call for a globalist world view. He defended a multilateralist global governance and nations acting according to their moral values, not just their self-interest. Peace and prosperity, he said, are built on scientific progress, knowledge and a commitment to truth. Nationalism, he told the world’s rising nationalist leaders watching in the front row, is a betrayal of patriotism.

That is a worldview the readers of this column will certainly recognize. But as nationalism is to patriotism, what then, I wonder, is the pendant of globalism? And in this mirror image, is globalism the good brother or the bad?

See, the name of this column is imperfect. I knew it when I started it, and many of your comments pointed it out. “Globalist” doesn’t just refer, as I intend it, to people who live across borders and cultures. It also refers to a capitalist system built on global trade and the business élite that has emerged from it. A system that has lifted millions out of poverty but been unkind to millions more. While they are two different things, they are intimately connected and we must talk about both.

My globalism is additive: I care passionately about multiple places on Earth. You should have seen me watch US midterm returns... But the danger of globalism is to feel so little connection to any one place in particular that we abdicate our responsibilities to any or all of them. If you don’t see yourself as a Michigan-rooted CEO, it’s easier to send the jobs to China. If Brazil isn’t home, it doesn’t hurt as much to dump toxic waste in its rivers. If your company isn’t particularly French, you might as well pay lower taxes in Ireland.

I was reminded of this recently while interviewing Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All. His book argues that plutocrats have taken over the conversation about social change and redirected it to exclude solutions that would challenge the system that gave them outsize wealth and power in the first place. While his opus isn’t directly about globalisation, the idea of a toxic rootlessness underlines it all. “People love to ask what they can do for their country, he told me. They don’t like to talk about what they’ve done to their country.” And often what they’ve done is cut the cord.

If so many would rather retreat behind borders, it’s because their opening has been brutally disruptive – to our identities, our communities and often to our simple ability to make ends meet. If commitment to the nation fades, it must be replaced with an equally strong value system that keeps globalists rooted in community and committed to their fellow humans. It is good for our generation of globalists to remember that World War I erupted at the end of the first globalization (1870-1914), when trade and finance, waves of immigration and rapid technological advances changed the world faster than people could adapt. When the backlash comes, and it’s starting to, the first casualty may well be the way of life we, last globalists, so cherish.

What then is a word for this enlightened and rooted globalism we should champion? As nationalism is to patriotism, globalism is to… ? My editor and I have already had a go and come up empty. What say you, reader?