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- Sprache: Englisch
Generations raised after the Second World War took for granted a world of stability and prosperity, and with it the waning of ancient hatreds. Recent decades have been more sobering. Instability and extremism have returned in force. As Shalom Lappin explains in this worrying book, an upsurge of antisemitism across the political spectrum has accompanied them. Recent events in the Middle East have transformed it into a tidal wave.
Lappin explores in particular the disturbing correlation between the expansion of economic globalization and the return of the anti-Jewish ideas that we thought had been consigned to the past. He examines this relationship within the context of the assault on democracy and social cohesion that anti-globalist reactions have launched in different parts of the world. To understand contemporary antisemitism, Lappin argues, it is essential to recognize the way in which its antecedents have become deeply embedded in Western and Middle Eastern cultures over millennia. This allows hostility to Jews to cross political boundaries easily, left and right, in a way that other forms of racism do not. Combatting antisemitism effectively requires a new progressive politics that addresses its root causes.
The New Antisemitism is crucial reading for anyone concerned with the social pathologies unleashed by our current economic and political discontents.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
1 Introduction: Democracy in Crisis
1.1 The Rise of Extremism
1.2 The End of the Postwar Era
1.3 Globalization and Inequality
1.4 Jews and Conspiracies: The Origins of Political Antisemitism
Notes
2 The Roots of Antisemitism in Western Culture
2.1 Hostility to Jews in the Pre-Christian Ancient World
2.2 Anti-Jewish Themes in Christian Theology
2.3 The Absence of an Anti-Jewish Theology in Traditional Islam
2.4 Replacement in Secular Political Movements: The Jews as an Illicit People
Notes
3 The View from the Right
3.1 America: The Alt Right and the Quest for a New Confederacy
3.2 Neo-Fascism in Europe
3.3 Pro-Israel Antisemitism
3.4 The Alt Right in Israel
Notes
4 The View from the Left
4.1 From Class Struggle to Critical Theory and Identity Politics
4.2 Jews as Bearers of White Privilege
4.3 Zionism as Colonialism
Notes
5 The View from Radical Political Islamism
5.1 Jews in Traditional Islamic Societies
5.2 The Rise of Arab Nationalism
5.3 The Emergence of Political Islamism
5.4 The Alliance between Political Islamism and the Radical Left
Notes
6 The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict Re-naturalized
6.1 A Brief Historical Overview
6.2 Cyprus: A Partial Analogy
6.3 Partition vs Binationalism: Two States or One?
Notes
7 The Jewish Response to the Crisis
7.1 Collaborating with the Far Right
7.2 Collaborating with the Far Left
7.3 Caught in the Middle
Notes
8 Notes for a New Progressive Politics
8.1 From Identity Back to Class
8.2 Socializing Globalization
8.3 Refugees and Immigration
8.4 Artificial Intelligence, Big Tech and Disinformation
8.5 Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1: Value of world exports as a share of world GDP. From Petri and Banga (2020), usi...
Figure 2: Global Gini index 1820–2020. From Chancel and Piketty (2021).
Figure 3: Inequality between and within countries, measured as the ratio of the top 10 per...
Figure 4: An elephant curve of global income distribution from 1980 to 2020. Fro...
Figure 5: Global income and wealth distribution for 2022. From Chancel et al. (2022).
Figure 6: Growth in regional GDP by continent in 1990 US dollars. From Berend (2006), publ...
Guide
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Table of Contents
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Dedication
ספר זה מוקדש לד״ר אינסה ברשדסקיי והצוות הרפואי שלמרפאת ביקור רופא, סניף ראשון לציון, ולד״ר אבי פוקס והצוותהרפואי של יחידת לב ביניים בבית החולים קפלן ברחובות, אשרהצילו את חיי ואפשרו לי לכתוב את הספר הזה
The New Antisemitism
The Resurgence of an Ancient Hatred in the Modern World
SHALOM LAPPIN
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Shalom Lappin 2024
The right of Shalom Lappin to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5856-8
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2023948030
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Preface
The entry of antisemitic themes into mainstream political discourse in the West over the past two decades has been accompanied by a significant rise in anti-Jewish hate crime. There has been widespread discussion of these developments in the press and among academics. Much of it has tended to view antisemitism as an independent phenomenon, in isolation from the context in which it arises. In fact its resurgence is conditioned by the crisis in democracy and social cohesion that has been affecting many countries over this same period. Writing this book has given me the opportunity to consider the connection between antisemitism and the political effects of economic globalization, specifically the sharp rise of inequality in income that has accompanied globalization. It has also permitted me to explore the way in which the long history of anti-Jewish hostility embedded within Western culture facilitates the ease with which antisemitism crosses a variety of ideological boundaries, in a way that other forms of racism do not.
I am grateful to my editor, Ian Malcolm, for invaluable guidance and constant support. My wife, Elena, my children and my grandchildren have given me generous amounts of love, good humour, and patient encouragement during the months that I was absorbed in working on this volume. I wish to thank Daniel Burston, Raphael Cohen-Almagor, Mark Glouberman, Alan Johnson, Matt Kramer, Susie Linfield, Benny Morris, Peter Nicholas, Mori Rimon, Haim Rubenstein, Richard Sproat, Nigel Vincent, Garvan Walshe, Anthony Warrens and an anonymous reviewer for much useful advice. My son Yaakov has provided extremely helpful critical feedback on draft chapters. Needless to say, I am solely responsible for the ideas presented in this book, and any errors that it may contain.
Several chapters of the book were written in Israel in the winter of 2022–3, while I was recovering from emergency open-heart surgery there. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the medical staff who saved my life. I appreciate their remarkable level of professional competence, and their deep compassion, more than they can know. I also thank family and friends who gave me much-needed support in this time. It is greatly valued.
During this period a large Israeli democracy movement emerged, organizing regular demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people from a large cross-section of the population. Against initial expectations, they have sustained a surprisingly effective opposition to the Netanyahu government’s ongoing assault on the country’s democratic institutions and independent judiciary. After a lifetime of activism I found myself confined to the role of observer as these dramatic events unfolded. It was moving and gratifying to cheer on my family and friends as they joined the demonstrations. The future of the country depends on the success of this movement.
One of the main conclusions that I reach in the book is that an effective response to antisemitism requires a new progressive politics that addresses the underlying causes of the current crisis in democracy. Such a response must be grounded in an understanding of the history of antisemitism. It is important to recognize where it comes from, and why it is pervasive as a response to the social dislocation generated by rapid change.
I completed the manuscript for this book shortly before the large-scale Hamas terrorist attack of 7 October 2023, and the conflict that followed it. These events have significantly altered the situation in the Middle East. They have also had a very deep impact on Jews in the Diaspora, and the environments in which they are living. I have tried to update some of the chapters to take account of these events, which remain ongoing. I have been forced to limit myself to brief observations, as a proper treatment of these developments would require another study. At this point it seems that many aspects of the international reaction to the attack and its aftermath amplify some of the tendencies and patterns previously identified in the book.
Shalom Lappin
London
December 2023
1Introduction: Democracy in Crisis
On the evening of 11 August 2017 a group of White supremacists carrying torches marched through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia shouting ‘Jews will not replace us.’ This was the opening event of a Unite the Right weekend rally. The following day, a far-right activist drove his car into a crowd of counter-demonstrators, killing Heather Heyer. President Trump responded to the clash by condemning violence and hatred ‘on both sides’. He did not mention the previous evening’s torchlight parade, and the antisemitic chants that it featured. In the days that followed the riot, he reiterated his view that White nationalist rioters and anti-racist protestors bore equal responsibility for the situation. He never abandoned his claim of moral equivalence between the two groups, insisting that there were ‘fine people on both sides’.
The comedian Dave Chappelle hosted Saturday Night Live on 13 November 2022. He devoted his opening monologue to the problems that Ye (the rapper and fashion icon formerly known as Kanye West) had recently encountered due to a series of strongly anti-Jewish posts on social media. Chappelle opened his remarks by taking a piece of paper from his pocket and reading a formulaic condemnation of antisemitism, in comic mode, to knowing chuckles from the studio audience. He followed this with the sentence, ‘And that, Kanye, is how you buy yourself some time.’ This was greeted with loud laughter and applause. The monologue went on to explore the issue of Jewish control of Hollywood, with the clear suggestion that there are some topics one cannot afford to speak about freely. Chappelle’s performance drew criticism from the Anti-Defamation League, and others. His defenders argued that he was parodying bigotry, while pushing the boundaries of comic expression through edgy sophistication. It would have been interesting to observe their response to a monologue that commented on racism directed at other ethnic groups, in the same ‘edgily sophisticated’, ‘boundary-pushing’ way.
These two events, from opposite parts of the political and cultural spectrum in America, indicate the extent to which ideas that had been safely confined to the margins of political life in the postwar era have now entered the mainstream in recent years. The expanding tolerance of antisemitic discourse in the public domain corresponds to a sharp spike in anti-Jewish hate crime in America, the UK and continental Europe.1 It is generally the case that an increase in racist rhetoric is accompanied by a rise in racist violence.
There have been numerous studies of antisemitism in recent years. Lipstadt (2018) looks at the resurgence of anti-Jewish bigotry on both the right and the left through an examination of the conspiracy myths of Jewish power that drive it. Julius (2010) provides an exhaustive history of antisemitism in England. Rich (2016), Hirsh (2017) and Baddiel (2022) deal with different aspects of left-wing antisemitism in Britain. Rich (2023) discusses the history of antisemitism as a set of recurring myths and prejudices embedded in European culture, with Britain as the focus of his study. In this book I will explore the emergence of contemporary antisemitism in the context of extremist anti-globalist movements. These movements are reacting to deep economic changes that have been generating wrenching social dislocations over an extended period of time. Attempting to understand the politics of anti-Jewish racism in this framework will, I hope, illuminate its close connections with other forms of bigotry, while throwing into sharper relief those distinctive properties that render it unique. This perspective will also clarify at least some of the factors that root this toxic prejudice so deeply within the cultures of Western and Middle Eastern societies.
1.1 The Rise of Extremism
We are living through a time of ongoing political and social turmoil, which has extended throughout much of the world over the past decade. Democracy is under siege in Europe, the United States, parts of Latin America and India. Far-right parties and extreme religious movements have moved from the periphery of many societies into the mainstream.
In America Donald Trump and his supporters retain a commanding influence within the Republican Party. They have been using it to effectively undermine the integrity of large swaths of the country’s electoral and judicial institutions. Both China and Russia are ruled by stridently nationalist autocracies pursuing increasingly aggressive policies of repression at home and expansion abroad. Vladimir Putin’s regime is waging a bloody war of aggression against Ukraine in the centre of Europe. Previous paradigms of stable progressive government, like Sweden, now prominently display neo-fascist parties poised on the edge of political power. Italy and France exhibit similar patterns. Hungary is under the control of Viktor Orbán, a pro-Putin authoritarian who has dismantled the independent judiciary and imposed partisan state control of the press. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan uses Islamist ideology to advance Turkish nationalism and the suppression of dissent. Narendra Modi has substituted extreme Hindu sectarianism for secular democracy in India. After being narrowly defeated in a recent presidential election, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsanaro continues to pursue his version of a Trumpian agenda in opposition. Many other countries and regions show variants of this dynamic.
In addition to far-right ethno-nationalism, varieties of far-left and radical Islamist movements have become increasingly influential in shaping the contemporary political landscape. In Europe and America a postmodernist identity politics of the left, formulated as ‘anti-colonialism’, has entrenched itself in large parts of academia, publishing and the entertainment industry. Across Muslim-majority countries different strands of Islamism have largely replaced post-colonial secular nationalism as a dominant ideology of government, as well as of opposition.
Conflict and extremism are not new phenomena, even in periods of relative cohesion. What is remarkable about the current era is the extent to which deep social unrest is driving radical political movements and undermining trust in established institutions across such a large and diverse set of environments. These movements, and, in some countries, the regimes that they have produced, threaten to destroy liberal democratic institutions. They are promoting ethnic conflict, and they are generating instability on a very large scale.
It is possible to identify at least four elements common to most of the extremist movements that are seizing control of the public domain. First, a distinctive sense of grievance lies at the core of their appeal. Their supporters feel that they have lost control over central aspects of their lives and their social contexts. This sentiment infuses these movements with the militance and the escalating violence that they exhibit. It defines the rancour that they bring to current political discourse.
The second factor is a collapse of faith in established political parties and existing institutions to meet the challenges that are now overwhelming them across a wide range of areas. Such challenges include sustaining an equitable level of prosperity, handling immigration, managing cultural diversity and coping with climate change. Increasing numbers of people are coming to the view that conventional political and economic arrangements are aggravating rather than solving these problems. They are embracing previously unthinkable alternatives that lie beyond the consensus on which public life in the postwar era in the West, and in many other areas, has depended.
Third, extremists of the right, the left and radical Islamism are staunchly anti-elitist. They attribute the failure of current governments and institutions to the machinations of various groups, who operate the machinery of the state, the economy and the mainstream media for their own benefit, rather than for the public good. For this reason these movements are frequently (and often misleadingly) described as ‘populist’. Their anti-elitist posture provides fertile ground for conspiracy theories, which they use to recruit support, and to define the targets of their campaigns.2
Finally, these groups have made identity politics a focus of their respective agendas. They stress the ethnic, cultural and gender aspects of the oppression that they claim to oppose. They present themselves as threatened by other groups of a different identity, who either make up the ruling elite, or are imported and used by it, to dispossess them.
The rise of extremism provides the more general context in which I am considering contemporary antisemitism. It has become an increasingly prominent theme in the politics of all three types of extremist movements. The far right in Europe and America targets ethnic and religious minorities, with people of colour, immigrants (particularly Muslim immigrants) and Jews identified as the main threat. Large parts of the far left have moved from criticism of Israeli state actions to vilification of the overwhelming number of Jews who are committed to Israel’s existence and wellbeing. They paint them as agents of a nefarious lobby that controls the press, financial institutions and Western governments. They use the language of extreme ‘anti-Zionism’ to avoid the terminology of ‘Jewish control’, which is embedded in the far right. In fact, their ideas converge at the same point. Many radical Islamists take the idea of a Jewish/Zionist conspiracy of control as integral to their own project of establishing societies based on the hegemony of Islamic law, free of Western influence. In this respect, antisemitism is a unique form of racism. It runs across political and cultural lines. The myths of malicious Jewish power that encode it are shared by the three dominant forms of extremism driving the current assault on democracy.
Those committed to democracy and pluralism are now very much aware of the crisis that has engulfed us. They are reacting with varying degrees of alarm, resistance and, in some cases, despair. They have enjoyed some successes in opposing extremist movements, such as Trump’s defeat in 2020, but they have not managed to wrest control of the political momentum in the current contest. For the most part, democrats remain on the defensive in the face of the growing authoritarian challenge. In order to effectively meet this challenge it is not sufficient to identify it, and to oppose it. We need to understand what is driving the rise in extremist movements. Only then will it be possible to formulate an alternative social and political vision that undercuts the forces sustaining their appeal. It is these forces that have invigorated the virus of antisemitism from a relatively somnolent state in the West in the postwar order into a potent pathogen infecting mainstream politics in the current decline of this order.
1.2 The End of the Postwar Era
The first half of the twentieth century was ravaged by two world wars, with a depression and the rise of fascism, Nazism and Communism, in the years between them. Determined to avoid a repetition of this cycle of mass destruction and destitution, the Western architects of the postwar era established a set of institutions designed to create prosperity and ensure stability. These included, among others, the Marshall Plan for rebuilding the destroyed economies of Europe, a programme to reconstruct Japan and the Bretton Woods system for international monetary exchange and capital management. Bretton Woods included the establishment of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
The postwar years of 1945–72 saw substantial economic growth, an increase in labour productivity and low unemployment throughout much of the world, particularly in the West.3 This was accompanied by a rise in living standards and a reduction of social and educational gaps in many countries. Both the West and the Soviet bloc experienced an expansion of manufacturing and rapid technological development. In the West, unions were relatively powerful, and job security was widespread.
This was the highwater mark of liberalism and the expansion of the welfare state in the West. The developing world went through decolonization. It saw the emergence of nationalist governments committed to both rapid development and independence from colonial rule. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) moved from Stalin’s regime of terror to a more settled, bureaucratic form of Communist rule. Competition between the West and the Soviet Union froze relations between them into an extended period of stasis. While the 1960s brought significant cultural change and political conflict to the West, this remained a period of relative economic and social stability, in which a liberal democratic consensus stayed intact in Western Europe, America and many other countries.
The period of prosperity and cohesion came to an end in 1973, when a sharp increase in the price of oil generated high inflation, falling growth and rising unemployment. By the end of the decade these developments contributed to extended periods of Conservative government under Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. Their administrations reduced the redistributive social programmes and the progressive tax systems that their predecessors had implemented. They also restricted the power of labour unions, and union membership declined significantly after this time. All of this was done in the name of an ideology of minimal state ‘libertarianism’. It was marketed with the promise that removing constraints on capital would yield increased growth, which would benefit all classes from the top down.
By the end of the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev’s experiment with political reform culminated in the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, and the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. Many commentators in the West hailed this event as establishing free-market-based liberal democracy as a universal, inevitable economic and political order. Fukuyama (1992) described it as the end point of historical evolution. But by the time that Fukuyama’s book appeared, Yugoslavia had broken up into its constituent republics and descended into a sequence of bloody civil wars that lasted until 2001. History did not stop, but it continued through a series of major upheavals.
The rapid move to an unconstrained free market economy in the former Communist countries of the USSR and Eastern Europe created social upheaval. Massive privatization of state assets in the Russian Federation under Boris Yeltsin gave rise to a small class of wealthy oligarchs, who took control of large areas of economic and political life. Vladimir Putin rose to power in the chaotic frontier economy that radical privatization generated. He proceeded to re-establish state control over large sections of the economy, and he moved to totalitarian rule through selective alliances with groups of oligarchs, who are beholden to him.4
In 2007–8, an international financial crisis produced a severe recession, aggravated by the austerity policies of many governments, particularly those of the UK and the European Union (EU). This recession lasted into 2009. More recently, the Covid pandemic of 2019–21 caused a major economic contraction and social disruption. It was followed by a rebound that has fuelled high inflation. The energy crisis that Putin’s war in Ukraine has unleashed is aggravating inflation. The increasing frequency of extreme weather events due to climate change (extended droughts, forest fires and flooding) are intensifying these shocks.
Several of the major economic disruptions that occurred at the end the of twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first were the direct result of policy decisions. Some of these were initiated by centrist governments of the liberal left. In 1999, the Clinton administration deregulated the financial markets with the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act. This law largely neutralized Roosevelt’s Glass–Steagall Act, enacted in 1933 to prevent banks from engaging in speculative lending and investment. Clinton then approved the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in December 2000. This legislation exempted derivatives from federal government control.5 The New Labour government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown pursued similar policies of financial deregulation during the same period. The crash of 2007–8 was preceded by smaller-scale, more local meltdowns in Savings and Loans associations, extending from the mid-1980s through to the mid-1990s. These were also made possible through congressional legislation removing many of the constraints on the lending industry in the 1980s.
Deregulation was instrumental in creating a highly globalized market for capital investment, loans and derivatives. Hedge funds and investors are able to chase short-term profitable returns across the world, buying and selling financial products anywhere, virtually without constraint. This rapid movement of large amounts of capital around the world has had a profound effect on the development of national and regional economies.
Brexit is another instance of a government policy decision that generated significant economic damage. Its implementation coincided with the disruptions of Covid, and so it was initially difficult to assess its impact accurately. As the pandemic began to recede, the extent of Brexit’s negative influence on the British economy has become increasingly apparent. The effects include a substantial reduction in the UK’s trade with both EU and non-EU countries, a decline in the level of foreign investment that it attracts, a rise in the price of imported goods and an acute labour shortage across a wide range of services and industries.6
The deregulation of financial markets that produced the crashes of the 1980s, the 1990s and 2008 was driven by the interests of bankers and investment agencies. It facilitated economic globalization. By contrast Brexit was motivated by anti-globalist sentiment. It was packaged as the promise to reclaim ‘sovereignty’ from the EU. Its advocates harnessed nationalist and isolationist impulses to achieve electoral endorsement, with these frequently spilling into xenophobia in the course of the referendum campaign.
From our current perspective, we can see that the early 1970s marked the end of the postwar era. At the conclusion of the first quarter of the twenty-first century we are witnessing the unravelling of the institutions that sustained the stability that those years afforded. Many people who grew up in the postwar era tend to see the features of this period as the norm. They regard the increasing chaos of the following years as exceptional departures from that norm. In fact there are good reasons to doubt this assumption. Piketty (2014) provides extensive evidence from tax receipts and other financial records, in a variety of countries, across several centuries, in support of the view that the postwar era was highly exceptional as a time of extended growth and reduction in income inequality. The economic profiles of earlier historical periods more closely resemble those of the years that have come after this era. To get a better sense of what might be conditioning the political breakdown on display now, it is worth considering some of the deeper, long-term structural patterns that extend over many years.
1.3 Globalization and Inequality7
Economists have identified two major periods of globalization over the past two centuries. Figure 1, from Petri and Banga (2020), shows the historical trend of world trade as a percentage of world gross domestic product (GDP) from 1820 to 2020. It rose from 10 per cent in 1820 to a peak of 15 per cent in 1910, and then fell in the first half the twentieth century as a result of the two world wars and the intervening depression. The second wave began in 1970, reaching a peak of 25 per cent in 2008. It declined in the wake of the financial crash, and then recovered to a plateau of ~22 per cent. The pandemic and recent economic disruptions, as well as political tensions between Western countries and China, have produced a levelling-off of the trajectory.
Figure 1:Value of world exports as a share of world GDP. From Petri and Banga (2020), using data from Fouquin and Hugot (2016).
Both periods of globalization were in part driven by technological innovation, and they involved major economic change. During the nineteenth century and early twentieth steamships and railways revolutionized transportation. The telegraph, followed by the telephone, transformed communication. Mass production lines allowed for the large-scale manufacture of standardized goods in a relatively short period of time. The second wave of globalization was facilitated by computers and digital communication, more efficient shipping (containers and cargo flights), improved manufacturing systems and high-yield intensive agriculture.8
The graph in Figure 2, from Chancel and Piketty (2021), shows the global Gini inequality index for the years 1820 to 2020.9 The trajectories in the growth of inequality, and their peaks, as well as their troughs, run roughly parallel to those of the globalization graph in Figure 1.
Figure 2:Global Gini index 1820–2020. From Chancel and Piketty (2021).
Chancel and Piketty distinguish two dimensions of inequality, one between countries, and the other within countries. The first is measured in terms of relative GDP, on the basis of the simplifying assumption that the residents of each country earn the same income. The second is determined through distribution of income in each country, normalizing all countries to the same level of GDP. Their data for the past two centuries reveals a surprising and important pattern. While both types of inequality rose during the first period of globalization, they diverged in the second, moving in opposite directions. Between-country inequality declined sharply from 1980 through to 2020, while within-country inequality rose during this time. Their graph, given in Figure 3, shows this divergence clearly.
Figure 3:Inequality between and within countries, measured as the ratio of the top 10 per cent average income to the bottom 50 per cent average income. From Chancel and Piketty (2021).
Globalization in the nineteenth century and early twentieth took place under the colonialist regimes of European countries. They used their colonies in America, Africa and Asia as sources of raw materials and markets for manufactured products, as well as a reservoir of cheap (often enslaved) labour. The rapid industrialization that Europe and North America experienced generated inequality along both dimensions. A large gap opened up between industrialized Western countries and the rest of the world, much of which they had colonized. The distribution of income within Western countries also became increasingly unequal, with the concentration of capital in the property- and capital-owning classes. However, the global effect of this inequality was smaller than the trend to inequality among countries.
In the second wave of globalization, there has been a substantial movement of industrial production from the West, most noticeably the US and the UK, to East Asian countries, in particular China and India. This has reduced the difference in GDP between some of these developing countries and the West. It has lifted large numbers of people in Asia out of poverty, However, this process has greatly exacerbated inequality both within Western countries and in the developing countries that have benefitted from substantial growth.
Service industries have replaced manufacturing as a major source of employment in the West. Wages have remained stagnant or declined for much of the middle and working classes. Job security has become elusive, and working conditions have become precarious, with benefits disappearing.10 Manufacturing towns in many of these countries have been hollowed out, and rural populations have suffered a decline in their relative living standards.
By contrast, the top 10 per cent of the global hierarchy has benefitted from a significant rise, with the top 1 per cent now controlling a very large proportion of the world’s income. This has produced a cleavage between people with higher education and technical skills on one side and the lower sectors of the income and education scale on the other. The former are concentrated in urban/suburban centres, while many of the latter are either in rural areas or in poorer inner-city neighbourhoods.
The differential effects of the growth that globalization has generated are frequently represented by an ‘elephant’ curve.11 This chart displays the rising share of growth in the Asian economies, concentrated in the bottom 50 per cent of the income percentile, followed by a sharp decline in the middle and lower classes of the developed economies, at the 70–90 percentiles. The top 10 per cent and 1 per cent exhibit a steep rise. The line of the graph traces the outline of an elephant with a trunk at the right. Chancel and Piketty’s version of this chart is in Figure 4.
Figure 4:An elephant curve of global income distribution from 1980 to 2020. From Chancel and Piketty (2021).
Milanovic (2023) observes that the rapid rise of China’s GDP over the past two decades has reduced global inequality, while intensifying inequality within countries, particularly in the West. Middle- and working-class income groups in Western countries have slipped down the global income distribution percentiles during this period, while the wealthy have retained their relative international positions. Milanovic also notes that because India, Africa and Latin America have not experienced the sort of economic growth that China has, they have not contributed significantly to a reduction in between-country inequality. They remain at the lower end of world income, although India has experienced an improvement in its situation.
We have been representing inequality as differences among percentiles of income distribution. It is worth noting that these differences are accentuated when one measures wealth, rather than income. This is natural, given that most wealth is income accumulated through time.12 The distinction between the two is clearly shown in Figure 5, which gives Chancel et al.’s (2022) graph for global income versus wealth distribution in 2022.
Figure 5:Global income and wealth distribution for 2022. From Chancel et al. (2022).
An additional feature of this issue worth noting is the rapid decline of publicly owned wealth, and the concomitant rise of private wealth, since 1980, in both the developed and the developing world. Alvaredo et al. (2018) describe this trend in detail. It is the direct result of large-scale privatization of assets and services. One of its consequences is that governments have increasingly limited resources for providing universally accessible public services, available to lower-income groups. The privatization of rail, water and energy companies in the UK, as well as the sale of British local council housing, illustrates this phenomenon.
The work that we have summarized here shows a strong correlation between globalization and within-country inequality, particularly in the second globalization wave of 1970–2008. While the correlation indicates a connection, it does not show that globalization causes inequality. The former is the vehicle of major economic change, which increases integration of world markets and expands wealth. However, the additional wealth that it creates could, in principle, be distributed in a way that reduces in-country inequality, or that leaves it unaffected.
The sharp rise in income differences that has accompanied globalization is, to a large extent, the result of the economic and social policies that governments have adopted during this period. In the West, in particular, the redistributive mechanisms of progressive income tax and the social programmes of the welfare state have been pared down. Advocates of these ‘supply side’ policies justify them on the grounds that tax and spending cuts create growth and increase employment, while avoiding inflation. They reason that the resulting inequality is the price of economic expansion, which trickles down to the lower income groups. In fact, the available evidence strongly indicates that the main assumptions of this view are false. In a study of eighteen Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, for the years 1965–2015, Hope and Limberg (2020) show that tax cuts on the highest income brackets produce significant inequality, but they have no measurable impact on GDP or employment. Hope and Limberg demonstrate that these effects are robust, at least through the medium term from the point in time when the tax cuts are made.
Although globalization, in itself, cannot be regarded as the agent of inequality, it has been accompanied by wrenching economic and social dislocation among large numbers of people who have not benefitted from the growth that it has yielded. This is particularly true of the pressed middle and lower classes in developed economies, and the rural poor, both in the West and in the developing world. That many governments have not managed these transitions in a way that ameliorates their effects has created a deep sense of abandonment and helplessness among those who have lost out in the new economy that emerged after the postwar era.
Many of these people associate globalization with the dispossession that they have experienced. They have come to regard the educated urban beneficiaries of this economy as manipulators of a system that has cast them aside. While the roots of their discontent may be economic and class based, they are increasingly prone to express their frustrations in cultural and ethnic terms. This has led to cultural warfare, in which ethno-nationalist politicians have mobilized working-class and rural people for a campaign against cosmopolitan elites. They portray the beneficiaries of the globalized economy as agents of exploitation and as a malign foreign influence. On the opposing side of this clash, much of the left has become gentrified, and it has lost touch with large swaths of the disadvantaged classes it once represented. Its supporters now view them with fear and contempt.
The three forms of extremism that dominate current radical political activism have all defined themselves as responses to what they take to be the effects of globalization. In fact, the main driver of this response appears to be the growing concentration of wealth upwards in a diminishing sector of the income scale. This effect is largely the result of economic policy choices, which are neither wise nor inevitable. However, globalization has helped to generate the disruption of traditional social patterns, through outsourcing of manufacturing, an influx of immigrants and changing demographic profiles. Alongside rising inequality, these changes have produced a growing sense of acute disaffection among those who are disproportionately affected by them.
These movements are, then, anti-globalist reactions to growing inequality combined with rapid economic and social change. The ‘populist’ character of anti-globalist movements derives from their view that the beneficiaries of the new economy are members of an international elite. They see this elite as orchestrating the world economic and political order for the purpose of enriching themselves at the expense of those who have been left behind by rapid change.13
The advent of social media has catalysed the formation of radical anti-globalism by giving extreme voices access to instant publication, with universal accessibility. Mainstream news media have increasingly lost traction in this environment, where many people have come to rely on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Tik Tok for their news and their understanding of events. The tech companies that host these platforms frequently amplify extreme views and disinformation campaigns, to maximize the advertising revenue that they generate.14
Social media are a product of the digital revolution that has facilitated the second wave of globalization. They did not create the extremist movements that use them to propagate their views. Such movements have taken over societies in the past, without the benefit of digital technology. However, these media have greatly promoted the dissemination and entrenchment of extremism across the world. They allow one to broadcast one’s thoughts to millions of followers through posts typed or videoed on a mobile phone, without filter or intermediary. The power of mass communication is now available, at minimal cost, to anyone who cares to use it, for whatever purpose they wish to pursue. Radical purveyors of disinformation and conspiracy theories have made strikingly effective use of this inexpensive route to influence. The result is that very large numbers of social media users are exposed to ideas and information from a very limited set of highly partisan sources. They are not forced to contend with alternative news or opinions that run counter to the extreme attitudes that they are consuming. This creates a closed propaganda loop designed to reinforce ungrounded and dangerous attitudes.
1.4 Jews and Conspiracies: The Origins of Political Antisemitism
The first period of globalization in the nineteenth century was marked by rapid growth through industrialization in Europe and North America. Figure 6 shows the increase in the GDP of different regions from 1820 to 1913. European output increased from 30 per cent of World GDP to 46 per cent in this time. Much of this growth was concentrated in Western Europe. It produced major changes in the economic and social structure of the continent. Large sections of the peasant and rural population were displaced. Urbanization increased rapidly. Traditional craftspeople lost their livelihoods to manufacturing. A growing industrial working class filled the cities, experiencing comparatively low wages and poor living conditions. The professional and commercial middle classes expanded in size and political influence. As we saw in Figures 2 and 3, there was a significant rise in both between-country and in-country inequality during this century, and Europe was part of this pattern.
Figure 6:Growth in regional GDP by continent in 1990 US dollars. From Berend (2006), published online by Statista.
These economic and social changes were accompanied by political conflicts. The nineteenth century saw the rise of nationalism in Europe, with cultural and linguistic communities demanding independence from multinational empires and the aristocratic regimes that ruled them. The initial wave of revolutionary uprisings in 1848 was both nationalist and democratic in character. These uprisings demanded sovereignty and free political institutions. They did not, however, succeed in displacing the empires and the aristocracies at which they were directed. In the latter half of the century the movements for nationalism and democracy tended to diverge. Many nationalist groups took on an exclusionary ethnocentric focus. Revolutionary socialists and anarchists pursued the struggle for democracy. Extreme ideologies and conflict became increasingly dominant elements of European public life. Xenophobia and antisemitism developed into organized political forces. These movements were, at least in part, fuelled by a reaction against rapid industrialization, and the social changes that it created.
Until the nineteenth century, hostility to Jews was expressed primarily in religious terms. In most European countries, Jews were the only substantial non-Christian minority. In the second half of that century, with the rise of nationalism, political antisemitism emerged as a powerful force.15 It traded on the view of Jews as a foreign presence. Willhelm Marr published his pamphlet Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum (The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism) in 1879, and in the same year he organized the Antisemiten-Liga (League of Antisemites) in Germany. Marr had started his political career as a left-wing democrat in the revolutions of 1848. With the failure of these uprisings he moved from liberal nationalism to ethnocentric pan-Germanism, placing a notion of racial purity at its core. He stressed that he was entirely uninterested in the religious beliefs of Judaism, and that he had no sympathy for religiously based anti-Jewish prejudice. He misappropriated the linguistic category Semitic, which denotes a class of phylogenetically related languages of the Middle East and East Africa, to describe Jews as a racial group. This provided the terminology for anti-Jewish racism formulated as a political programme.
