Globalization and peace

In a 2005 article, David Rowe reviewed the 19th-century liberal belief that the formation of a global economy would bring enduring peace. The arguments sound a tad familiar: “Liberals identify at least three closely related means by which globalization pacifies society. First, globalization generates powerful new social classes with vested interests in peace . . . Second, globalization endows societies with pacific social and personal values that constrain the state’s ability to generate and wield military force . . . Third, globalization enhances the political importance of these pacific values by liberalizing and democratizing society.” One might almost call it the McDonald’s Theory of international peace.

Of course, it didn’t work, and the result was World War I. According to Rowe, “Liberalism’s logic linking globalization’s constraints against war to international peace suffers at least three significant flaws . . . .

“First, it assumes that a state’s security is determined solely by its external environment . . . Second, the liberal argument implicitly assumes that constraining states from threatening or using military force always enhances international peace . . . . Third, . . . globalization [does not] constrain all states equally . . . these constraints should vary according to whether the state uses the country’s abundant or scarce economic resources to build military power . . . In sum, globalization’s tendency to generate systemic internal constraints on military force does not necessarily lead to a more stable and peaceful international system but can instead . . . generate systemic insecurity as all major powers become less able to mobilize their countries’ abundant resources . . . undermine the ability of powers to practice effective deterrence . . . magnify the importance of defensive alliances . . . magnify the threat posed by states that are at least constrained by deepening integration into the world economy.”

Niall Ferguson, who cites Rowe’s article in his The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World , summarizes Rowe’s historical findings this way: World War I might be “understood as a kind of backlash against globalization, heralded by rising tariffs and immigration restrictions in the decade before 1914, and welcomed most ardently by Europe’s agrarian elites, whose position had been undermined for decades by the decline in agricultural prices and emigration of surplus rural labour to the New World.”

Familiar, eerily familiar.