The far-right in modern world history

ABSTRACT

It is commonly assumed that far-right populist and nationalist movements and parties emerge within, and in reaction to, liberal international orders. This paper challenges that assumption. It shows that, while the rise of the far-right in interwar Europe and in recent decades in the Global North occurred during periods characterized by globalization, it was a globalization that was essentially anti-liberal in nature. During both periods, globalization was shaped, not by a liberal, competitive ethos, but by conservative and counter-revolutionary values and ideologies, and by policies which worked to ‘dis-embed’ local economies, promote concentration and monopoly, and widen inequality. Far-right politics emerged, therefore, in reaction, not to liberalism, but to established conservative parties which appeared either unable or unwilling to suppress pressures from ‘below’ and as, therefore, too weak or corrupt to ensure the continuation of conservative policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Globalization
• counter-revolution
• far-right movements
• liberalism
• conservatism

Introduction

The recent rise of far-right politics in the Global North is often associated with the rise of far-right movements and parties in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. There are a number of similarities between recent events and those of this earlier period. As in the earlier period, they are occurring in a situation in which large segments of local populations are experiencing socio-economic insecurity and cultural anxiety; and in which elites, committed to continuing the policies and doctrines which helped to generate these symptoms of disorder, are promoting racism and nationalism as a bulwark against class-based ideologies and politics. Drawing on conservative values and ideologies that have long been ‘in the air’, they are actively promoting a culture of rage and violence about the gains achieved by minorities and immigrants and the loss of status, security and future prospects this supposedly represents for groups that feel ‘left behind’. In both periods, they emerged from within, and in reaction to, established conservative parties; but contemptuous of the perceived corruption and failures of these parties, they introduce new forms of mobilization and participation which combine electoral politics with the politics of violence in the streets.¹

Many scholars assume that, both during the interwar period and today, far-right politics emerged in reaction to liberal international orders and to the processes of globalization associated with them. This is misleading. While it is true that the far-right emerged following periods of accelerated globalization, the notion that the rise of far-right politics occurs within and in reaction to liberal international orders assumes, wrongly, that a globalizing international order is a liberal one.

This paper argues that both periods were characterized by the acceleration of an essentially illiberal globalization that was pursued as a means of avoiding redistribution and reform at home, and driven by counter-revolutionary policies that began, or escalated, the ‘dis-embedding’ of local economies and militant pursuit of markets abroad. It argues that far-right movements emerged, not only within essentially conservative international orders, but in reaction to conservative parties which appeared unable to suppress the pressures from ‘below’ that these orders generated. To clarify what might distinguish a (relatively more) liberal international order from a (relatively more) illiberal one, we can contrast these two periods with the immediate post-World War II decades. During these decades local markets were ‘re-embedded’ in (what became as a result) the ‘Global North’ through Keynesian policies which ensured that the movement of people and goods across borders served the expansion and integration of national markets, supported an overall system of welfare and higher wages at home, and generated a relatively more balanced and internally oriented development.² However, this period came to an end with the ‘neo-liberal’ turn in the 1970s which, following what appeared to be a global revolution in 1968, accelerated processes of globalization that worked to ‘dis-embed’ national economies once again and re-instate key aspects of the pre-world war international order.³

The following sections explore the role of revolution and counter-revolution in shaping the nineteenth century and post-World War II international orders. It first discusses how doctrines of counter-revolution – formulated during the French Revolution and, thereafter, associated with European conservatism – shaped the development of domestic economies and the nature of the international order throughout the ‘long nineteenth century’ (1789–1914). Continuing the discussion of this period, it then focuses on how crises generated by the counter-revolutionary economic expansion of this period (the great depression and agricultural decline of 1873–1896) set the stage for the emergence of a more extreme, far-right, form of counter-revolutionary politics. It then draws parallels between this history and the tensions which, following the 1968 global evolutions and the neo-liberal turn in the late 1970s, led to the rise of far right politics in the post-World War II period.

Revolution and counter-revolution in the nineteenth century

In the eighteenth century, Europe and other parts of the world were characterized by ‘moral economies’. Karl Polanyi called these embedded economies because local markets were governed by principles of economic behaviour that were embedded in society and inextricably related to underlying social relations.⁴ In the eighteenth century, and alongside the expansion of international trade, these economies supported the growth of production for local mass consumption and the gradual expansion of local markets.⁵ The proportion of Britain’s industrial output consumed at home – four-fifths at the beginning of the century – was still about two-thirds at the end of it (Cole, 1981, p. 39). The ratio of exports to GNP for the British economy over the eighteenth century was about 8.4% in 1700, growing to 14.6% in 1760 (falling to 9.4% in 1780) and then increasing to about 15.7% in 1801 (Engerman, 1994; see, also, Cole, 1981, p. 38). Thus, the value of Britain’s home trade was also far greater than its foreign trade in the eighteenth century (Ashton, 1955, p. 63).

In fact, during the eighteenth century, England’s breakthrough in production was equalled by one of home consumption. Britain’s industrial output quadrupled during the century, and the bulk of this output was mass consumption goods. In fact, in Britain ‘a greater proportion of the population than in any previous society in human history’ was able ‘to enjoy the pleasures of buying consumer goods’ and ‘not only necessities, but decencies, and even luxuries’ (McKendrick et al., 1982, p. 29). However, despite the growth of the domestic market, and the fact that at the end of the Napoleonic Wars abundant opportunities remained for investment and the expansion of production for home consumption, in the nineteenth century, Britain’s ‘moral economy’ was dismantled and the home market ceased to play a major role in its industrialization. To understand why, we need to look more closely at the struggle that was culminating at that time over the costs and benefits of industrial capitalism.

Europe’s ‘embedded’ or, ‘moral’ economies had been founded on the ideal that the ruler's legitimacy was bound to the well-being of all his subjects and that elite power and privileges must therefore be limited to protect the welfare of ordinary local people.⁶ Guided by this ideal, ‘absolutist’ states in England,⁷ France, and elsewhere in Europe regulated markets in order to protect the local population against monopoly and speculation, shortages and high prices. While it is commonly assumed that opponents of absolutism were motivated by a concern for a variety of freedoms, what they sought, above all, was freedom from rules and regulations which ensured fair prices and practices at home.⁸

Along with demands to deregulate markets there was a clamour to end the state’s role in the provision of welfare. In the sixteenth century, and in line with a Europe-wide movement, the government of England had launched a campaign to eliminate poverty, and to set up new institutions for poor relief and a system of hospitals to provide medical care for paupers. By 1700, England had a national welfare system.⁹ France also established a nation-wide welfare system in the eighteenth century (Lis & Soly, 1979, pp. 200–209). By 1770, Prussia had introduced measures establishing a cradle-to-grave welfare system that guaranteed every Prussian subject adequate food, sanitation, and police protection.¹⁰

Poor rates were universal in England. There, and in Wales, they provided pensions for the old, widowed, and disabled; relief for the ill and unemployed, casual payments to the able-bodied poor; and shoes, shirts, bread, fuel, lodging, medical aid, stocks of flax or wool to spin, spinning wheels or other work tools, and apprenticeships for children. During the first half of the eighteenth century, ‘expenditure on the poor doubled in real terms’, and continued to rise until the 1780s in order to meet most living expenses (Slack, 1990, pp. 32–33); and. by the end of the century, very large sums, by large, well-funded subscription charities, charity schools and hospitals, and hundreds of ‘friendly societies’, were being transferred to the poor on top of the rates (Slack, 1990, p. 52). Due to the expansion of long-distance trade during the century, competition for labour had increased and, as it did, wages rose and labourers were able ‘to take on less work and spend more time at leisure without endangering their traditional standard of living’ (Gillis, 1983, p. 41). In addition, in economies based on local markets and face-to-face relations between seller and consumer, workers were able to exercise power, not only as labourers but as consumers, as well.

An aggressive campaign emerged by the 1770s with the aim of eliminating price and wage controls and labour protections, ending the state’s role in the provision of welfare, and privatizing new sources and means of producing wealth. In France, this led to state-instituted changes which worked increasingly to ‘dis-embed’ local markets and which triggered the recurring rounds of bread riots, peasant revolts, and urban strike activity that, in 1789, culminated in the French Revolution.

Global factors contributed to the tensions leading to the Revolution. Among these were France’s global commercial empire and involvement in international capital markets, the transformation of the French economy ‘as a result of the tremendous wealth generated by France’s Caribbean colonies in particular’, and ‘France’s financial crisis in the 1780s, which had its roots in large part in the country’s Atlantic engagements, especially in the War of American Independence’.¹¹ In addition, ideas circulating throughout the Atlantic world, particularly with reference to colonial rights and slavery and abolition, also played an integral part, both in the events leading to the Revolution’ (Popkin, 2011, p. 221) and in the ‘explosion of political thought and activity that occurred after 1789’ (Dubois, 2006, pp. 6–7), including the ‘revolutionary preoccupation with “the rights of man.”’¹²

If the origins of the Revolution were global, so too were its consequences. Between 1789 and 1848, ‘governments ‘shook and fell, not only in France and all across Europe, but in the Middle East and China’.¹³ Anti-colonial and anti-slavery uprisings in the Caribbean and Latin America sent shock waves throughout the Caribbean and the Americas and led to the independence of Latin America. The Haitian Revolution culminated, in 1804, with the establishment of the first black republic in the world. Threats to class structures and, with the liquidation of the white population in Haiti in 1804, to racial hierarchies and white supremacy, were to preoccupy elites throughout the ‘long nineteenth century’. Thus, perhaps the most important outcome of the Revolution and the events which followed, was to instil in the minds of an increasingly global network of elites a deathly fear of revolution, and to set in motion, everywhere, more than a century of counter-revolution. The counter-revolution began by dismantling the last vestiges of Europe’s ‘moral economies’ and launching a counter-revolutionary reorganization of production and economic life which completed the ‘dis-embedding’ of local markets and accelerated the globalization of capital.

The counter-revolutionary nineteenth century

There is a tendency to associate the disembedding of markets and globalization with liberalism. But throughout the nineteenth century globalization was essentially conservative and counter-revolutionary. It began with the dismantling of regulations that had tied production and investment to local economies and that had ensured fair practices and prices in local markets; and it proceeded through a militant pursuit of markets abroad that enabled elites to expand production while, at the same time, avoiding pressures for redistribution and reform at home.¹⁴

The association of nineteenth-century globalization with liberal forces and ideologies is based on an erroneous assumption about the evolution of class power in Europe. In both Liberal and Marxist theory, it is assumed that a new, industrial capitalist bourgeoisie emerged together with a new capitalist mode of production and played a revolutionary part in social and economic development by demolishing outworn institutions and replacing them by new institutions to meet the needs of capital. The expansion of industrial production and of trade in the eighteenth century consolidated the dominance, not of new liberal industrial interests, but of the older and more conservative sectors of Europe’s wealth structure.¹⁵ Liberalism, it is assumed, became the ideology of the new industrial capitalist bourgeoisie in its endeavour to supplant and replace the traditional dominant class.

However, liberalism was still ‘an obscure and marginal category’ during the 1820s and 1830s; and though usage proliferated during the second half of the century, ‘it remained closely tied to the creed of the newly named Liberal Party’ (Bell, 2014, p. 693). Until the 1930s, it remained ‘a term for a party ideology rather than a name for principles of constitutional liberty and representative government’ (Bell, 2014, p. 700). A 1935 study noted that ‘liberalism has meant in practice things so different as to be opposed to one another’ (Dewey, 1935, p. 3; quoted in Bell, 2014, p. 702). But in 1937, a new liberal narrative was introduced by George Sabine in ‘one of the first major scholarly texts to discuss liberalism in any detail’. With this change in meaning, liberalism was located ‘squarely in nineteenth-century Britain, figuring it as a distinct position between socialism and conservatism’.¹⁶

There was also a decisive disjuncture between the articulation of liberal principles by the rising industrial bourgeoisie, and support for their embodiment in concrete policies and deeds:¹⁷ for while in most European countries rising commercial classes demanded a bigger share of power they did not, nor did they seek to, overthrow and replace the old ruling class. After 1848, there was a fusion of these classes, but one in which Europe’s ‘traditional’ landowning and aristocratic elite remained dominant. Liberalism thereafter became explicitly linked with the interests of the propertied classes: the defense of the institution of private property, the suppression of labour and, above all, resistance to the pressure of the lower classes for a democratic system.¹⁸ Consequently, in practice, it was often difficult to tell the difference between conservatism and liberalism. Up until the period of the world wars, the traditional aristocracy in Europe retained its wealth and power and played the dominant role in industrial capitalist development. It absorbed and dominated new wealthy elements and imposed their standards of behaviour on them. As a result, European development in the nineteenth century was shaped, not by a liberal, competitive ethos, but by monopoly and by rural, pre-industrial, feudal, and autocratic structures of power and authority.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the British state remained an ‘administration of notables’ (Weber, 1978, II, 974); the social composition of Parliament remained the same throughout the century (Thompson, 1963, p. 276); and. until 1905, every British cabinet, whether Conservative or Liberal, was dominated by the traditional landed elite, with the brief exceptions of the Liberal ministries of 1892–5 (Thomas, 1939, p. 4). Agriculture remained the largest branch of Britain’s economy in employment terms until 1901; and until 1914, non-industrial Britain easily outvoted industrial Britain (Hobsbawm, 1968, pp. 195–96). In 1914, industrialists still ‘were not sufficiently organized to formulate broad policies or exert more than occasional influence over the direction of national affairs’ (Boyce, 1987, p. 8).

Between 1868 and 1886 – that is, under Gladstone’s premiership – two-thirds of the 49 cabinet members were either from landowning families or from families closely linked with the aristocracy in the church, the services, and diplomacy. In 1924, at least half the cabinet were landowners; and’ in 1937’ the proportion of landowning and aristocratic elements was not much less (Cannadine, 1990, p. 207). Thus, despite the emphasis placed on liberal free market ideology and the establishment of a new liberal international order, protectionism, rather than free trade, characterized the nineteenth century, under both Liberal and Conservative governments; and mercantile policies and doctrines continued to predominate in Europe throughout the century.¹⁹ It was not until the 1860s that Britain repealed the Navigation Laws and Usury Laws and abolished restrictions on exports and all but a few duties on imports; and, after 1879 the protectionist trend continued until 1914. The period 1860–1879 represents the only free trade interlude in an otherwise protectionist century. Throughout this period, monopoly continued to dominate in the large plantations, large trading companies, transnational corporations, and state enterprises that formed the basis of networks of transnational, cross-regional exchange. Even in Britain, the supposed home of the free market, the ‘internationalism’ of Britain’s gentlemanly financiers, bankers and foreign investors was essentially protectionist and monopolistic, and monopolies dominated the agricultural, industrial, and financial sectors right through the first half of the twentieth century.²⁰

The greatest achievements of British liberalism are generally considered to have been the reforms undertaken by Liberal Party governments during William Gladstone’s four premierships;²¹ and, perhaps, chief among these was the Third Reform Bill of 1884. The first Reform of 1832, undertaken in the face of massive rural uprisings, extended the franchise to a larger number of the rich by increasing the number of voters from 435,000 to 652,000. The Second Reform Bill in 1867 further increased the electorate by about 400,000, leaving five out of six adult males, and by far the greater part of the working class, voteless. Gladstone’s Third Reform Bill of 1884 granted most of the male population the vote, in principle: but complications and limitations in the registration procedures which were biased against the working class meant that, though 88% of the adult male population should have qualified to vote in 1911, less than 30% of the total adult population of the U.K. was actually able to vote (Rueschemeyer et al., 1992, p. 97). In sum, despite extensions of the suffrage, under both Liberal and Conservative governments, Britain still had a severely limited form of representative government which excluded the great majority of adults from participation.

Three ideologies emerged from the French Revolutionary period: conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. But it was conservative ideologies which proved most influential, and which had the most decisive impact on the nineteenth-century European and international political economies. After 1815, formal ideologies that had emerged and had been elaborated by theorists as ‘a mode of counter-revolutionary practice’ (Robin, 2018, p. 17) during the French Revolution and ensuing upheavals, became associated with conservative ideologies and parties’. Thereafter, they became ‘as much a permanent part of the … European political tradition as the Revolution itself’ (Roberts, 1990, p. 113), and ‘the breviary of counter-revolutionaries in all western countries until the … doctrines inspired by fascism’ (Godechot, 1971, p. x).

Europe emerged into its first century of industrial capitalism from the crucible of the Great War. A quarter century of war and revolutionary turmoil had made clear the central dilemma for dominant groups tempted by the possibilities of great profits from the expansion of production: how to mobilize–train, educate and, in other ways, empower–labour while, at the same time, maintaining the basic relation of capitalism, i.e. the subordination of labour to capital. Many analogies were drawn between the mass army of soldiers created in the Great War and the mass industrial army of workers needed for industrial capitalist production. At the same time, the socialism born in the French Revolution with its focus on eradicating private property – something dominant classes had achieved through a century or more of struggle – seemed, in combination with the revolutionary ferment unleashed by the war, to threaten an anti-capitalist revolt of the masses. This was the context within which elites throughout Europe undertook to mobilize labour for industrial production. Consequently, among the counter-revolutionary ideas that emerged at that time from Conservatives, like Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre, was the need ‘for the slowest possible pace of change’ (Wallerstein, 1989, p. 45; my emphasis).

Whether directly influenced by these ideas or not, elites generally choose, everywhere, to very slowly and selectively introduce mechanization and use methods of production that deskilled workers and kept labour, as a whole, fragmented and poorly paid; and to expand production principally for export to foreign ruling groups or areas of ‘new’ settlement abroad,²² rather than for local markets. They introduced new forms of dominating and putting to work the lower classes based, not on a revolutionary transformation of means of production and increase in relative surplus value production, but on a counter-revolutionary increase in absolute surplus value production. Increasing relative surplus value involves increasing the productivity of labour; while increasing absolute surplus value involves increasing the duration or intensity of labour. Either one supplies more products in a given day. But the former holds certain disadvantages: it requires skilled workers, and it causes no change in the value of labour power (or in the magnitude of surplus value) unless the industries affected produce articles habitually consumed by workers. Consequently methods of absolute surplus value production predominated in Europe far longer than is generally recognized. In most sectors of European economies, technological improvement came late, and only under pressure of military competition and war; workers were unskilled and wages remained low (see Halperin, 2014, chapter 3). Mechanization and skilled labour were restricted to sectors producing for export, leaving masses of unskilled labour ‘in reserve’ and the overall market position of labour weak.

The exchange of capital goods and manufactured articles (for building railways, docks, and other infrastructural needs) for raw materials and, in particular, cheap food (which enabled Europeans to avoid land and other reforms at home), by developing and linking together export sectors around the world, enriched elites while leaving traditional social structures largely intact. Both in Europe and other regions this created what dependency theorists have described as ‘dualistic’ economies: modern sectors producing sometimes as much as half of the income of the local economy and affecting only small segments of the indigenous population. The development of mass purchasing power, not at home but among foreign groups and ruling bodies through loans and investment in infrastructure, railroads and armament enabled elites, whether in colonies, former colonies, or states that had never been colonies, to consolidate and maintain their power and become wealthy by building railways and ports and developing mines and raw materials exports. Similar structures – export platforms, foreign-oriented enclaves – emerged which, together with repressive labour policies at home, ensured that the benefits of expanding production would be retained solely by the property-owning classes. The financial centre of this globalizing international order was the City of London, which like the advanced sector of a ‘dependent’ third world economy worked to build strong linkages between British export industries and foreign economies, rather than to integrate various parts of the domestic economy.

Polarization

Conceptions of class and of class structure can be highly differentiated or more simplified and abstract, depending on the context. Distinctions within classes on the basis of sector, status, gender, and race may be important for exploring some contexts and kinds of problems while, for others, ‘it is appropriate to use a much more abstract, simplified class concept, revolving around the central polarized class relation of capitalism: capitalists and workers’ (Wright, 1999, p. 2).

Within the circumstances of nineteenth century Europe and, specifically, the revolutionary currents unleashed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, European society became increasingly polarized along class lines until it effectively generated a two-class structure. First, there was an aggregate of people who occupied the upper rungs of the economic ladder. While there were different ‘fractions’ within the dominant class,²³ the social conflicts that became endemic throughout Europe after 1815 brought about a unity among them²⁴ so that landowners, industrialists, and bankers, which, in other circumstances, analysts might treat as separate classes, united and their unity assumed a definite political expression. While landed and industrial capital in Britain clashed over the Corn Laws, they remained united in a struggle to prevent labour from achieving any significant political and economic power. Similarly, conflicts between large and small landowners, between monopolistic and competitive business, between liberal bourgeois and reactionary feudal overlords, and between domestic and foreign interests, became subsumed within the larger conflict situation. The traditional elite was successful in accommodating, absorbing, and dominating new wealthy elements largely because these elements did not form a counter-elite to challenge it but sought only to join it (Guttsman, 1954, p. 22). Thus, at the end of the nineteenth century, ‘[a] certain amount of new wine had been poured into old bottles, and the bottles had not cracked’ (Thompson, 1977, p. 37).

Within this class structure there was, second, an aggregate of those who produced surplus value from a subordinate position in terms of production functions, income, and status, represented by the institutions of the working class.²⁵ Following the 1848 revolutions, Europe became increasingly polarized between conservatives and liberals, on the one hand, and all socialistic and working class elements, on the other. Working class activism evoked a more or less similar response from the dominant class: whether to the demand for an eight-hour day, a living wage, universal and equal suffrage, or the overthrow of capitalist property relations, the response of this class was swift, absolute, and uncompromising.²⁶ For, however it is defined, and however varied the circumstances of its formation and the characteristics of its organization, the working class constituted the only significant challenge to the power of the dominant class. Thus, while conflict between these two classes was not the only conflict within nineteenth-century European society, it was the most far-reaching and important.

Landowners and industrialists monopolized gains from domestic industry and international trade through tariffs and other controls, and through cartels, syndicates and corporatist arrangements that provided them with privileged access to the state and all the resources at its command. At the same time, states brutally repressed labour organization and prevented the mass of the population from gaining significant institutionalized economic, social or political power. They denied workers the right to bargain, bound them by long and inflexible contracts, made them liable to imprisonment for breach of employment, and ensured that wage levels would be determined, not by market forces or through collective bargaining, but by employers.

The great depression and agricultural decline of 1873–1896

It is generally assumed that the character of capitalist development began to change when the Great Depression of 1873–1896 brought about a shift from internationalism and free trade to protectionism and trading blocs. With the deterioration of agricultural conditions and slowdown in world production, industry became increasingly penetrated by monopoly and protection. Tariff walls were raised throughout Europe and the foundation of the modern cartel movement were laid. But, as was discussed in the previous section, monopoly and concentration characterized the entirety of the ‘long nineteenth century’; and, except for the period 1860–1875, so did protectionism. Thus developments after 1873 represented a change, not in the character of nineteenth-century capitalist development, but in the scope and forms of monopoly and restriction.

What made this period a crucial turning point in the ‘long nineteenth century’. was the groundswell of social conflict throughout the world. In rural areas there was an explosive rise of violence which proved increasingly difficult to keep in check by repression and emigration;²⁷ in urban areas, hungry and disenfranchized populations fuelled a rising ‘red tide’ of radicals and socialists of various sorts, dissenters, trade unionists, and suppressed national minorities. The emergence of mass socialist working-class parties, the explosive rise in strike activity around the world, and the consolidation of ‘a global radical culture’, marked these decades as the beginning of the era of mass politics. With the press covering these activities all around the world, and the spread of periodicals, newspapers, books and pamphlets that were accessible to the masses, people all over the world were simultaneously reading about ‘important political victories by socialist parties, workers’ strikes, trials of anarchists, a variety of militant social movements and radical activities’, and ‘debates about social reform, wealth redistribution and mass education’, all of which ‘served to universalize their own contexts and localize the global’ (Khuri-Makdisi, 2013, p. 32).

Within this rising red tide, elites became preoccupied, not only with the threat to class structures: there was an escalation of fears concerning the maintenance of racial hierarchies, as well.

Alliances of European and non-Western workers were widespread, particularly in trade unions, in all the large cities of the world (Orr, 1966, p. 89), raising fears on the part of elites about the maintenance of racial differentiation and hierarchy. Colonial states and foreign companies had actively opposed cooperation among European and indigenous workers, as well as inter-racial mixing among workers. However, despite these efforts, European employees, found in all the large cities of the world, cooperated with indigenous workers in trade unions.²⁸ The union of European plantation employees in the Dutch Indies supported indigenous protests, railway strikes, and nationalist organizations (Stoler, 1989, p. 145); and multiracial trade unions were formed in Java in the 1920s (Ingelson, 1981, p. 55; in Stoler, 1989, p. 138). Europeans formed and led the first African or mixed trade unions in most of the African territories where there was a European working class (Orr, 1966, p. 89). In 1908, a racially mixed tram workers’ union was organized in Cairo; and government workers in Egypt, South Africa, the French African territories, and the Belgian Congo, organized unions that frequently had a mixed membership (Orr, 1966, p. 78).

As a result of this period of crisis, the fusion of the landowning and industrial classes, which had accelerated as a result of the 1848 revolutions, was completed. European societies became further polarized between conservatives and liberals, on the one hand, and all leftist and working class elements, on the other. Following the depression of the 1870s, and increasingly during the 1880s and the 1890s, there was a general movement by landowners to spread their assets by investing in and developing industry and entering the professions, the most enterprising and successful members of the merchant class were lifted into the aristocracy. These gravitated to the land and there assumed the privileges and authority of nobles (Montagu, 1970, p. 170, Cannadine, 1990, p. 250). The dominant class thus became an ‘active symbiosis of two social strata, one of which supported the other economically but was in turn supported by the other politically’ (Schumpeter, 1947, p. 136–137).

During this period there had been a sharp increase, not only in monopoly and restriction, but also of imperialist rivalry; and, by the beginning of the twentieth century Europe itself had become the focus of imperialist rivalries. For the first time in a century, ruling elites were faced with the possibility of a major war in Europe and the need for mass mobilization – precisely what a century of overseas imperialist expansion had enabled them to prevent. The mobilization of masses – in the context of the mass politics that had emerged during the crisis of 1873–96 – to fight for a system that had generated increasingly divisive social conflict triggered a social revolution that began in 1917 and, thereafter, swept through all of Europe.

Reaction

Following the end of the 1914 war, European economies were plagued by widespread and persistent unemployment and an unprecedented degree of contraction (Landes, 1969, pp. 390–391). The Great Depression, which emerged during the interwar years and which eventually engulfed all of Europe except the Soviet Union, increased the gap between the rich and the poor: but it failed to steer European governments off the course they had charted for the previous 150 years. Instead, and despite the profound dislocations that had resulted from the war, governments moved to re-establish monopoly capitalism and carry forward pre-war trends towards industrial concentration through various forms of corporatism. Corporatist structures and regimes were established in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway Sweden, Germany, France, Austria, Portugal, Spain, Poland, Croatia, and Slovenia. As societies throughout Europe became increasingly polarized, governments suspended parliaments and outlawed opposition parties, censored the press and limited assemblies. In Hungary (1919), Italy (1922), Portugal (1926), the Balkan countries (1923, 1926, 1929), the Baltic states (1926), Poland (1926), Belgium (1926, 1935), Germany (1934), Austria (1934), the Netherlands (1935), Switzerland (1935), and Spain (1936), parliamentary democracy was destroyed.

The far-right movements and parties, including various forms of fascism, which emerged in Europe during these years built on features of conservative politics – the illiberal, racist and religiously intolerant nationalism which conservatives had promoted to displace class narratives,²⁹ and their opposition to democracy, liberalism, and party politics – that had characterized European societies since the French Revolution. These fundamentals of conservatism had been upheld throughout the ‘long nineteenth century’ by the various structures that had served as a bulwark against reformers and revolutionaries. Among these was the Roman Catholic Church which, as one historian described it, was one of ‘the greatest international organization of that or any other day’ (Petrie, 1944, p. 165). Throughout the century, the Church had forcefully condemned reform and revolution, liberalism and the liberal state, the separation of Church and State, and freedom of conscience and of books; and its call for a return to medieval Christian principles (Rerum Novarum) had defined a clerico-corporatist social order that, during the interwar years, came to be reflected in the corporatist regimes and structures that emerged throughout Europe (see, e.g. Berghahn, 1988; Elbow, 1953).

Far-right and fascist movements came to power with the help of the Church,³⁰ and with financial and political support from other elements of traditional society, including capitalists and conservatives, who favoured a politics which supported the existing social order and big business, and sought to crush left-wing organizations³¹ including large landowners and industrialists who increasingly feared the pressure of land-hungry peasants and the growth of proletarian radicalism, and middle classes who feared the threat to their property from socialist appropriation. These fears tended to drive all of Europe's relatively privileged or well-to-do groups and elements into one anti-revolutionary coalition. The conditions in which the masses lived made this fear well founded; but no efforts were made to remove the sources of mass misery because wealth owners were unwilling to make the sacrifice of wealth and privilege which this would entail. Eventually, a fascist revolution was launched which, drawing on core elements of European conservatism, aimed to preserve the very policies that had generated these conditions. Fascism, as George Mosse (1999) pointed out, was a political and cultural revolution rather than social and economic one. The political revolution sought to establish ‘permanent nationalistic one-party authoritarianism’ and transform politics’ into ‘a continuous spectacle’; the cultural revolution was aimed at gaining mass support, through racial and nationalist appeals, for one-party rule as the only means of regenerating national greatness and restoring the national social order (Gentile, 2004, p. 335, 339).

This mass support was sought and rendered at a time in which the organizational power and social prestige of working classes had increased as a result of the massive wartime mobilizations for World War I. But at a time in which conservative politics ensured that economies would remain restricted and offer limited opportunities, the gains achieved by working classes were perceived as representing a loss of status and security, and future prospects, for other classes (Carsten, 1976, pp. 420–25). The emergence of fascism, of a ‘resurgent, ultra-conservative and militant right’ (Mayer, 1969, p. 4), spoke to the rage of those who felt ‘left behind’, had lost confidence in the ability of conservative parties to preserve their status and economic security, and were hostile to an’ internationalism’ – a globalizing international order – that had delivered benefits solely to elites. Fascist movements also drew heavily on those who felt ‘left out’: returning soldiers who were alienated by conservatives who had lied, led them into war, and betrayed the nation, as well as a class of urban workers, who were not members of socialist parties or trade unions. These movements offered these groups a ‘shared world-view’ which restored their dignity and ended their alienation by uniting them with others who were ‘part of the Volk, the race, or nation’ (Mosse, 1966, p. 19).

In the context of societies which had become increasingly polarized between a newly-powerful left and a resurgent far right, governments and ruling groups attempted to actively aid and abet the re-armament and expansion of Germany as a bulwark against Bolshevism (see Anievas, 2011; Halperin, 2004), and it was this that led directly to World War II. The mobilization of masses of workers for a second, and even more destructive, European war led to the collapse of the system after the war and, having further shifted the balance of class power, made its restoration impossible (at least for a time).

After the war, economies in the Global North were transformed through the adoption of social democratic policies that had previously been strenuously and often violently resisted. As Schumpeter observed:

The business class has accepted gadgets of regulation and new fiscal burdens, a mere fraction of which it would have felt to be unbearable fifty years ago … And it does not matter whether the business class accepts this new situation or not. The power of labor is almost strong enough in itself … to prevent any reversal which goes beyond an occasional scaling off of rough edges (1950/1976, pp. 419–20).

States adopted social democratic and Keynesian goals and policy instruments that made investment and production serve the expansion and integration of national markets. Wages rose with profits, making higher mass consumption possible for new mass consumer goods industries. This more balanced and internally oriented development brought to an end – for a time – the intense social conflicts and great movements of colonialism and imperialism that had characterized the long nineteenth century.³²

The re-assertion of counter-revolution in the Global North

The resurgence of far-right politics in the Global North occurred following the ‘neo-liberal’ turn that began in the late 1970s and the subsequent 30-year elite consensus which maintained it.³³

After World War II, the countries of the Global North had experienced a period of dynamic growth characterized by an increase in the power of working classes relative to that of other classes, a relatively more nationally ‘embedded’ capitalism, the development of purchasing power among a mass domestic citizen workforce that made possible new mass consumer goods industries and the extension and integration of domestic markets, a more equitable distribution of income, and the resumption by states of the welfare and regulatory functions that they had relinquished at the end of the eighteenth century. However, conservative counter-revolutionary values and ideologies remained active in (1) the ‘Cold War’ campaign by governments, in both the Global North and Global South, against, not only Communists and Socialists, but often against groups calling for democracy and land reform, including liberal, left-of-centre, and other reformist groups and movements; and (2) ‘development’ initiatives which restored or created, in the Global South, a narrow range of foreign-oriented interests and contributed to the weakening of trade unions, farmers and fishermen’s associations, and other worker’s associations.

In the US, a liberal order was established by a set of reforms called the ‘New Deal.’ However, in the 1960s, a number of pressures combined to weaken the coalition of interest groups and voting blocs whose support had maintained it. Beginning in 1964 the US government, desperate to prevail in its war in Viet Nam (1955–1975), had raised a mass conscript army. Like Europe’s experience as a result of World War I, this mass mobilization politicized and radicalized large numbers of people and unleashed powerful pressures to extend and expand civil rights. The New Deal coalition had been forged, in part, on the basis of a North–South agreement to maintain the racial status quo. But when the civil rights movement began weakening support for this agreement, wealthy southerners fled the Democratic Party (which had supported the new Deal) for the Republican Party (which had not) and, by sowing fear and racism, succeeded in bringing a majority of white Southerners with them. These pressures were compounded by others. US industry had few competitors after World War II; so when higher wages were conceded as part of the Keynesian/Fordist compromise underpinning the New Deal, these could be paid for by higher prices. By the 1960s, however, competition from Europe and Japan had begun to act as a constraint on pricing and was narrowing profit margins – just at the time that labour militancy and political radicalism, triggered by mass conscription for the Viet Nam war, made reducing wages politically untenable. US capitalists, caught in a profit squeeze by competition abroad and labour militancy at home (mirroring the dilemma of nineteenth-century industrialists), pressed for policies that would reverse the settlements that had tied capital to the development of national communities and enable them to escape the implications of the Keynesian/Fordist compromise in a ‘sealed-off domestic context’ (van der Pijl, 1998, p. 119).

By 1968, similar pressures had emerged around the world. That year, a series of uprisings and demonstrations, aimed at expanding the social revolution that had occurred in the course of the world wars, combined to produce what appeared to be a world revolution (Wallerstein, 2006, p. 84). These events marked a turning point in the post-World War II order. Within a few years, governments had introduced policies that denationalized capital throughout the Global North and laid the foundations for a rapid return to core features of the pre-World War II international political economy. In 1978, the U.S. introduced far-reaching measures of deregulation that began a process of dis-embedding its economy and the UK began to move in the same direction in 1979. Similar changes took place in the 1980s in France, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and in other OECD countries and the European Community. A drastic, ‘shock therapy’ version of these policies in ‘second world’ countries quickly reinstated monopoly capitalist structures that had characterized their economies before the world wars. Among the features of the pre-World War II international political economy that re-emerged was the seemingly ‘paradoxical relationship’ between (neo-) mercantilism and (neo-) liberalism (McMichael, 2019, p. 1), the guarantee of international, as opposed to national, property rights, the use of direct or indirect imperialism to maintain them and extend the reach of capital through tearing down barriers erected by national governments,³⁴ and a colossal wave of capital exports.

U.S. capital exports after World War II, which had been relatively small,³⁵ had supported an overall system of welfare, income equality, and higher wages at home. But those associated with the ‘neo-liberal’ globalization that began in the late 1970s were essentially anti-liberal in nature: part of an overall shift that involved downsizing work forces and resetting corporate activity ‘at ever lower levels of output and employment’ (Williams et al., 1989, p. 292). Large firms tended increasingly to buy existing assets through mergers and acquisitions rather than to build new ones to avoid the creation of new capacity.³⁶ This prevented glut and falling profit and, by augmenting the power of large firms (Nitzan, 2001, p. 241) generated increasing concentration and monopoly.

Building on neo-liberal policies and ideas, key organizations of the ‘liberal’ international order – the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organization – promoted policies that helped to roll back European and American social democracies. Along with these changes came a return to the methods of absolute surplus value production that had characterized Europe’s nineteenth century expansion: intensifying work regimes, reducing real wages; cutting health, pension, and social safety net protections; and eroding job security by restructuring employment away from full-time and secure employment into part-time and insecure work. By the early 1990s, the deregulation of industry and markets, abandonment of exchange controls, privatization of state assets, and curtailment of welfare functions, had produced growing inequality, rising poverty, and widespread homelessness.³⁷

In 1994, following a series of crises, and with growing pressures from ‘below’, far-right elements within the Republican Party launched a revolution. Like the Fascist revolution of the interwar years, this was a political and cultural, rather than social and economic, revolution. Its political aim was to subvert democratic institutions and ensure a permanent Republican majority by capturing state legislatures, re-drawing congressional districts, and passing voter suppression legislation targeting non-whites. Its cultural aim was to win voters over to authoritarianism by building on the Republican Party’s so-called ‘Southern Strategy’ which, beginning in the late 1960s, had sought to capture white working-class and other Americans who felt threatened by the demographic and cultural expansion of non-whites.

This revolution went into high drive following the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Obama’s election, and the 15 million new voters that helped to elect him, seemed to portend a new Democratic supermajority in the U.S. Senate. In response, the Republican Party launched a ‘Redistricting Majority Project’ with the aim of winning key swing-state legislatures in 2010 and, thus, controlling the decennial redistricting that follows the census. This project succeeded in returning Republican majorities to state legislatures in these critical states, and these majorities then proceeded to redraw congressional district maps so as to pack as many Black and Democratic voters into as few districts as possible’.³⁸ This redistricting, combined with on-going voter suppression legislation, created what would become the Trump ‘base’ of older white conservative voters who, despite their decreasing numbers in the general population, were now able to elect candidates for state and national office, including Tea Party ‘revolutionaries’, alt-right ideologues, white nationalists, and conspiracy theorists. During the remaining six years of the Obama Administration, there was an increasingly aggressive populist-nationalist campaign that sought to wed conservative economic policies to white nationalism, focus resentment arising from neo-liberal policies onto non-whites and immigrants, and encourage anti-democratic sentiment by promoting the idea that whites were losing power due to a widening electorate of newly-enfranchised or –empowered groups (workers, minorities, immigrants) and the demands of women, workers, homosexuals, and immigrants.

Unlike the interwar years, the gains achieved by working classes after World War II had occurred in the context of expanding domestic economies and middle classes. But by 2008, labour had been experiencing wage stagnation and rising debt levels for two decades, and deflation had increased the value of debt while decreasing the ability of debtors to pay it back.

There had been dozens of financial crises in the 1990s and 2000s, but these were dwarfed by the 2007–2008 financial crisis. Operating within the constraints of a 30-year long neo-liberal elite consensus, the Obama Administration responded to this crisis by stabilizing and restoring the financial institutions that had been responsible for the crisis. As in the interwar period elites, facing continuing pressures from ‘losers’ in the globalizing international order, promoted a culture of resentment and fear about the gains being pursued by minorities and immigrants and the loss of status, security, and future prospects, this supposedly represented for the ‘master race’. This, coupled with ‘the tormenting symbolism of a black president and the greater visibility of black and brown faces in the culture industries’, helped to turn a large white constituency in the U.S. against the Republican establishment (Robin, 2018, p. 243). As in the interwar period, the failure of established parties to suppress pressures from below triggered the rise of a far-right which built on elements of conservatism that were already ‘in the air’: the prosecution of the Cold War at home, persistent hostility to the New Deal and ‘defense of slavery and Jim Crow’ (Robin, 2018, p. 39), as well as opposition to the labour movement, civil rights, feminism, and gay rights.³⁹

Conclusions

This paper has endeavoured to situate the rise of far-right politics within the longue durée of conservative politics focusing in particular on key deflection points within ‘the long-nineteenth century’ (1789–1914) and the post-World War II era: the rising global ‘red tide’ during the great depression of 1873–1896, and the 1968 global revolutions. These pressures succeeded in uniting liberals and conservatives around policies that moved political and economic structures further to the right.

The context in which far-right populist movements emerged after the 1870s and 1970s, and the configuration of class power and interests that shaped that context, were broadly similar. They emerged within globalizing international orders that had become increasingly anti-liberal in nature, characterized by mergers and acquisitions rather than an expansion of productive capacity, and by widening inequalities. This trend was either preceded by or the outcome of a number of developments. The first was the occurrence of crises which were caused by war, depression, recession, and/or narrowing opportunities for the expansion of capital; and which seemed, in combination with increasing, and potentially revolutionary, pressures from ‘below’, to threaten fundamental aspects of the capitalist order. Second, elites of all major parties responded to these pressures by uniting around policies which moved economies further to the right and worked to intensify challenges from below. Finally, conservative elements launched a ‘revolution’ which sought to preserve their power by undermining democratic institutions and incorporating into this revolution elements of the population who were experiencing economic insecurity as a result of anti-liberal globalization.

The globalization that characterized both periods was driven by conservative and counter-revolutionary values and doctrines. The Great Depression that began in the 1870s had accelerated the rise of a global ‘red tide’ and, in response, elites had united around policies which, by increasing monopoly, restriction and inequality, intensified pressures from ‘below’. This triggered the rise of far-right movements that aimed to preserve and make permanent the policies that had generated these tensions through corporatist and fascist institutions that consolidated monopoly and privilege and restricted (or destroyed) parliamentary democracy. In the immediate post-World War II decades, liberal policies introduced in the Global North supported the expansion of domestic markets, a more balanced and internally-oriented development, rising wages, and the growth of middle classes. However, the revolutionary events of 1968 – triggered by war and demands for the extension of civil rights – began a ‘turn’ that brought about a return to features associated with the pre-war international economy. This culminated in the crisis of 2008. In the U.S., and with millions of Americans losing their jobs, savings and homes, the Obama administration moved to stabilize and preserve the financial system that had generated the crisis; and, in the face of growing pressures from below, conservatives launched an aggressive culture war and assault on democratic institutions.

In sum, far-right politics, both in Europe during the interwar years and after the 1970s, emerged during periods characterized by the acceleration of an essentially illiberal, counter-revolutionary globalization that, over the course of decades, worked to restrict local markets and economic opportunities, exacerbate inequality, and polarize societies. In the face of increasing pressures from ‘below’, and the failure of established conservative parties to contain them, elites sought to preserve conservative and free-market policies through hyper-nationalist and racist appeals to those who felt ‘left behind’ and ‘left out’ by established parties, and through an assault on democratic institutions.

While it is often assumed that far-right politics emerge within, and in reaction to, liberal international orders, the history of modern world politics suggests that this assumption is misleading. The international orders within which far-right politics emerged, both during the interwar years and the 1970s, were characterized by processes of globalization. But this was a globalization driven by policies that worked to ‘dis-embed’ national markets and disadvantage large segments of local populations. In the history of capitalism, there have been periods in which the globalization of capital has expanded national markets and supported an overall system of welfare and higher wages at home, and periods in which it has worked to dis-embed local markets and increase inequalities. The embedding, disembedding, and re-embedding of economies are part of a political struggle over the distribution of costs and benefits of industrial capitalism that began with the deregulation and reorganization of economic relationships at the end of the eighteenth century. It is a struggle that continues today. A closer reading of this struggle, and of the nature of state and international structures that have been shaped by it, may offer important insights into the forces at work in the rise (once again) of far-right movements and parties and the changes that are needed to send them back into retreat.

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Notes on contributors

Sandra Halperin

Sandra Halperin is Professor Emerita of International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her main research areas include global development, the historical sociology of global relations, the causes and conditions of war and peace, and Middle East politics. She is the author of three cross-regional and trans-historical comparative studies: In the mirror of the third world: Capitalist development in modern Europe (Cornell, 1997), War and social change in modern Europe: The great transformation revisited (Cambridge, 2004); and Re-envisioning global development: A ‘horizontal’ perspective (Routledge, 2014). She is also co-author (with Oliver Heath) of Political research: Methods and practical skills (Oxford, 2012, 2016), and author of articles on globalization, development theory, historical sociology, nationalism, ethnic conflict, Islam, and democracy in the Middle East.

Notes

1 Other similarities include their rejection of conventionality and promotion of the use of uniforms (shirts, hats), chants, rituals, and rallies (Linz, 1976, pp. 12–13); the attack on ‘fake news’ which, as Timothy Snyder notes, ‘echoes the Nazi smear Lügenpresse (“lying press”)’; referring to reporters as ‘enemies of the people’, and attempting to replace the ‘pluralism of the newspaper’ with the radio or, today, with Twitter (Snyder, 2021).

2 John Ruggie (1982) saw the ‘embedding’ of local markets after World War II, combined with the continued existence of a liberal international order, as a ‘hybrid system’, which he called ‘embedded liberalism’. The terms ‘embedded’ and disembedded’ are discussed in the next section.

3 The agenda of neo-Liberalism, which sees itself as the heir to liberalism – the dominant economic doctrine of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – is clearly of ‘nineteenth-century vintage’; and though it portrays its policies as ‘new’, and as necessary to meet the challenges of a ‘new’ global world, these policies as Ha-Joon Chang points out, are designed to reconstruct key aspects of the pre-world war international political and economic order (2003, p. 3).

4 Polanyi elaborates the notion of markets as embedded and dis-embedded in The Great Transformation (1944) and in regard to the changes that gave rise to Europe’s nineteenth-century market system. See Booth (1994) for a discussion of the relation between the ideas of ‘embedded economy’ and ‘moral economy’.

5 The argument here is not that Britain’s economic expansion unfolded endogenously during this period, but that the expansion of Britain’s foreign trade at this time was supporting an expansion of the home market and the production of mass consumption goods which raised the level of welfare of ordinary local people. This, as I shall argue, was not generally the case in the nineteenth century.

6 This ideal was also found in the Islamic, Confucian, and other Asian traditions that intermixed across the Eurasia.

7 Some scholars assume that England’s monarchy was not absolutist because, unlike the absolute monarchies of the continent, English monarchs could not take the property of their subjects without their consent in Parliament. But continental absolutism was also based on the rights of property. Also, in France, local and provincial institutions were able to provide a counterbalance to Louis XIV s power; and his Ministers had to gain the support of local elites in running the country (see Morrill, 1978). Moreover, the assumption that England did not have an absolute monarchy because it was constrained by parliament ignores the fact that England’s parliament played an essential role in, and was an integral part of the establishment of the absolute state under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I (Manning, 1965, pp. 250–51; see, also, Anderson, 1974, pp. 113–42).

8 Lie (1993, p. 283). The term ‘absolutism’ was used by those who opposed reforms which today we associate with the welfare state and progressive policies. Attempts to capture this contradiction in terms are seen in such phrases as ‘enlightened despotism’ and ‘liberal absolutism’. However, the word survives as a key analytic term in the study of early modern Europe, together with its negative connotations and the hostility that it was originally meant to express.

9 Slack (1990, p. 22). In her review of these developments, Pat Thane concludes that there is ‘a very real question’ as to ‘whether the vastly richer Britain of the twentieth century is relatively more or less generous to its poor than the England of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ (1998, p. 55).

10 See Dorwart (1971). The legal measures were never fully implemented, however, because of resistance from aristocratic office-holders whose job it was to apply them. These restricted the workday for miners to eight hours, guaranteed them a fixed income and the right to work. barred female and child labour and Sunday shifts; provided miners with free medical treatment in case of illness or accident, sick payments during the whole period of illness, and invalid payments in case of permanent disablement (Tampke, 1981, pp. 72–3).

11 Bell (2014, p. 12). The French government spent the equivalent of an entire year’s budget, most of which had been obtained by loans, on the War of American Independence; and had accrued immense debt through its involvement in the Seven Years War (1756–1763).

12 Hunt (2010, p. 31). Several northern states of the U.S. abolished slavery, the Anti-Slavery Society in England (founded in 1787), began calling for abolition of the slave trade; the French Societé des Amis des Noirs, also created in 1787, called for abolition of the slave trade and emancipation of slaves; and Denmark passed a law in 1792 banning the import of slaves to its West Indies colonies (Hunt, 2004, pp. 149–179).

13 Goldstone (1991, p. xxii). Uprisings in Serbia (1804 and 1815) and Bosnia (1809), the Greek (1825–29) and Egyptian (1831–23) revolts within the Ottoman Empire. In china, the White Lotus Rebellion (1794–1804) took the Qing dynasty eight years to defeat, weakening it and leaving it vulnerable to further uprisings, including the Eight Trigrams uprising of 1813 which nearly succeeded in overthrowing it.

14 Braudel pointed out that, historically, overseas trade was the logical choice for those who wanted to evade the free market:

it was after all based on the price differences between two markets very far apart, with supply and demand in complete ignorance of each other and brought into contact only by the activities of the middleman. Thus, if, over time, competition appeared and super-profits vanished from one line, it was always possible to find them again on another route with different commodities. (1979, II, 405)

15 It is often assumed that the French Revolution and the repeal of the English Corn Laws marked the end of landed power and the victory of the new capitalist bourgeoisie. But the Corn Laws had been enacted in 1815, not to shore up a declining sector, but to retain the high profits generated during the Napoleonic wars. Wheat prices did not fall until the onset of the Great Depression in the 1870s (Hobsbawm, 1968, p. 197). After the repeal of the Corn laws, Richard Cobden tried to rally forces around a campaign for free trade in land. However, landowners and wealthy businessmen instead rallied together in opposition to it and, as a result, helped to fuse the old landed and the new industrialists into a new ruling class (Thompson, 1963, pp. 284–5).

16 Bell (2014, p. 701); my emphasis. This marked the beginning of a process which, in the United States and in Britain, reconfigured ‘liberalism as the ideological other of “totalitarian” ideologies, left and right’ (Bell, 2014, pp. 698–99). Duncan Bell notes that ‘nineteenth-century philosophers had very rarely seen Locke as a liberal or written positively about his political theory’ (2014, p. 696); but with this reconfiguration, ‘some stylised arguments stripped from’ his body of work were ‘posthumously conscripted to an expansive new conception of the liberal tradition’ (2014, p. 698).

17 Perry Anderson explains that this phenomenon is neither novel nor inexplicable. Rome, which never experienced anything but a narrow and oppressive oligarchy, gave birth to the Latin cult of Libertas and ‘the most elegant threnodies for freedom in Antiquity’. On the other hand, ‘Athens, which had known the most untrammeled democracy of the Ancient World, produced no important theorists or defenders of it.’ The reason, he suggests, is that, in Rome, power and culture were concentrated in a compact aristocracy. The narrower the circle that enjoyed freedom, ‘the purer was the vindication of liberty it bequeathed to posterity’ (1974, p. 73).

18 Many scholars wrongly associate ‘Liberals’ with the struggle for democracy in nineteenth century Europe. But liberals and democrats had two quite distinct ideologies and aims: democrats argued that with the proper education and environment, all (or most) citizens could share the responsibilities of governing; while liberals subscribed to an aristocratic theory of government that held that only a select few were possessed of sufficient intelligence, discipline and character to govern. The leading French Restoration liberal-radical, Benjamin Constant, held this view as did the Whig (liberal) historian and parliamentarian, Thomas Macauley. As Karl Polanyi noted, ‘From Macauley to Mises, from Spencer to Sumner, there was not a militant liberal who did not express the conviction that popular democracy was a danger to capitalism’ (1944, p. 226).

19 Deane (1979, p. 220). These included the promotion of overseas rather than domestic commerce, restricting the domestic market, and establishing monopolistic enterprises allied with state power (but with the privatization of their returns.

20 A number of studies argue that, during the interwar period in Britain, elements of capital began to recognize the limits of the system; that, in light of the U.S. experience, they began to consider the importance of the home market, and to reconsider Britain’s reliance on overseas markets (see Boyce 1987, pp. 102–5). However, despite these differences, the revolutionary currents unleashed by World War I worked effectively to keep the capitalist class unified. A shift in the character of capitalism did not become evident until 1945.

21 1868–1874, 1880–1885, 1886, 1892–94. Margaret Thatcher proclaimed in 1983 that, given the policies the Conservative Party was pursuing under her leadership, she thought it likely ‘that if Mr. Gladstone were alive today he would apply to join the Conservative Party’. In 1996, she explicitly referred, approvingly, to Gladstone’s ‘kind of Conservatism’. Speech to the Conservative Party Conference, 14 October 1983; Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture, 11 January 1996.

22 By 1914 about 30% of Europe's population in 1830 had immigrated to the Americas, providing markets for European products overseas, rather than locally and enabling Europeans to expand production without dangerously impacting social relations at home.

23 In Britain, as elsewhere, the dominant class consisted of a landowning aristocracy; large manufacturing, financial and commercial interests, and those performing the functions of a middle class on their behalf and who represented ‘a specialized sector of the ruling class which dealt with key aspects of economic and political domination’ (Morris, 1979, p. 23).

24 See, e.g., Guttsman (1954, pp. 12–32), Spring (1977), Rosenberg (1966), Mayer (1981); and also, Halperin (1997, chapter 4).

25 By 1832 there were ‘strongly based and self-conscious working-class institutions’, intellectual traditions, and community-patterns, as well as ‘a working class structure of feeling’ (Thompson, 1966, p. 194).

26 On occasion, the landowning faction of the dominant class promoted radical programmes. For example, landed elites favoured extensions of the suffrage that would increase their weight relative to that of industrial interests. Thus, in Norway, the suffrage was extended to the property-owning stratum of peasantry prior to its being achieved by the urban working class. Bismarck favoured an extension of the suffrage to strengthen landed interests against financial interests, since the landed elite controlled the behaviour of their dependents and their workers at the polls (Weiss, 1977, p. 76). Similarly, in Belgium, the right wing could secure the vote of the mass of peasant voters who were Catholics, and so had less to fear from universal manhood suffrage than the Liberals (Carstairs, 1980, p. 51). The ‘immediate object’ of Bismarck’s social welfare schemes in the 1880s was ‘to cut the ground from under the feet of the socialists’ (Ogg, 1930, pp. 548–549, 551) and to secure the subservience of labour through dependence on the state (Briggs, 1962, p. 249). Each of these measures was partial and provisional; and other countries emulating Germany's example, introduced social insurance; measures that, in most cases, were applied to a small group of men, were voluntary rather than obligatory, and private rather than public (see Ogg, 1930, pp. 543–609).

27 Between 1870 and 1914, 35 million Europeans, mostly peasants and agricultural labourers, left the region (Goldstein, 1983, p. 246).

28 See in addition to Stoler (1989), Comaroff (1985), Gordon and Meggitt (1985), Breman (1987), Callaway (1987), and Kennedy (1987).

29 The far right added increased emphasis on past imperial glory as, for instance, in the Greater Germany programme of the German NSP, the Italian fascist crusade to recreate a Roman empire, and, realizing the Greek Megali idea, the inauguration of the ‘Third Hellenic Civilization’ by the fascist regime.

30 Despite Nazism’s overt atheism, Germany’s Catholic Center Party voted for the Enabling Act granting Hitler dictatorial powers, and many Catholic organizations merged with Nazi organizations after 1933. The Church formalized its support of Italian fascism in the Lateran Treaty of 1929; and, in 1933, helped bring about the establishment of Salazar’s authoritarian regime in Portugal. Most Catholics regarded the victory of Fascism in the Spanish Civil War as a Christian triumph (Carr, 1966), and the Church supported France’s Vichy regime.

31 In Behemoth (1944), Franz Neumann described the German Nationalist Socialist government as a private capitalistic economy regimented by a totalitarian state.

32 Participating in this transformation were East Asian countries facing the Soviet Union or China where US-imposed revolutions brought about ‘the fastest economic and social transformation in human history’. Broadly similar changes occurred in European countries that became part of the communist world; consequently, though their autocratic structures remained, they eventually achieved political change by means of a ‘velvet revolution’ in the 1980s. A coalition of first world’ and ‘third world’ elites waged a successful campaign to prevent revolutionary change in nearly all the rest of the world.

33 ‘New Democrats’ in the U.S. (like ‘New Labor’ in the U.K.) abandoned their historic white working-class base and moved to the right economically. By the 1990s they had become identical with the political right. In his 1996 State of the Union address, Bill Clinton, falling in line with Ronald Reagan’s vision of the US, announced that ‘the era of big government [i.e., the welfare state] is over’.

34 Lal, 2003, pp. 16–17. In addition to ‘shock therapy’, these efforts were advanced through ‘structural adjustment’, post-war and post-disaster ‘reconstruction’, ‘democratization’, ‘civil society’, and ‘good governance’ initiatives, and regime change.

35 While British capital exports in the nineteenth century had amounted to 10% of GDP, those of the US at their peak had been around 2% of GDP.

36 E.g., mega-mergers that have created the oil ‘super-majors’ and military ‘mega-firms’.

37 One in every ten Americans was receiving federal food stamps; the infant mortality rate for African Americans, 17.7 deaths per 1000 live births, was higher than in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Cuba (Bello, 1994, pp. 95–7).

38 Daley (2020). As in Europe during the interwar years, this project was supported by big business – by Fortune 500 companies like Walmart, Reynolds American, Pfizer, AT&T, Citigroup, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Blue Cross Blue Shield – seeking to establish a permanent Republican majority committed to de-regulation and tax breaks.

39 And in the electoral advantage given to rural areas that continues to guarantee a Republican majority in the Senate for at least four of every six years.