by Manlio Graziano
Gang of Anti-Globalists
The image was created using ChatGPT.
J.D. Vance, the vice president of the United States of America, recently summed up how he believes the “globalist economy” applies to his country in these terms: “We borrow money from the Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.”
Vance, we note incidentally, rarely lets an opportunity pass to insult someone, be it Europeans in general, or Danes, Ukrainians, the British army, Greenland or the Chinese in particular. He claims he is well within his rights to do so: in February, he tweeted that “insulting someone is not a crime,” and to think so is “Orwellian,” even “lunacy.” Trying to explain to Vance the gap between good manners and dystopian horror, or even between good manners and lunacy, is time wasted. We are entitled, however, to our suspicion that for him anything not matching his worldview – his and his fellow merrymakers – is “Orwellian” and “lunacy.”
What interests us here, however, is his conception of globalization. For it is largely there that lies the key to Trump’s electoral success and to the morbid obsession of the president and his clique with tariffs, seen as a necessary, if painful, “medicine” needed to cure the “disease” of globalization.
Vance, we note incidentally, rarely lets an opportunity pass to insult someone, be it Europeans in general, or Danes, Ukrainians, the British army, Greenland or the Chinese in particular. He claims he is well within his rights to do so: in February, he tweeted that “insulting someone is not a crime,” and to think so is “Orwellian,” even “lunacy.” Trying to explain to Vance the gap between good manners and dystopian horror, or even between good manners and lunacy, is time wasted. We are entitled, however, to our suspicion that for him anything not matching his worldview – his and his fellow merrymakers – is “Orwellian” and “lunacy.”
What interests us here, however, is his conception of globalization. For it is largely there that lies the key to Trump’s electoral success and to the morbid obsession of the president and his clique with tariffs, seen as a necessary, if painful, “medicine” needed to cure the “disease” of globalization.
Trump’s forerunners were the Seattle anti-globalization protesters of 1999, who are now finally seeing their hopes realized; some of them, by now gray-haired, may even have participated in the “Hands-Off” marches of April 5, without realizing that they were marching against their younger selves.
From the beginning, opponents of the free market have presented globalization as the result of someone’s deliberate will. The popularity of such a view is understandable: rather than toil to understand its complex mechanisms, it is easier to imagine that a group of ill-intentioned individuals sat around a table to hatch a treacherous plot aimed at shamelessly enriching themselves on the backs of others.
Such nefarious characters have been identified from time to time – whether as George Soros, the Trilateral Commission, Big Pharma, international finance, the Elders of Zion, the European Union … one could go on – there are candidates aplenty, enough to satisfy anybody’s obsessions.
If the consequences of such a worldview were not invariably catastrophic, one would almost smile: for years the Americans were seen as the architects of globalization; now, to listen to Vance and his comrades, it turns out that it was all part of a design to sabotage them.
What follows is a short note intended to facilitate the understanding of this phenomenon so despised by anti-globalists of every persuasion.
Let us begin by dispelling the myth: globalization is not born of someone’s perverse imagination or guilty greed; instead, it is the natural outcome of the mechanisms of our society. If one understands those mechanisms, one will find that capitalism and globalization are almost the same thing. It is no accident that, in their Manifesto (1847), Marx and Engels described the characteristics of the globalized world, as we have known it only since the 1980s, as if they had it before their eyes. Yet at the time, industrial capitalism – and its killer app, high productivity – had fully developed only in England and was just beginning to develop in the United States, France and a few German regions.
Capitalism and globalization are almost the same thing because capitalist development inevitably tends – as could be seen even in 1847 – to take over the whole world. The two are almost the same thing, but not the same thing.
Let us first see why capitalist development inevitably tends to conquer the whole world. Capitalism is called so simply because its function, its raison d’être, is to enrich the capital invested: anyone who invests capital X does so with the intention of making a profit X+1; absent this guarantee, or at least this hope, the investor would simply put his money under the mattress. Thus, capitalism works by growing capital, that is, wealth.
However, there is a downside: capitalism is anarchic, i.e., investors often go rogue: either they create new sectors, which will soon be flooded by other investors, or they invest in sectors already occupied by others, with the aim of destroying competitors, i.e., destroying wealth; and when markets become clogged or when the investment no longer enriches capital (X remains X) or even impoverishes it (X-1), a crisis ensues. Crises and wars are the reasons capitalism and globalization are not perfectly overlapping: during crises and wars, in fact, capital expansion slows or stops altogether.
A question then arises: if capitalism and globalization are almost the same thing, then why do we speak of specific and sharply delimited “phases” of globalization? Why was there a “first” globalization (conventionally defined as between 1870 and 1913) and a “second” globalization (1980-2008)? The answer is simple for the shorter period of 1913-1945, characterized by two world wars and the Great Depression, but less so for the period 1945-1980, characterized by the Japanese, German, Italian and French “economic miracles.” The answer: since 1980, development has rapidly accelerated on a global scale, ultimately turning the picture described by Marx and Engels in 1847 into reality.
What explains this acceleration? Put simply: the opening of Asia – particularly China – to investment. The recession of the mid-1970s hit the old industrialized countries hard, and saw the emergence of what were called the “NICs,” the newly industrialized countries: between 1973 and 1979, the combined GDPs of the United States, Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy grew by an average of 2.7 percent each year, while that of the “Asian tigers” (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) grew annually by 13.7 percent, more than five times faster. By the end of the decade, South Korea had become the world’s second-largest shipbuilder (after Japan), producing twice as much as Germany, three and a half times as much as Britain, and four times as much as the United States.
At that point, investors concentrated in the so-called “advanced” countries realized two things: 1) if they continued at the same pace, Asia would bury them; and 2) Asian development was an opportunity not to be missed. The wave of trade liberalization that followed led to the expansion of world commerce, which in turn stimulated production, and the increase in production further expanded world commerce. The “advanced” countries took advantage of the industrialization of the “backward” countries to embark on a large and hugely lucrative round of investment, while the “backward” countries took advantage of those investments to accelerate their own development, to move out of “backwardness” and, ultimately, to compete against the “advanced” ones.
Today it is fashionable to accuse Bill Clinton of opening the floodgates of globalization by co-opting China into the World Trade Organization (WTO), with the naive hope of “converting” Beijing to the rules written by Washington.
Yet, China joined the WTO not under Clinton but under the George W. Bush administration, and Beijing now complies with WTO rules more than the U.S. does. Moreover, through the 1990s, American investors had pressed Clinton to ease the sanctions imposed on Beijing after the Tiananmen massacre and to open the doors of China to them – firstly to go there to do juicy business themselves and, secondly, to prevent the Japanese and Europeans from doing the same.
What happened is summarized in the following two graphs:
From the beginning, opponents of the free market have presented globalization as the result of someone’s deliberate will. The popularity of such a view is understandable: rather than toil to understand its complex mechanisms, it is easier to imagine that a group of ill-intentioned individuals sat around a table to hatch a treacherous plot aimed at shamelessly enriching themselves on the backs of others.
Such nefarious characters have been identified from time to time – whether as George Soros, the Trilateral Commission, Big Pharma, international finance, the Elders of Zion, the European Union … one could go on – there are candidates aplenty, enough to satisfy anybody’s obsessions.
If the consequences of such a worldview were not invariably catastrophic, one would almost smile: for years the Americans were seen as the architects of globalization; now, to listen to Vance and his comrades, it turns out that it was all part of a design to sabotage them.
What follows is a short note intended to facilitate the understanding of this phenomenon so despised by anti-globalists of every persuasion.
Let us begin by dispelling the myth: globalization is not born of someone’s perverse imagination or guilty greed; instead, it is the natural outcome of the mechanisms of our society. If one understands those mechanisms, one will find that capitalism and globalization are almost the same thing. It is no accident that, in their Manifesto (1847), Marx and Engels described the characteristics of the globalized world, as we have known it only since the 1980s, as if they had it before their eyes. Yet at the time, industrial capitalism – and its killer app, high productivity – had fully developed only in England and was just beginning to develop in the United States, France and a few German regions.
Capitalism and globalization are almost the same thing because capitalist development inevitably tends – as could be seen even in 1847 – to take over the whole world. The two are almost the same thing, but not the same thing.
Let us first see why capitalist development inevitably tends to conquer the whole world. Capitalism is called so simply because its function, its raison d’être, is to enrich the capital invested: anyone who invests capital X does so with the intention of making a profit X+1; absent this guarantee, or at least this hope, the investor would simply put his money under the mattress. Thus, capitalism works by growing capital, that is, wealth.
However, there is a downside: capitalism is anarchic, i.e., investors often go rogue: either they create new sectors, which will soon be flooded by other investors, or they invest in sectors already occupied by others, with the aim of destroying competitors, i.e., destroying wealth; and when markets become clogged or when the investment no longer enriches capital (X remains X) or even impoverishes it (X-1), a crisis ensues. Crises and wars are the reasons capitalism and globalization are not perfectly overlapping: during crises and wars, in fact, capital expansion slows or stops altogether.
A question then arises: if capitalism and globalization are almost the same thing, then why do we speak of specific and sharply delimited “phases” of globalization? Why was there a “first” globalization (conventionally defined as between 1870 and 1913) and a “second” globalization (1980-2008)? The answer is simple for the shorter period of 1913-1945, characterized by two world wars and the Great Depression, but less so for the period 1945-1980, characterized by the Japanese, German, Italian and French “economic miracles.” The answer: since 1980, development has rapidly accelerated on a global scale, ultimately turning the picture described by Marx and Engels in 1847 into reality.
What explains this acceleration? Put simply: the opening of Asia – particularly China – to investment. The recession of the mid-1970s hit the old industrialized countries hard, and saw the emergence of what were called the “NICs,” the newly industrialized countries: between 1973 and 1979, the combined GDPs of the United States, Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy grew by an average of 2.7 percent each year, while that of the “Asian tigers” (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) grew annually by 13.7 percent, more than five times faster. By the end of the decade, South Korea had become the world’s second-largest shipbuilder (after Japan), producing twice as much as Germany, three and a half times as much as Britain, and four times as much as the United States.
At that point, investors concentrated in the so-called “advanced” countries realized two things: 1) if they continued at the same pace, Asia would bury them; and 2) Asian development was an opportunity not to be missed. The wave of trade liberalization that followed led to the expansion of world commerce, which in turn stimulated production, and the increase in production further expanded world commerce. The “advanced” countries took advantage of the industrialization of the “backward” countries to embark on a large and hugely lucrative round of investment, while the “backward” countries took advantage of those investments to accelerate their own development, to move out of “backwardness” and, ultimately, to compete against the “advanced” ones.
Today it is fashionable to accuse Bill Clinton of opening the floodgates of globalization by co-opting China into the World Trade Organization (WTO), with the naive hope of “converting” Beijing to the rules written by Washington.
Yet, China joined the WTO not under Clinton but under the George W. Bush administration, and Beijing now complies with WTO rules more than the U.S. does. Moreover, through the 1990s, American investors had pressed Clinton to ease the sanctions imposed on Beijing after the Tiananmen massacre and to open the doors of China to them – firstly to go there to do juicy business themselves and, secondly, to prevent the Japanese and Europeans from doing the same.
What happened is summarized in the following two graphs:
Source: World Trade Organization
Source: World Trade Organization
Apologists for capitalism argue that investors, although spurred by their private interest, accidentally act in the public interest: it is the “invisible hand” thesis. And indeed, during the golden phase of globalization (1980-2015), the “invisible hand” appeared to be hard at work: the percentage of the world’s population below the poverty line declined fourfold; world income per capita tripled; the literacy rate rose from 70 percent to 86 percent; the number of college students rose from 12.4 percent of the relevant age group to 36.9 percent; and finally – flowing from all the other figures – life expectancy rose worldwide from 62.8 to 71.8 years (and to 73.3 in 2024).
So why did those very years give rise to the anti-globalization movement? For two reasons, essentially. The first is that, in “advanced” countries, globalization has brought not only great wealth but a much larger sense of uncertainty and insecurity in the face of the future. The older industrialized countries were forced to increase their productivity to avoid being wiped out by competitors from the newly industrializing countries, where wages were much lower and social protections almost nonexistent. This has entailed deregulation in the older industrialized countries, sometimes to devastating effect: intensifying the pace of work, worsening working conditions and slowing or even reversing the wage growth: this has also brought greater industrial and financial concentration, an intense wave of relocations, reduced social benefits, etc. Big corporations were offered tax cuts in an effort to attract investments that had begun flowing toward the NIC eldorado. The anti-globalists living in “advanced” countries wanted to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The second reason is that, since the 1980s, the emerging economies have consistently had much higher growth rates than the old industrialized powers. Anti-globalists saw only the relative decline of their countries and ignored the sometimes dazzling growth of countries they used to label as “Third World” or “underdeveloped.”
The table below starts only from 2000, but the trend of this unequal development is obvious:
So why did those very years give rise to the anti-globalization movement? For two reasons, essentially. The first is that, in “advanced” countries, globalization has brought not only great wealth but a much larger sense of uncertainty and insecurity in the face of the future. The older industrialized countries were forced to increase their productivity to avoid being wiped out by competitors from the newly industrializing countries, where wages were much lower and social protections almost nonexistent. This has entailed deregulation in the older industrialized countries, sometimes to devastating effect: intensifying the pace of work, worsening working conditions and slowing or even reversing the wage growth: this has also brought greater industrial and financial concentration, an intense wave of relocations, reduced social benefits, etc. Big corporations were offered tax cuts in an effort to attract investments that had begun flowing toward the NIC eldorado. The anti-globalists living in “advanced” countries wanted to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The second reason is that, since the 1980s, the emerging economies have consistently had much higher growth rates than the old industrialized powers. Anti-globalists saw only the relative decline of their countries and ignored the sometimes dazzling growth of countries they used to label as “Third World” or “underdeveloped.”
The table below starts only from 2000, but the trend of this unequal development is obvious:
Comparison of real GDP growth in advanced economies, emerging market and developing economies (Mucha-Leszko, Kąkol and Angowska, 2022)
Note that despite this widening gap, “advanced” countries have not become impoverished in absolute terms: even as the polarization of wealth increased substantially, the per capita product between 1975 to 2015 of G7 countries doubled or nearly doubled.
It might be worth reminding Vice President Vance that the old industrialized powers, the United States among them, gradually de-industrialized because many of their investors, despite the lure of lower taxes, found it cheaper to produce where wages and social protections were lower: by de-industrializing, they produced less wealth and compensated by borrowing money “from Chinese peasants,” i.e., by running up debt. Between 1980 and 2015, the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy multiplied their public debt by more than three times, from an average of 38.3 percent of GDP in 1980 to 120.3 percent in 2015. The debt of the United States went from 31.8 percent of GDP in 1980 to 123.35 percent in 2024, almost four times as much (White House Office of Management and Budget data).
Stripped of its supposed Keynesian vocation to stimulate recovery, debt has now appeared, in its naked reality, as an electoral bargaining chip; and its steady increase has further weakened the competitiveness of the “advanced” countries against the “emerging” ones: in 2015, the public debt of the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy was, as mentioned, 120.3 percent of their GDP, while that of the “emerging” countries was 43.9 percent; in other words, the latter had almost three times more resources potentially directed to production.
Herein lies the dilemma: without the “Chinese peasants,” and thus without globalization, the “advanced” countries, the United States among them, would have been overwhelmed long ago; yet, with globalization they have themselves fed their competitors, or “systemic rivals” as they like to call them. While for decades they made golden deals, investing in the “Chinese peasants” while getting these latter to pay their debts, they are now staging a comedy that might be called The Great Snatching – and doing so to their own, and the world’s, detriment. Donald Trump, on his so-called Liberation Day, said he was acting to defend an America that had been “looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike.”
The big trouble for the United States, and indeed for the rest of the world, is that Donald Trump, JD Vance and the whole juvenile juggernaut in power in Washington really believes this.
It might be worth reminding Vice President Vance that the old industrialized powers, the United States among them, gradually de-industrialized because many of their investors, despite the lure of lower taxes, found it cheaper to produce where wages and social protections were lower: by de-industrializing, they produced less wealth and compensated by borrowing money “from Chinese peasants,” i.e., by running up debt. Between 1980 and 2015, the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy multiplied their public debt by more than three times, from an average of 38.3 percent of GDP in 1980 to 120.3 percent in 2015. The debt of the United States went from 31.8 percent of GDP in 1980 to 123.35 percent in 2024, almost four times as much (White House Office of Management and Budget data).
Stripped of its supposed Keynesian vocation to stimulate recovery, debt has now appeared, in its naked reality, as an electoral bargaining chip; and its steady increase has further weakened the competitiveness of the “advanced” countries against the “emerging” ones: in 2015, the public debt of the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy was, as mentioned, 120.3 percent of their GDP, while that of the “emerging” countries was 43.9 percent; in other words, the latter had almost three times more resources potentially directed to production.
Herein lies the dilemma: without the “Chinese peasants,” and thus without globalization, the “advanced” countries, the United States among them, would have been overwhelmed long ago; yet, with globalization they have themselves fed their competitors, or “systemic rivals” as they like to call them. While for decades they made golden deals, investing in the “Chinese peasants” while getting these latter to pay their debts, they are now staging a comedy that might be called The Great Snatching – and doing so to their own, and the world’s, detriment. Donald Trump, on his so-called Liberation Day, said he was acting to defend an America that had been “looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike.”
The big trouble for the United States, and indeed for the rest of the world, is that Donald Trump, JD Vance and the whole juvenile juggernaut in power in Washington really believes this.
The opinions expressed in this article are of the author alone. The Spykman Center provides a neutral and non-partisan platform to learn how to make geopolitical analysis. It acknowledges how diverse perspectives impact geopolitical analyses, without necessarily endorsing them.