Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars, book by Tara Zahra; review by Matthieu Grandpierron,

 Review 192

Tara Zahra, Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars. W. W. Norton & Company, 2023. ISBN: 9780393651966.

6 October 2026 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/R-192 | Website: rjissf.org

X: @HDiplo | BlueSky: @h-diplo.bsky.social | Mastodon: @HDiplo | YouTube: @JervisForum

Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Daniel R. Hart
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Masami Kimura

Matthieu Grandpierron, Institut Catholique de Vendée (ICES)

---

Tara Zahra’s Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars offers a reinterpretation of interwar international history by placing anti-globalism at the center of a political and ideological change across Europe, the United States, India, and Latin America. Moving beyond conventional accounts of diplomatic crises, economic depression, and ideological polarization, Zahra reconstructs how a wide and diverse range of actors, across social classes and beyond decision-makers or ruling elites, experienced, resisted, and reimagined the breakdown of global interconnections between the First and Second World Wars. The book’s main contribution is that it treats anti-globalism not as a marginal reaction, but as a major cross-class and transnational response to social dislocation, economic volatility, and cultural anxiety after the collapse of nineteenth-century liberal internationalism. In doing so, Zahra shows how “ordinary” people attempted to shape, or at least tried to act, on international trends, and at times, to resist them. Her work clarifies the relationship between individual experience, mass politics, and broader historical changes.

Rather than through familiar ideological binaries, such as liberalism versus communism or fascism versus liberalism, Zahra examines interwar history through the changing ways people understood and rejected globalization. She moves beyond institutional or policy-centered accounts to examine anti-globalism as a lived mentality: a set of emotions, doubts, hopes, and misunderstandings shaped by personal experience of war, blockade, economic volatility, and cultural displacement. This approach not only restores humanity, but it also brings back individual experience into a field that is often dominated by impersonal process-tracing and structural abstraction, and complements such studies by providing a detailed account of how people reacted to and felt about these events.[1] Anti-globalism, as Zahra defines it, includes political, social, and cultural movements that sought to protect societies from the unregulated global economy by mobilizing against policies, people, and institutions associated with internationalism and cross-border integration. Crucially, she does not describe a simple drive toward deglobalization, but rather a contested effort to redefine the terms on which globalization operated, a dynamic that also resonates with present-day debates about sovereignty, supply-chain resilience, and demands for reduced external dependence.

Zahra reinterprets interwar international history by placing anti-globalism and mass mentality at the center of global change, marking a clear departure from the elite-focused tradition of historiographical international relations.[2] Much scholarship in that tradition tends to analyze interwar politics through great-power rivalry and diplomatic contingency, and the personalities and worldviews of decision-makers and foreign policy practitioners. Like these approaches, Zahra’s prioritizes context, subjective mentality, and human agency.[3]Unlike them, and closer to critical international relations scholarship, her narrative extends that analysis to marginalized actors excluded from mainstream diplomatic history: migrants, workers, peasants, women, and ethnic minorities.[4] Zahra explicitly writes history from below, explaining and showing how ordinary people’s fears, grievances, insecurities, and grassroots demands reflected different versions of anti-globalism and of different experiences of interwar challenges and mindset changes. She demonstrates that the collapse of trust in globalization after the First World War was not only an elite ideological shift, but was also a popular revolt against interdependence, instability, and inequality. In this sense, Against Globalism restores passion, suffering, doubt, and aspiration to a field often presented as a dispassionate strategic game, and it aligns closely with social and transnational history.[5]

The book is organized in three parts: discontent with globalization before World War I, the post-war backlash, and the radicalization of anti-global movements in the 1930s. Throughout, Zahra uses individual life stories to illustrate broader mentality shifts and how “ordinary” people balanced ideals, material reality, and political hope in moments of systemic breakdown. Methodologically, Against the World draws on grassroots sources including petitions, local newspapers, labor records, and testimonies from migrants. This method brings freshness to a discipline often dominated by rationalist and structural models and serves as a reminder that international relations are shaped not only by states and elites, but also by the people who live within, and resist, global order. It is also valuable for diplomatic history because it shows how unspoken popular mentalities can gradually shape foreign policy, even before they become official doctrine. In this sense, Against the World provides valuable understandings to studies of elite behavior by unpacking how bottom to top pressures can become foreign policy.[6]

Zahra’s argument is convincing. It connects interwar anti-globalism to two long-term forces: the acceleration of nineteenth-century globalization, driven by steamships, railways, and telegraphs, and the rise of mass politics and democratic participation. These forces produced widening inequality, economic vulnerability, and cultural dislocation, in ways that also invite comparison with contemporary digital integration, artificial intelligence, and global supply chains. Interwar critics denounced the overreach of international institutions, especially the League of Nations, for imposing external conditions and economic constraints, much as contemporary actors criticize the conditionality of the International Monetary Fund and European Union. Equally important in Zahra’s analysis is the role of emotion. Anger, fear, resentment, and insecurity, which rationalist international relations theory has often marginalized, emerge as central drivers of political change.[7] In the interwar period, mass media and public rallies amplified these sentiments; today, social media platforms play a similar role by shaping political communities and spreading backlash against cosmopolitan elites.[8]

A major strength of the book is its refusal to reduce anti-globalism to a monolithic or exclusively nationalist ideology. Zahra reveals its internal complexity: some internationalists defended national self-sufficiency, some nationalists supported global trade, and many coalitions crossed left-right divides. She shows that anti-globalist sentiment was especially strong in states that lost the First World War, where narratives of national decline, economic encirclement, and food insecurity fueled demands for autarky and sovereignty. This pattern also speaks to contemporary anxieties about perceived great-power decline and strategic vulnerability, from energy and critical mineral dependence to food supply chains. In one especially revealing section, Zahra shows that interwar anxieties over food imports helped shape authoritarian appeals to autarky and “soil and blood” rhetoric, complicating accounts that explain fascist and Nazi popularity solely through racial ideology (236-256).[9] She links post-war blockades, economic sanctions, and agricultural crisis to popular distrust of global openness, suggesting that wars might be lost on the home front long before battlefield defeat.

Yet the book also raises theoretical and methodological questions, especially regarding its structure and methodological approach, which are familiar concerns in historiographical international relations. The first question is how representative and impactful the personal experiences discussed really were. One could argue that these voices might not reflect wider social attitudes. It would have been useful to include more sources that cross-check the views of each selected individual against broader datasets or other forms of evidence. Similarly, the criteria for selecting individual voices could be made more explicit, as Zahra does not always state why certain figures were chosen. Against the World would also benefit from a detailed and explicit theoretical framework that links the different stories together. Without that framework, some narratives remain rich but somewhat disconnected from the broader argument. The conclusion works well in its insight into anti-globalism, but a theoretical section would be a welcomed addition. A stronger conceptual architecture at the start of each section would also help reinforce Zahra’s overall claims and improve the connections between cases. These limitations do not undermine the project, but they raise familiar questions about how far micro-level biographical evidence can explain macro international outcomes.[10]

Despite these limitations, Against the World makes an important contribution to historical and international relations scholarship by recovering the grassroots origins of interwar anti-globalism. It sheds new light on the unintended consequences of the post-World War I peace settlement: the collapse of empires fragmented economic space, disrupted long-standing agricultural and industrial networks, and intensified pressures on new nation-states struggling for survival. In a particularly striking corrective, Zahra notes that Austria’s request for unification with Germany in 1919 was driven in part by food insecurity, a fact which is often erased in purely geopolitical or ideological accounts (46-48). The book is especially effective in giving voice to those marginalized by traditional international history and in demonstrating that global order is made not only by diplomats and statesmen, but also by ordinary people demanding a more secure and just world. The book’s contemporary resonance is underscored by its concluding reflections on the unresolved tensions between globalization, equality, and democracy (283-286). Against the World shows that these tensions are not new: they emerged in the interwar period when mass populations rejected a global order that offered them little security or dignity. Globalization cannot survive if it does not address the legitimate grievances of those it leaves behind.

 

Matthieu Grandpierron is Associate Professor of International Relations and head of the Political Science Department at ICES, France. He is also Senior Researcher at Ecole Polytechnique (Paris) and Visiting Professor at the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law. His book, Nostalgic Virility: How Leaders of Great Powers Cope with Status Decline (McGill Queens, 2024) employed MMCDA (mixed methods critical discourse analysis) to analyze over 1,000 declassified documents from French, American, and British archives to investigate the role that status considerations and nostalgic virility can play in great powers’ decisions to go to war. He was also Research Fellow at the University of Ottawa from 2018 to 2019 and also spent 2019–2020 on a research scholarship by Columbia University (CES-Alliance mobility program). His current research investigates how the international order is understood and described by BRICS+ countries and what alternatives they propose. This research is conducted under the framework of mixed methods critical discourse analysis. His forthcoming book, A Practical Guide to Mixed Methods Critical Discourse Analysis (co-authored with Paul Saurette) offers a step-by-step guide to researchers interested in conducting mixed critical discourse analyses.

 

---

 

[1] Jens Bartelson, The Critique of the State (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Alexander Wendt, “The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory,” International Organization 41:3 (1987): 335-370.

[2] Patrick Cohrs, The New Atlantic Order: The Transformation of International Politics 1860–1933(Cambridge University Press, 2022); A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: 1848–1918 (Oxford University Press, 1980); E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (Harper Perennial, 1964); Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing World (Basil Blackwell, 1957).

[3] Lorenzo Cello, “Taking History Seriously in International Relations: Towards a Historicist Approach,” Review of International Studies 44:2 (2017): 236-251.

[4] For example, Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (Columbia University Press, 1993).

[5] For example, Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (Simon and Schuster, 1995).

[6] Steven E. Lobell, Norrin M. Ripsman, and Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, Neoclassical Realism, the State and Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2012); Gideon Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy,” World Politics 51:1 (1998): 144-172.

[7] Karl Gustafsson and Todd H. Hall, “The Politics of Emotions in International Relations: Who Gets to Feel What, Whose Emotions Matter, and the ‘History Problem’ in Sino-Japanese Relations,” International Studies Quarterly 65:4 (2021): 973-984; Emma Hutchinson and Roland Bleiker, “Theorizing Emotions in World Politics,” International Theory 6:3 (2014): 491-514.

[8] Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism(Cambridge University Press, 2019).

[9] See also Peter Staudenmaier, The Politics of Nature in Nazi Germany: Environmental Ideals and the Myths of Blood and Soil (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

[10] Jeanne Gamble and Lynn Hewlett, “Working Across the Gap: The Ongoing Challenge of Generalizability in Qualitative Research,” International Journal of Research and Method in Education 49:1 (2026): 4-23; Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (The MIT Press, 2005).

• Read more or reply