What links civilisation, liberalism, and globalisation? Many fascinating and profound debates in politics, naturally, but the quiz-player’s answer is book titles followed by ‘and its discontents’. The third of these books, Joseph Stiglitz’s classic attack on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, captured the myriad challenges and dilemmas generated by rapid interconnection of the global, politically and economically. The Nobel Laureate noted the huge economic benefits of such integration, but also highlighted how power asymmetries were exploited and ideology often got in the way of development. More than two decades on from Stiglitz, the debate over globalisation is still raging, as attested to by a new release from Philip Cunliffe, associate professor of international relations at UCL.
Needless to say, the book – The National Interest: Politics after Globalization – is timely, with the world still coming to terms with Donald Trump’s second term, and what The Economist has characterised as his ‘imperial presidency’: a nineteenth-century quest to expand the frontier and enforce huge tariffs. Now more than ever there are calls for self-sufficiency and isolationism, retreats from ‘shaky supply chains’, and use of buzzwords like ‘friendshoring’. Related notions appear as central themes of the book, which sets out to defend a form of strategic nationalism through a mix of political science, theory, and rhetoric.
In brief, the book calls for a revival of the ‘national interest’ as the Archimedean point for thinking about politics. In a ‘post-globalisation’ world, Cunliffe argues that it is only by ruthlessly pursuing their own needs that states facing democratic backsliding will be able to see a revitalisation of politics. According to this argument ‘making the national interest the lodestar of political life will deepen popular self-rule and democratic government’ (pg. 1). Cunliffe suggests that globalisation was an abandonment of this way of thinking, with multilateral agreements restricting the ability of individual nations to act to their own advantage.
Locating the nation-state as the main, if not sole, site for political contestation and attention is nothing new; indeed, a good deal of the book expounds the intellectual lineage of ‘realism’ in international relations. Machiavelli, who advised princes how best to rule their states, can be seen as a prime example of the self-interest which realists think governs the anarchic world order. To follow the pressing example that Cunliffe also makes use of, Trump is – as he sees it – acting solely in his nation’s interest (‘America First’): extracting economic and political concessions from countries around the globe, be they a long-established ally or a pariah state. Later notable authors in this vein include E. H. Carr and Hans J. Morgenthau.
However, the book sometimes uses the descriptive and normative senses of ‘realism’ interchangeably. As a theory describing how states behave, realism is an empirical hypothesis that can be operationalised and tested – which has had mixed success. Yet even if realism is descriptively valid – already a big if – it’s another question entirely whether it is prescriptively so, i.e., if it can serve to clarify how states ought to act. (Analogously, it might be descriptively accurate that my classmate will cheat on their next exam; it doesn’t follow that they should.) Although Cunliffe is aware of this distinction, his arguments are prone to elide empirical claims and normative facts.
Cunliffe claims that reviving the national interest is the only way to ‘reinvigorate democracy and rebuild our nations’ (p. 152). The fact that democratic renewal is central to the book’s contention is slightly confusing, as little time is spent discussing democracy itself. The literature on democracy – both descriptive and normative – is of course vast, but there’s no discussion in the book of topics such as the trade-off between efficiency and representation or non-representative forms of democracy.
The author sees the nation-state, embodied in Treaty of Westphalia (1648), as the natural form of democracy: mixing sufficient socio-cultural homogeneity with democratic accountability. There’s no discussion of whether this holds for all countries – compare how India’s nearly 1.5 billion inhabitants are represented politically with the governance of the UK or tiny Luxembourg. And there is an absence of many theoretical arguments linking the pursuit of national interest to democracy. He writes that: ‘The process of articulating collective interests channelled through the existing institutions of the nation will in turn help spur the creation of new nations…to transcend the splintered societies’ (p. 29). This could be an interesting line of thought, but there is no space given to democratic debate; instead, it’s assumed that framing political choices in terms of how they affect the national interest will eo ipso also improve democracy.
Cunliffe is at his strongest when he argues that international integration has hampered democracy. He suggests that the movement towards globalisation, starting in the late seventies, has transferred power from the people to shady bureaucrats and CEOs of TNCs, with ‘transnational networks becoming a convenient site at which to stash away decision-making processes, safely above the reach of the nation below’ (p. 7). It’s very plausible that leaders who fixate on international bodies and integration are prone to neglect the interests of their own citizens. This complaint is common on both the left and right, and sees some support in the political-science literature, where it’s argued that ‘catch-all’ parties have replaced class-based mass parties. Yet even granting that decisions should be made by national leaders rather than companies, it doesn’t follow that countries should consider solely their own national interest. It’s far from obvious why giving power to the masses entails abandoning allies and trading partners, or why a mass party can’t support foreign aid.
Indeed, looking at the economics, there may be very good reasons to not act in the realist manner prescribed in the book. Globalisation has brought enormous prosperity around the world, even whilst increasing inequalities. Cunliffe seems to think, like Trump, that nineteenth-century policies of tariffs and export restrictions will go a long way to forwarding the national interest. But as Ferdinand Mount writes in a recent piece in the London Review of Books: ‘Such a plonking plank of policy finds little or no support in economic theory’. He notes that more than a thousand economists have asked the President not to impose tariffs. Extensive economic research has shown that their cost ends up landing on the domestic consumers, and that they have a tendency to lead to cronyism and inefficiency at home.
Assuming, then, that the concept of the ‘national interest’ is meant to include the material conditions of a nation’s citizens as well as its relative power over other nations at a given point in time, it’s hard to substantiate much of what Cunliffe says about the benefits of reinforcing ‘post-globalisation’ isolationism. This is not to say that nationalism cannot be used as a populist pretence and find electoral success – evidence of this can be seen around the globe – but rather that sometimes the ‘shady’ civil service bureaucrats might know how to run a country well. Hence the trifecta that the book argues for – democracy, sovereignty, and national interest – are far from being as compatible as the author thinks.
Ultimately, whilst Cunliffe’s book tries to unite political theory and science – normative and descriptive – to offer a new account of this age’s problems, it fails to deal adequately with either. The normative account could have shown promise, but it is minimal and underwhelming, failing to consider in any meaningful depth the fundamental questions of representation and democracy. The descriptive account too often confuses ostentatious signs of political independence with policies that would genuinely make a country better. The book may still be worth reading: if only to understand the psychology of some leading thinkers in today’s political administrations.