Commissioned Book Review: Beth Rabinowitz, Defensive Nationalism – Explaining the Rise of Populism and Fascism in the 21st Century
| Published date | 01 November 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299241250171 |
| Author | Gareth Dale,Rowan Alcock |
| Date | 01 November 2024 |
Political Studies Review
2024, Vol. 22(4) NP9 –NP10
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1250171PSW0010.1177/14789299241250171Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2024
Commissioned Book Review
Defensive Nationalism – Explaining the Rise
of Populism and Fascism in the 21st Century
by Beth Rabinowitz. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2023, 304 pp., £21.99,
ISBN: 978-0197672044.
This timely and insightful book investigates
how defensive nationalism (or ‘populism’)
came into being in the twentieth century and
asks how this process rhymes with its recent
resurgence. The general argument is that to
understand the developments that facilitated
the rise of populism in the United States and
Europe in recent decades, it helps to look again
at the same regions in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, to identify the forces
that facilitated an uprush of populism. Each era
was preceded by a period of peace, at least
between the Great Powers – that is, from 1815
to 1914 and from 1945 to 2020. This enabled a
flourishing of international trade and techno-
logical innovation. Rabinowitz sees this as the
main facilitator of the rise of ‘reactionary
movements’ in both eras. To this end, the book
centres on a comparison between the Second
Industrial Revolution (1860–1910s) and the
Digital Revolution (1960–2010s).
In both periods, Rabinowitz argues, North
America and Europe tipped from liberal stabil-
ity into populist turbulence due to the liberal
commitments, initially at least, of the hegem-
onic powers: Britain, then the USA. Each pre-
sided over tariff reductions, expanding
international trade, the establishment (initially
at least) of a stable monetary system and
increased capital mobility. However, these glo-
balisation processes led to blowback in the
guise of right-wing and left-wing populism.
Market-fundamentalist globalisation generated
socioeconomic strains, such as economic cri-
ses, economic insecurity and extreme wealth
inequality – the Gilded Age, with its tycoons,
avaricious individualism and worship of mar-
kets, ‘certainly does rhythm with today’s
Digital Age’ (p. 208). These strains combined
to sow fear and paranoia, mentalities condu-
cive to the ‘anti-liberal populism and ethnic
and economic nationalism’ which was to fol-
low. Rabinowitz’s case studies show that, in
both periods, left-wing and right-wing move-
ments appeared simultaneously across multi-
ple countries, the left generally focused on
reasserting economic sovereignty and protest-
ing the extreme concentration of wealth; the
right objecting to the dangers they perceived in
mass immigration and the undermining of the
‘traditional family’.
Rabinowitz’s argument draws on theories of
two political economists, Joseph Schumpeter and
Karl Polanyi. Using Schumpeter’s insights into
the role of new technologies in generating inter-
national financial speculation, she argues that
‘the driving force behind the economic and politi-
cal changes of the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury were the new technologies developed during
the nineteenth’. As to Polanyi, Rabinowitz
deploys his idea of the ‘double movement’. This
refers to a twin process: liberal marketisation (the
commodification of land, labour and money),
and the resistance to this: a ‘countermovement’
centred on appeals for social protection through
labour regulation, tariffs and suchlike. Combining
Schumpeterian and Polanyian theory, the author
suggests that Polanyi’s double movement can be
interpreted as ‘a response to technological revo-
lutions’. In addition, and largely ignored by
Polanyi, technology enabled the massification of
the media, which, given the pressures of a com-
mercialising world, proved a potent ingredient in
the rise of populism.
Finally, the author enquires into linkages
between technological revolutions and interna-
tional finance. Four factors are identified, appli-
cable to both periods: new tech–enabled trade
and industry to expand; trade growth took off in
liberal states which then pushed for global eco-
nomic liberalisation; trade expansion generated
pressures to establish an international monetary
system; these processes led to global economic
crisis, which spurred the dismantling of the ear-
lier protective order. In combination, these fac-
tors explain the technology-driven marketisation
of the late nineteenth and late twentieth centu-
ries, which in both cases ushered in a Polanyian
double movement.
Defensive Nationalism is an important con-
tribution to the study of populism, as well as
offering insightful comparisons of the Gilded
Age and the Digital Age. Rabinowitz succeeds
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