The Trouble With Compulsory Globalism

Epoch Times

04-05-2025

Commentary
For years, I've resisted deploying the word globalism with approbation because international cooperation is a good thing. Travel is glorious and so is the freedom to trade and migrate. How did the practice of freedom as it extends over national juridical lines come to be so widely loathed and disparaged?
There is a complicated story here that speaks to entanglements between states, industry, finance, multinational government structures, and the control of a people over regimes.
The COVID experience revealed all. The response was notably global, nearly all nations locking down in the same way at roughly the same time, enforcing the same protocols and issuing the same remedies (more or less).
The World Health Organization seemed to be calling the shots, with national public health agencies deferring on point after point. The virus itself seems to have emerged from within the structure of multilateral research on both pathogens and possible pharmaceutical countermeasures.
In addition, central banks all over the world cooperated to fund the extreme policy response, printing money like never before to stop full economic collapse under forced closures. Nations like Sweden and Nicaragua that went their own way were demonized by media all over the world in the exact same way.
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National legislatures had no role in the initial lockdowns. They were excluded from decision-making. This means that the people who elected them were disenfranchised too. No one voted for six feet of distance, business closures, and shot mandates. They were imposed by administrative edicts, and nowhere did judicial systems stop them.
Democracy as an idea, plus the rule of law, died in those months and years, deferring always to the global institutions and financial systems that assumed
de facto
control of the planet. It was the most astonishing show of universal power on the historical record.
Given the results, it is hardly a shock to see the backlash, which has centered on a reassertion of the rights of nations and the citizens thereof.
Many defenders of human liberty (right and left) are often uncomfortable with the ethos of the backlash and wonder whether and to what extent there is good historical precedent for reclaiming sovereignty in the name of freedom.
I'm here to say that such a precedent exists, with some discussion of a historical episode that is almost wholly forgotten.
It is well known that the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 included portions that dealt with international monetary settlement (the gold-exchange standard) as well as finance and banking (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank). Many people are also aware of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1948)
What is not known is that GATT was a fallback position. The original draft of Bretton Woods included an International Trade Organization (ITO) that was to be empowered to manage all global trade flows. It was drafted in 1944 and codified in the Havana Charter of 1948. There was a tremendous push at the time on the part of major governments and corporations to ratify this agreement as a treaty.
The ITO was to rule the world, with oligarchs seizing control in the name of globalization.
It was defeated, and why? It was not because of opposition from protectionists and mercantilists. The main opponents of the ITO were in fact free traders and economic libertarians. The campaign to trash the treaty was led by French-American economist Philip Cortney and his barnburner book called
'The ITO Charter is a monument to wishful thinking,' he wrote, 'a bureaucratic dream that ignores the hard realities of national economies. It promises free trade but delivers shackles, binding nations to rules that cannot bend with the storms of inflation or scarcity.'
He and others in his orbit could detect the hand not of freedom in this charter but rather central planning, corporatism, inflationism, fiscal planning, industrial policy, and managed trade—in short, what today is called globalism. He was dead set against it, precisely because he believed it would set back the legitimate cause of free trade and submerge national sovereignty into a bureaucratic morass.
The objections he had were many, but among them were those centered on issues of monetary settlement. Nations would be locked into a tariff regime with no flexibility to adjust currency values based on trade flows. There was a genuine danger under the ITO, he believed, that nations would lack the ability to adapt based on changes in exchange rates or other specifics of time and place. Even though the charter seemed to push free trade, Cortney believed it would ultimately undermine it.
He further believed that if nations were to open up their economies to international competition from all corners of the world, it should be done in a way that was consistent with democratic governance and national plebiscites. An iron-handed global government imposing such a regime would contradict the whole history of the structure against mercantilism, and would likely be abused by the largest firms in industry and finance to game their system in a way that benefited themselves.
What's striking about the argument is that it came from a liberal/libertarian point of view that favored traditional methods of obtaining free trade, while opposing what today would be called globalist means of getting there.
Indeed, Ludwig von Mises
It was Cortney, alongside his ideological compatriots in business and editorial writing, who ultimately torpedoed the Havana Charter and sent the International Trade Organization into the dustbin of history.
To be clear, the rejection of the ITO was not a result of activism by reactionaries, socialists, protectionists, or even economic nationalists. It was rejected by strong proponents of economic liberalism, free trade, and commercial business interests dominated by small- and medium-sized firms that feared being swallowed up by the globalist morass.
These people distrusted bureaucracy in general and global bureaucracy especially. This was a principled generation and they were by then very aware of how something can sound fantastic in rhetoric but be awful in reality. They simply did not trust the gang in charge in those days to hammer out a sustainable trade arrangement for the world.
The rejection of the ITO is how and why we ended up with the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade. It was General, meaning not firm law. It was rooted in Agreement, meaning that no nation would be compelled against its interests. It was about tariffs but did not attempt some grand strategy to equalize all currency valuations. It was informal and not formal, decentralized not centralized.
GATT prevailed until 1995, when the World Trade Organization was shoved through under tremendous media and corporate pressure. It was a revival of the old ITO. By this time, the free-market crowd had lost its sophistication and went all in for the new global agency. As if to confirm Cortney's prediction, the WTO has now been rendered mostly obsolete, scapegoated for economic stagnation, deindustrialization, currency mismatches, and unsettled foreign accounts backed by foreign holdings of US dollar assets.
Now we face a backlash in the form of crude mercantilist policies arriving with fury. America has been the destination for vast products from China, now being blocked by high tariffs. In extraordinary irony, the
New York Times
is
Imagine that!
The balance between national sovereignty and freedom itself is a delicate one. Generations of intellectuals once knew that and were careful never to overthrow one to back the other. To permanently detach governing structures from citizen control, even if only through a periodic plebiscite, courts disaster even on topics like trade, to say nothing of infectious disease and virus research.
Thus has the revolt arrived, exactly as Philip Cortney would have predicted.
From the
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