The Emergence of Globalism

Abstract

During and after World War II, public intellectuals in Britain and the United States grappled with concerns about the future of democracy, the prospects of liberty, and the decline of the imperial system. Without using the term “globalization,” they identified a shift toward technological, economic, cultural, and political interconnectedness and developed a “globalist” ideology to reflect this new postwar reality. This book examines the competing visions of world order that shaped these debates and led to the development of globalism as a modern political concept. Shedding critical light on this neglected chapter in the history of political thought, the book describes how a transnational network of globalist thinkers emerged from the traumas of war and expatriation in the 1940s and how their ideas drew widely from political philosophy, geopolitics, economics, imperial thought, constitutional law, theology, and philosophy of science. The book presents compelling portraits of Raymond Aron, Owen Lattimore, Lionel Robbins, Barbara Wootton, Friedrich Hayek, Lionel Curtis, Richard McKeon, Michael Polanyi, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Maritain, Reinhold Niebuhr, H. G. Wells, and others. It shows how the globalist debate they embarked on sought to balance the tensions between a growing recognition of pluralism on the one hand and an appreciation of the unity of humankind on the other.

Problematising the Global in Global IR

“…105 Building on intellectual biographies, she not only disputes the standard IR narrative about a succession from Wilsonian idealism to Realism but also shows a 'complex and nonlinear genealogy of globalism in mid-century visions of world order'. 106 The globalisms she reconstructs do not comprise unified ideological frameworks but rather 'a growing sensitivity to a particular dimension of politics', which Rosenboim defines as global, that is, 'a perspective on politics, a sometimes abstract space that was modified, redefined, and challenged in lively transnational conversations'. 107 The rise of this global perspective not only served as an alternative to empire but also reflected a growing concern for the future of democracy and the idea of a pluralistic world order.…”

Darkness and Light in a Global Political Economy

“…We appear to have forgotten that not too long ago others tried to clear an imaginative space in between utopian dreams and realist dogma. Rosenboim (2017) provides a timely, if admittedly Eurocentric, reminder of a serious conceptual and empirical project well advanced during the inter-war years, before expectations of a stable American imperium preempted it. Although she does not label them practitioners of IPE, it is not hard to see the project's pioneers as progenitors of our field in its initial trans-Atlantic phase.…”

Transnational partisan networks and constituent power in the EU

“…From this, it is only a short step to the kind of anti‐Protestantism that conceives the boundaries of Europe as congruent with Europe's Catholic countries, not to mention the tendency to assert the primacy of Catholicism over non‐Christian religions (Forlenza, , pp. 272–273; Rosenboim, , pp. 252–257).…”