• This article first appeared in French at Le Grand Continent
• This article is commentary as part of the Lloyd George Study Group on Global Governance. Learn more about the Study Group and its work.

“In foreign relations,” Walter Lippmann famously wrote, “a nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, its purposes within its means and its means equal to its purposes.” When nations fail to balance international commitments and national capabilities, Lippmann added, they “will follow a course that leads to disaster.” Foreign policy analysts often equate Lippmann’s means to military and economic capabilities, but as Lippmann himself argued, a country’s political “solvency” is often more critical to effective statecraft.

Today, Western democracies are suffering from a “Lippmann gap.” A large gulf has opened between Western governments’ internationalist ambitions and their publics’ willingness to support these. As we show in Geopolitics and Democracy, Western voters’ support for trade liberalization and multilateral cooperation has fallen by nearly half since the end of the Cold War, much of this coming before the 2008 global financial crisis. The pace and extent of this decline in public support for such liberal internationalist policies have varied across the West. Yet in one Western democracy after another, voters have turned increasingly to candidates and parties advocating fewer international ties.

Many factors contributed to the rise of anti-globalism, but two drivers were decisive: the end of the Cold War and the turn to neoliberalism. During the Cold War, geopolitical imperatives disciplined Western democracies, at once strengthening their commitment to the welfare state and marginalizing anti-globalist parties and factions. This all changed in the 1990s. Freed of great power conflict, Western leaders adopted new growth strategies. Liberalizing markets and rolling back social protections to promote globalization eroded manufacturing and created a climate of economic insecurity. As voters grew more vulnerable, they became increasingly receptive to anti-globalists promising greater economic safeguards and national autonomy.

Once a source of domestic cohesion, liberal internationalism has become a source of political fragmentation and weakness within the West. Early predictions that Western democracies’ unified response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine would break the anti-globalist fever have not borne out yet. In the past year, anti-globalists have made political inroads in France, Italy, Sweden, and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the possibility of a Trump restoration in the United States persists. Geopolitics alone cannot fix this problem. The West needs a different approach.

Then and Now 

In the postwar era, Western democracies struck a balance between foreign and domestic policy. In the standard telling of this story, Western leaders, having seen how unbridled market capitalism fueled extremism and anti-globalism in the interwar years, recognized that the best way to avoid a repetition of the downward spiral that led to depression and war was to allow governments a substantial degree of national economic autonomy and social protection in the domestic realm. This would cushion the market’s most disruptive effects while allowing industrialists, farmers, and workers to reap the rewards of trade. By taking the hard edge off capitalism, the postwar welfare state could strengthen support for liberal internationalism more broadly, among Western publics, and make competing anti-globalist strategies of nationalism and isolationism less attractive.

That Western leaders saw liberal internationalism and the welfare state as mutually supportive is clear. However, their commitment to the compromise between the market and social welfare known as “embedded liberalism” did not spring solely from the hard-learned lessons of the interwar years. As research on the relationship between the Cold War and the welfare state makes clear, it was also reinforced by Cold War imperatives. The East-West rivalry was an important factor stimulating the steady expansion of the welfare state. Whatever its merits as a social policy paradigm, Western leaders came to see full employment, social protection, collective bargaining, and ultimately civil rights in the United States as necessary concessions to a widening stratum of working-class voters that were needed to counter Soviet claims that communism was a “worker’s paradise.”

During the Cold War, geopolitics gave Western leaders and voters strong reason to support embedded liberalism. So did the practical realities of party politics. For most of the second half of the twentieth century, political parties had to build cross-class coalitions to win and hold onto power. This led center-left and center-right parties to reject extreme policy positions in favor of moderate ones. This was clearest in domestic policy, where Social Democrats dropped their insistence on nationalizing the economy and Conservatives accepted active government management of the economy in place of laissez-faire. In foreign policy, this meant striking a balance between international openness and social protection, and between institutionalized international cooperation and national sovereignty. International openness and multilateral institutions were needed to promote and sustain growth; social protection and domestic control over the economy were needed to ensure working-class voters’ support.

It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that this delicate balance between foreign and domestic policy began to break down. This is when Western leaders, led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, began “liberalizing” the liberal order. The balance between international openness and social protection shifted decisively in favor of markets in the 1990s. The Soviet collapse weakened a long-standing rationale for social protection: i.e., the need to offer working-class voters an alternative to state socialism and unrestrained capitalism. Parties on the center-left began softening their commitment to social protection, seeing markets as a way to make themselves more attractive to the most globalized (pro-globalization) sectors of industry and finance and younger, educated, middle-class voters who benefited from globalization.

Bill Clinton’s New Democratic agenda, Tony Blair’s “New Labour,” Lionel Jospin’s réalisme de gauche (left realism), and Gerhard Schröders’ “Agenda 2010” were cut from the same neoliberal cloth, and under the influence of globalization, driven by the same political imperative to make the center-left more market-friendly and competitive electorally. In effect, Western leaders on the center-left began abandoning a large part of their traditional working-class political base to win over younger, educated, middle-class voters. By one estimate, in 1980 center-left parties mobilized roughly twice as many working-class voters as middle-class voters. By 2010, the proportions were roughly the reverse.

Western leaders’ efforts to globalize the liberal order succeeded in expanding markets and the reach of multilateral institutions. But it also spurred political fragmentation within Western democracies. Political ideologies and alignments frozen by the bipolar Cold War conflict thawed. Foreign policy strategies sidelined and shunned by Western leaders during the long East-West struggle gained a new lease on political life. As popular fears of communist expansion receded, the political space opened up. At a time when Western governments were retrenching politically, working-class voters and members of the new precariat found a widening array of reasons to buck mainstream parties.

In response, anti-globalist parties on the far left and far right began to reinvent and reposition themselves. On the far left, parties such as Denmark’s Red-Green Alliance, France’s Communist Party, and Sweden’s Left Party combined traditional calls for trade protection, defense cuts, and disarmament with transnational issues such as social justice, climate change, and social regulation in hopes of winning over younger voters. On the far right, parties like Austria’s Freedom Party and France’s Front National, that once championed laissez-faire economic orthodoxy, embraced anti-globalism and social protection, hoping to broaden their appeal to the growing ranks of disenchanted working-class voters and structurally unemployed.

In the succeeding years, these parties actively used anti-globalism to mobilize voters in regions severely impacted by globalization and falling behind economically, and that were often critical to mainstream parties’ electoral success. In Greece and Spain, the left wing Syriza and Podemos capitalized on growing Euroscepticism in the wake of the 2008 financial crash and ensuing eurozone crisis. In 2016, Nigel Farage, the head of the UK Independence Party, fused anti-immigration and opposition to the EU to rally so-called “left behind” voters in England’s aging Rust Belt cities and towns. In 2017, France’s Marine Le Pen, the leader of FN, coupled the party’s long-standing opposition to mass immigration to a new “strategic plan for reindustrialization” aimed at French regions hard-hit by globalization.

Their efforts did not catapult anti-globalist parties into national government, but it did succeed in putting mainstream parties on the defensive and importantly, capturing a larger share of the national vote. Indeed, the more trade liberalization and supranationalism were debated, the more anti-globalist parties benefited, especially those on the far right. Our analysis shows that between 1990 and 2017 the far right’s share of the national vote in Western democracies tripled. As parties on the far left and far right have gained ground electorally, mainstream parties’ dominance in Western governing coalitions has weakened, and the process of putting them together and keeping them together has become increasingly more complex and taxing.

Anti-globalism is also driving change within mainstream parties themselves. As pressure from anti-globalists on the right has mounted, Conservative parties have become more nationalist and nativist, and in many cases more protectionist. On the center-left, Social Democrats, seeking to deflect pressure from those on the far left who see globalization as a “race to the bottom, have urged greater “harmonization” of welfare standards across Europe. In America, Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaigns used anti-globalism to appeal to white working- and middle-class voters who felt left behind by Washington’s overreliance on globalization.

Bridging the Gap

Can Western leaders break this downward cycle? Is it possible for Western governments to reconnect their foreign policies to recognizable benefits at home for working families? If Western governments hope to tame the anti-globalist passions roiling their societies, they must restore the balance between international openness and economic security. Trying to do this by turning inward and putting up walls is costly, and unnecessary. Anti-globalism is only partly about globalization. The crux of the problem is the failure of Western governments’ commitment to domestic economic security and inclusiveness to keep pace with globalization.

Trying to close the solvency gap by replaying the Cold War won’t work either. The nature of the Soviet challenge to the West was very different than the one China poses today. Throughout the Cold War, Western publics’ support for foreign policy depended critically on their governments’ commitment to economic security and welfare. Social protection was seen as a complement to fighting communism during the Cold War. In the absence of a renewed commitment to economic security and inclusive growth, playing the China card is unlikely to bring anti-globalists back into the fold.

At a time when the foreign policies of trade liberalization and multilateralism have fallen into disfavor, and the domestic coalitions associated with those foreign policies have splintered, leaders must find new arguments about the necessity of international openness and institutionalized cooperation. They must also forge new domestic bargains and political alliances to support them. Western democracies cannot return to postwar liberal order, but they can search for new ways of securing the benefits that the former order brought.

Such a strategy of renewal will require innovation in domestic growth regimes centering on strategic localization of productive activities, investment in human capital, quality-of-life supports, and environmental sustainability. Some of these processes are already underway. Yet given the depth of the anti-globalist backlash, far more is needed if Western democracies hope to close the solvency gap and put the West on a stronger footing to compete geopolitically. To paraphrase Lippmann, Western democracies’ international purposes need to once again be within their domestic means, and their means equal to their purposes.

• Featured image: Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash  
• Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the Lloyd George Study Group, USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.