Globalism, Nationalism, and Conservatism: A Long-read Q&A with Dalibor Rohac

In an era of nationalism in American politics, can globalists still make an effective case? What do international institutions like the UN and EU even do for America in the first place? And why is it worth preserving them — besides the fact that we set many of them up in the first place? AEI’s Dalibor Rohac joins the podcast to answer these questions and more.

Dalibor is a Resident Scholar at AEI, where he studies European political and economic trends. He is concurrently a visiting junior fellow at the Max Beloff Centre for the Study of Liberty at the University of Buckingham in the UK and a fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. Most recently, he is the author of In Defense of Globalism.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.

Pethokoukis: What’s wrong with America First? It seems pretty straightforward — I’m not going to have France First, or Europe First. So what’s wrong with America First as a general proposition?

Rohac: I suppose there’s nothing wrong with it as a general proposition. One question is, obviously, how US interests can be advanced in the world — especially in a world that’s globalized and interconnected. A world in which business activity is not confined to territories of particular nation states, but are spread out and decentralized.

In that world, I don’t think a policy that’s organized around nationalism, protectionism, and dismantling traditional alliances that the US has relied on will bring about results that are aligned with US interests.

But, in practice, all countries try to put their interests first, right? Have other countries been behaving in a way where they put their interests first in a way that we haven’t?

Well, I think there was a discontinuity in US foreign policy outlook at the end of the Second World War, in which a bipartisan consensus emerged in Washington about the nature of these long-term US interests. So everything that seemed to be immediately in the material US interests seemed was also aligned with these more enlightened interests.

Rather than having US troops continue to come to Europe’s rescue after two horrific World Wars, Americans decided to create this system of international, collective security that would prevent these conflicts from emerging in the first place. And that system, by and large, has been incredibly successful.

It went hand-in-hand with institutions that promoted economic openness and democracy, and they overall made the world a much better place. In the meantime, I think they were, by and large, good for America’s interests. They made the US the world’s uncontested leading superpower — they placed it in a position in which its leverage can be exercised in every corner of the world in a way that the world, guided by an America First mentality, wouldn’t have produced the same outcomes.

It seems to me that there are people who think that a globalist outlook has served America well, but no longer. They think that people who believe in globalism are stuck in the past — they refuse to acknowledge the changes. There’s no more Soviet Union, the US is facing new economic competitors, we have big trade deficits — so globalism is just a backwards-looking belief.

Then, there are people who believe that it maybe wasn’t such a success. All it got us was a bunch of hollowed-out communities in the Rust Belt, it got us the Iraq War, while all the other countries did very well — I think the President said, “Meanwhile, we’ve been bled dry.”

So either it’s backwards-looking and you’re refusing to acknowledge a brand new set of circumstances that requires a brand new point of view, or you’re just overstating how valuable it was to begin with. Just then, you made the case that globalism has been good for America, but what about those criticisms — that it got us into these more recent costly wars, and that we’ve ended up with 30 years of a declining manufacturing base while other countries have built up their capabilities?

I guess one could quibble about the particular propositions that your question encapsulated. I think, by and large, the idea that America today is worse off because of the US global leadership role is wrong.

That certainly seems to be the president’s position — that we’re worse off.

I’m not sure that if the rules of global trade were written by the Chinese, or if the WTO [World Trade Organization] didn’t exist, or if Europe was trapped in a power competition between large countries like they were in the past, that it would be conducive to better prospects for US workers or industry. So, I’m not convinced by that line of thought.

The line of thought that might be more compelling is the one which enquires about whether particular aspects of this system need updating.

That’s the Steve Bannon argument. He thinks, “Great, the world was in shambles after WWII, and we wanted those countries to catch up. We didn’t want those countries to have terrible economies and to all become Communist, we wanted them to become liberal, pro-American democracies. That’s great. Well, guess what? They caught up — and in some cases, maybe they’ve even surpassed us, so now we need to start thinking about ourselves.”

I think the President frequently says this, but sometimes the countries change: “We rebuilt China, we rebuilt this and that country — maybe it’s time we rebuild ourselves.”

The two are not mutually exclusive, right? You can have good domestic policies without jeopardizing your international position. But I would say that the world has certainly changed, and many of these institutions have not adapted to those changing circumstances.

There needs to be a conversation within the context of transatlantic relations with Europe about how that alliance should look — whether the US should be the sole guarantor of Europe’s security, whether the core of the relationship should not be oriented towards the new challenges coming from the rise of China rather than European security narrowly understood.

There also has to be, I think, a broader conversation about multilateral institutions.

Like the World Bank, the IMF [International Monetary Fund], and the WTO? Is that what you mean?

Right. So, those various institutions were created with certain mandates in the past. In many cases, they have outlived their original mandates.

The IMF was created to essentially manage the system of exchange rates after the Second World War. That system of exchange rates hasn’t existed for quite a few decades now. This means that some of these institutions have reinvented their mandates anew — some have drifted into irrelevance, and so this idea that we should probably look at them more closely and prune some of these aspects of the international architecture that aren’t fit for purpose anymore isn’t an offensive idea. But I don’t think that justifies a wholesale cynicism about the system, which really is a radical departure from what existed in the past. Overall, it’s something that’s served the US and the world well.

The book is called In Defense of Globalism. So, what do you believe that you think a nationalist doesn’t? What are the key differences in your worldview?

If you want to use President Trump as an example of nationalism, fine, but if there’s a more… sophisticated and nuanced version of it, then you can use that.

So obviously, there are various ways in which one can be a nationalist, and some of them are perhaps more compelling intellectually than others.

But the book has a twofold aim: The first is to push against the idea that nationalism in its various forms is an integral part of conservative or center-right thought. It is to push against the idea that this crude, narrowly-understood realism is the only way to think about global and international affairs from a center-right perspective. That’s really a position that’s been gaining traction and influence in center-right circles, especially in the English-speaking world and particularly America.

The second goal of the book is to point out that many of these international institutions, organizations, and the multilateral architecture that we can call “globalism,” if you will, is not some sort of top-down imposition created with the aim of dismantling or replacing the nation state. Rather, it is a bottom-up evolution aimed at fixing particular policy challenges that have emerged. I think it has implications about how we should think about these systems.

There is an obsession with national sovereignty on the political right, which has become rather unhealthy as of late, and which leads people to ideologically-driven, knee-jerk refusal to even engage with policy challenges that arise at the international level. That could be climate change, or various questions of sustaining trade openness or financial stability.

How do you think about sovereignty compared to someone who calls themselves a nationalist? You’re not arguing for the dissolution of the nation state, so you believe in sovereignty to some degree. How do you think about it, versus how do you think a nationalist thinks about it?

Sovereignty is a tricky word, because it carries slightly different meanings for different people. One understanding of sovereignty is the traditional Westphalian sense, in which you have states that see each other as equals. It’s sovereignty as an international norm, in the way that states treat each other. Clearly, international cooperation has not eroded sovereignty in that sense. You still have, mostly, governments that enter into various international obligations and treat themselves as equals in those structures.

Westphalian sovereignty, by the way, is not an absolute norm. It is always conditioned on the way governments treat their own citizens. I could find you some quotes in the book coming from people like [conservative South Carolina Senator] Jesse Helms and others who dismiss the idea that sovereignty entitled Slobodan Milosevic to ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. Actually, sovereignty arguments are often invoked by authoritarian governments to essentially justify whatever they’re doing to their own population. So this is an argument that I think, in the past, has been summarily rejected by people on the political right for good reasons. It’s not really an argument that would jeopardize any possibility for international cooperation and creating international institutions.

There is one way of thinking about sovereignty, especially among US conservatives, which does present a challenge for international cooperation. If you understand sovereignty through the lenses of self-governance and US constitutional order, there are a number of technical challenges that arise when the United States joins international treaties, organizations, or delegates decision-making to international bodies. People like Jeremy Rabkin or John Yoo at AEI have written about those subjects extensively, but these challenges are not materially different from the broader set of tensions that arise in US constitutional law with regard to the way we govern ourselves at home.

Federalism as practiced today looks very different today than the way it was envisaged by the Founding Fathers. The executive branch has taken on much more power, and congress has abdicated some of its responsibilities. So to say that it’s international cooperation and institutions that somehow pose a distinct threat to US constitutional order is not very compelling to me.

This is part of a much broader story that different countries have resolved in different ways. In Germany, you just pass a constitutional amendment every time you need to do something, particularly regarding the process of European integration. So many constitutional amendments have been adopted by European countries — it’s harder in the US, which I think is why some of these tensions arise. But these are not tensions limited to international questions, but to the US systems of governance more broadly.

Let me ask the question in a different way: What are globalist approaches or policies that you would advocate for that, as you understand it, a nationalist would say, “I disagree with that,” and vice versa? Is it just trade, or is it about American troops stationed overseas? What are the salient differences?

I suppose one way to answer that questions would be to say that these two understandings of sovereignty — whether it’s the Westphalian one or the one that arises from questions of US constitutional law — are probably not what animate most people and turn them nationalist.

I think that what people perceive sometimes at the very intuitive, perhaps emotional level, is that the sovereignty they understand is the ability to control things, policy outcomes, or various features of economic and social life. I think there’s a naïve idea that, “If only we repatriated powers, we could somehow gather better control of things. We could perhaps return to some sort of nostalgic version of what the imagined 1950s look like.” I think that’s very much the animus behind the Brexit movement, and I think it explains a lot of the appeal that president Trump had in his campaign.

That instinct is mistaken — this sense of control is simply not on the menu in a world as complex and interconnected as ours. Efforts to repatriate control — like how the British are trying to do with Brexit — might paradoxically result in less control and reduce these countries into positions as rule-takers. It’s just very difficult to disentangle a country from the globalized world by trying to withdraw from these various institutions.

I think that’s the big distinction — I as a globalist, so to speak, accept that these institutions exist for a reason. Although we can quibble over the details, and maybe seek to exit from some aspects of the system, there is no going back without imposing dramatic economic costs on the population or resigning on any kind of control over policy outcomes.

What do you understand the nationalist agenda to be? Is it dramatically reducing immigration, or much more protectionist trade policy?

What do you sense is the key element — bringing all of the troops home, and not worrying about it unless enemy ships start landing at Virginia Beach? Not caring about what goes on in other countries — that we shouldn’t care about the Uighurs because it’s not our business? “We’re there to make a trade deal, why should we care about Hong Kong?”

What is the agenda, as you understand it, and what about it do you reject?

The question really reveals how multilayered this problem is. Obviously, for some of the supporters, if not with some of the movers and shakers in the nationalist movement, it is about things like migration and domestic demographics of the US or Western Europe. It’s much less about trade agreements or alliances.

For others, it’s about these technical questions of constitutional law and how these countries govern themselves. But what I think unites these approaches is the rejection of the idea that countries and nation states should be able to pool sovereignty and decision-making and create common structures that potentially constrain the discretion that the elected officials in these nation states posse.

I think it’s an idea that’s actually a striking departure from what has been the baseline of classical liberal thought for many years, even in conservative Catholic thought in Europe in the early 20th century. For them, the nation state was perceived — I think rightly so — not as a God-given fact, but simply as a result of the processes of unification that occurred in the 19th century.

So for example: The Catholic Personalists, this Catholic social thought movement in the early part of the 20th century, were very explicit in rejecting the sort of Jacobinic nature of the nation state as a centralizing entity.

This is something I’m trying to explain to Americans — part of the European condition has to do with trying to reconcile diversity and unity. The European continent lived through a millennium and a half of efforts to secure coexistence for a great number of highly decentralized political units. The best answer that the thinkers on the conservative, classically liberal center-right was able to come up with was some version of international federalism.

That notion is reflected in the architecture of the EU to some extent, but it’s also reflected more broadly in the institutions that the US helped to set up after the Second World War.

I’m guessing that a lot of people who might call themselves nationalists are ultimately wondering about what America continues to get from this.

Again, the Soviet Union is gone — that’s why there were troops in Europe, so why do we still have troops there? What are we getting from these trade deals?

Maybe I’m misstating your views, but I guess they don’t see what America is getting from this perspective. We’re already the richest country in the world, and we don’t seem to have any immediate threats. Again, this seems to be an architecture built for an earlier era. So how does globalism need to update itself for a new era, in a way that people will see as relevant?

I think it needs to update, but at the same time it’s pretty obvious to me that an international trading system in which countries are mostly held to high standards in terms of economic openness and nondiscrimination is one that also benefits US exporters and companies that have been doing business overseas and that rely on very complicated value chains. Apple products are being built all over the world.

I think that nationalists would like to bring those supply chains back to the United States. They’d like all of these products to be made here. If you listen to the president, it almost sounds as if all American products should be manufactured in the United States. And, if you want to sell to the United States, other countries should manufacture their products here as well.

I think it’s a fundamental misunderstanding, not just of how international trade but also modern business models operate. So, maybe it was the case 100 years ago that you had companies operating as ‘boxes” combined to the territory of one state, and they would purchase the inputs, capital, and labor, and they’d produce something. Shoes, or cars, or something. Those would then get exported. But that’s nothing like what corporations and value chains look like these days.

You have thousands of intermediate products and suppliers stepping in at every point of the way. I think there are over 1000 suppliers that Boeing uses to build the Dreamliner plane. Car manufacturers in the US and Europe constantly ship intermediate parts back and forth, and that’s made the world so prosperous.

I think a lot of nationalists would say that it’s made some people prosperous — that it’s made companies and executives very prosperous. But there’s a question as to whether or not it’s continuing to work for the United States.

I don’t see why not. I’m not an expert in US manufacturing, but my understanding is that the US economy is in far better shape than it was 50 years ago.

I don’t think the nationalists believe that’s the case. They believe that we were prosperous in the 1950s and 60s. But then we opened ourselves up to more trade, plus we started getting a lot more immigrants, and it’s been downhill ever since.

To me, I don’t know if that’s the smart nationalist take, but it seems that that’s the common one — that we started worrying too much about the welfare of people in other countries. We were going to let them come here, because if you’re an immigrant, you come to the United States and you’re immediately better off if you’re coming from a poorer country. We worried a lot about those people and about these other countries, and now we just need to worry about the United States.

Is there a smarter nationalist take that I’m missing?

I’m not sure, but I think that’s contradicted by heaps of evidence about US real incomes, longevity, et cetera. On any metric, the US is a far better society than it was 50 years ago. I think that the nostalgia simply misplaced.

But if there is a grain of truth to that, it probably has to do with the fact that maybe there could’ve been domestic policies that could’ve worked differently in terms of the social safety net and helping people move between jobs and geographic locations.

This book is kind of aimed towards people on the center-right.

Yes.

What do you want those people to know, where they might be getting things about nationalism and globalism wrong? What’s the core thing you want them to understand going forward?

If there’s just one message, it really has to do with the fact that, for all the problems we’ve seen over the past 20 years — whether it’s the Iraq War, or the financial crisis, or the European migration crisis in 2015, or indeed the high numbers of asylum seekers coming to the United States — by and large, this system built internationally under US leadership after the War has served the United States, the West at large, and the world in general extremely well.

It used to be a central tenet of conservatism to tinker with things that mostly work very, very carefully, and I think that prudence has gone out the window in recent years. There’s this almost revolutionary zeal to dismantle or destroy existing institutions without having anything remotely resembling a strategy about how they should be replaced. And I’d like to revive that sense of prudence in center-right circles.

There’s a lot at stake. There are conflicts around the world that can come back easily — there are things that are done under the flag of bringing our troops back home, for example, that have massively destabilizing repercussions. I’m talking about what happened in northern Syria recently, right? I mean, these are things that the next administration will have to deal with that will cost, maybe, a lot in terms of US lives — and treasure, as well.

I would just like to see more prudent thinking on many of these decisions.

Last question: An America that withdraws from the world, with the “drawbridge up” approach, what does that world end up looking like? With an America that doesn’t exercise leadership — “We’re just one country among many. We’re going to take care of our own. We’re not going to worry about this conflict over here, or about what’s happening to those people in that country. We’re not going to let them migrate.” What does that world look like a decade or two later?

I think it’s a world that is much less attuned to US interests. It would be a world that’s much less friendly to whatever voters in the Midwest care about.

If you have these vacuums created in different parts of the world, you have ruthless powers stepping in and filling those voids. So I firmly believe that part of responsible leadership with America right now is to work with America allies in France and in countries with whom the United States share values and broad outlooks on governance and markets, and help to remake the world. Not necessarily in our image, but in a way that’s aligned with American interests. That’s true for trade, and that’s true for security questions.

The idea that the US can just tackle the China challenge on its own is, I think, a naïve one. The EU is the world’s largest economy with over 500 million consumers. So even if you see China as the one major challenge that maybe Trump has correctly identified and brought attention to, the idea that the US can do it alone is very naïve.

Dalibor, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thanks, Jim.