Book about the interwar period: Entangled fronts

The US historian Tara Zahra unearths some fascinating information about globalization and right-wing anti-globalization movements between the world wars.

Migrant workers in the USA in the early 1930s. Is the world currently facing a crisis similar to the Great Depression? Photo: Photo Researcher/AKG

On December 4, 1915, a ship left New Jersey. The goal of the trip was bold: to bring peace to a war-torn Europe. The project was financed by the US CEO Henry Ford. The Hungarian-born feminist-pacifist activist Rosika Schwimmer had convinced Ford that the European boys could be gotten “out of the trenches by Christmas”.

Ford, the anti-Semitic tycoon, and the Jewish idealist were an unusual combination. Nobody in Europe wanted to know anything about the ship. The mission ended in disaster.

After 1918, Rosika Schwimmer became stateless – outcast by the right-wing extremist Horthy regime in Hungary. In a letter from Vienna she wrote to a friend: “We are now really the eternal Jews who wander from one place to another without a home.” She went to the USA.

Her attempt to become a US citizen failed in 1926 because she refused to commit to defending her new homeland with weapons. She is just a citizen of the world. That was principled and unpragmatic. The fact that a fifty-year-old woman would have had to defend the USA with weapons was even more unlikely than the success of the peace mission in 1915.

Bright side of globalization

Schwimmer is an unsung heroine in Tara Zahra’s “Against the World”. She embodies the lively, cosmopolitan internationalism, the bright side of globalization in the early 20th century and, at the same time, the victims of the anti-globalist exclusion processes. At the beginning of the 1930s, the idea of ​​a legally regulated, peaceful world order seemed to have come to an end.

The US journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote from Berlin in 1931: “If you look at Europe, you have to admit that after twelve years of the League of Nations, the International Court of Justice, multilateral treaties and disarmament conferences, the world is turning away from the international view, packing up and going home “That sounds alarmingly familiar in view of Trump and AfD, Le Pen and Modi.

Zahra develops a multi-faceted, global view of time. The disputes were complex. The dividing line ran between universalism and particularism, aggressive economic globalization and equally aggressive isolation. The fronts were too intertwined to fit into catchy formulas such as “progressive globalization versus reactionary isolation”.

Openings and closings often crossed each other. The USA rose to become a global power after entering the war in 1917. At the same time, they isolated themselves at this very moment and brutally stopped the influx of migrants from Europe.

Non-reactionary isolation

Conversely, economic isolation did not necessarily have to be reactionary. In India in 1921, Gandhi burned foreign-made hats, coats, jackets and umbrellas, declaring this an act of purifying liberation “from the emblem of our enslavement.” Instead of buying products from the British colonial power, Indians should spin their own clothes.

However, these small-scale fabrics, called khadi, were more expensive and scratchier than the British imports. Gandhi declared the complaint about Khadi to be a luxury problem and self-sufficiency to be an emancipation.

Zahra sets off a firework display of stories, biographies and episodes. The author rushes through history in seven league boots, jumping from Henry Ford’s vision of combining car factories with farms, and thus home roots with industry, to the dispute in the Nazi movement about whether economic self-sufficiency was necessary. And from there to movements in Europe that sought alternatives to anonymous industrial cities and that ranged from fascist settlement projects to social reform garden cities.

All of this is told vividly, journalistically. But this accessibility comes at a price. Perhaps, given the disparate material, it is always more difficult to formulate syntheses for global history than for national history. In any case, the summary interpretation falls short here. As sparkling as “Against the World” reads, it sometimes leaves you wondering: What was the question again?

Unleashed market and the consequences

Using a 1944 quote from Karl Polanyi, Zahra delicately suggests that the rise of fascism was not a consequence of the First World War, but a reaction to the unleashed global market. No misunderstanding: It is foolish to misunderstand history as a provider of useful attitudes and morals.

But the question of whether the interplay between economic globalization and “Lets take back control” revanchism will be more understandable if we look back in 100 years would be obvious. Zahra, perhaps too fascinated by the steamy stories she unearths, too often leaves analytical comparisons unnoticed on the sidelines.