Does Economic Nationalism Have a Philosophy?

Compared to the once-brilliant promise of globalization, today's economic nationalisms appear bereft of intellectual appeal.Globalization offered free trade and unshackled investment to market liberals and the forces of capital.Yet it also offered something attractive to progressives: a vision of world citizenship beyond ethnos and nation. 1 So powerful was the allure of cosmopolitan convergence that it was often declared not only desirable but inevitable: "Stay global, " Barack Obama advised graduates in 2006."It's here, and it's not going away." 2 In contrast, the rising politics of economic nationalism-manifest in tariffs and industrial policies, migration controls and strategic resource management-reassert boundaries, violate economic principles once thought unimpeachable, and lean too heavily on populist sentiment to inspire intellectual engagement.The ideology of globalization drew unmistakably from the long lineage of liberal enlightenment.Do the ideological roots of economic nationalism draw from similar depths-or is it merely a newish blend of realpolitik, reaction, and right-wing mysticism?Liberal aversion to nationalism has a history.It is worth recalling that liberalism and nationalism were once close siblings, twin progeny of the antiaristocratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Their decisive split dates to the twentieth century.Taking their lessons from the interwar period, liberals came to describe nationalism as a pathology of modernity, a reactionary tendency perpetually in danger of lapsing into fascism.By the 1980s it was customary to argue that nations were socially 1 Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America