Economic Nationalism is Suicide

"The ongoing melodrama of the Brexit negotiations has lived up to its billing as one of the great shit-shows of our time. But the whole tragicomic affair has shown us the clear political premium of nationalist ideas today: Both UKIP’s Nigel Farage and certain socialist contributors to Jacobin magazine share a basically national definition of sovereignty, and so too of democracy. Both sides accept the assumption that withdrawing from the European Union is the way to rejuvenate democracy. Both right-wing “Brexit” and left-wing “Lexit” presume the national state to be the only possible terrain of genuine self-rule.

Sensing the wind blowing toward a broader neo-nationalist revival, the thought leaders of the American center-left call for a similar recovery of national democratic integrity against the failures of globalization. Recent years have seen a cascade of earnest center-left think pieces pleading for an inclusive, responsiblenationalism from the likes of John Judis, Noam Gidron, and Yascha Mounk, among others. Hillary Clinton, in her recent remarks that Europe must “curb immigration to stop the alt-right,” offered an instructive example of how the “vital center” drifts toward the very thing it claims to abhor: to beat the right, simply ape the right.

Further to the left of these luminaries lurks a persistent belief that bold, large-scale redistributive programs require globalization to be somehow “rolled back.” This line of thinking implies that some form of disengagement or “decoupling” from the world market is necessary. Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect, for instance, plainly calls for a left-wing form of economic nationalism based on the blueprint of the postwar Bretton Woods order, while othersmake the full case for economic nationalism as the road to socialism.

These writers insist that imposing strict capital controls at the national level is distinct from the racialized, xenophobic nationalism we’re seeing today, what with its closed borders and hostility to immigrants, the undocumented, and people of color. The left case for economic nationalism can be aptly distilled in a phrase: closed borders for money, not for people.

In fact, the idea that one could build a wall against capital while avoiding a crackdown on the free movement of people is a fundamental premise in the case for economic nationalism as the road to social democracy, or even socialism. But the flows of people and capital are actually closely connected; often, one implies the other. The only way forward for the left, then, lies through globalization, not in an atavistic resurrected nationalist identity.

All of the forces energizing the current, worldwide turn toward nationalist politics are flowing from the same, deep source: the declining dynamism, steadily eroding productivity, and deepening stagnation of the specific form of capitalist growth that has organized global society, both culturally and institutionally, for the last 40 years. For decades, workers were told by the “experts” that despite the ravages of deindustrialization, more markets, more competition, and more “free trade” would eventually deliver higher living standards for all. This narrative accompanied the deepening economic interdependence of the world’s countries, who since the late 1970s were woven ever more closely together through cross-border flows of capital investment and the spread of transnational supply chains. And for some time, neoliberal globalization did benefit millions in the world’s developing countries. . ."

https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-nationalism-brexit-trump-globalization/