Thumbnail: Olga Rozanova, The Harbour, 1912.
Can free trade be left-wing? Depending on who you ask, this question might seem to be obvious, anachronistic or essential. Free trade can, it would surprise exactly no one, be right-wing - Slobodian’s Globalists revealed as much. It is difficult to argue that the triumphalist neoliberal ascendancy of 1991-2016 represented anything other than the unmitigated victory of antidemocratic free-trading. But does this perspective, rooted in the very recent past, represent the full spectrum of political possibilities available? In Pax Economica: Left Wing Visions of A Free Trade World, Marc William-Palen argues that that our ‘end of history’ goggles might be blinding us to a long and deeply-rooted left-wing tradition of free trade; a tradition needed now more than ever.
The subtitle to Palen’s book is important - his book is not about a close-knit school of thought, like Globalists, but rather a series of ‘visions’ that are, at times, only distantly connected. In Palen’s own words, “Pax Economica’s spectrum of left-wingers broadly encompasses those whose politics were left of centre”, which, over a two-hundred year timespan, gives a lot of leeway. Perhaps as a result, Pax Economica can read more like a collection of essays than a thesis. The frequent repetition of biography contributes to this - Richard Cobden is, I believe, ‘reintroduced’ in each chapter, as are other notable figures such as Norman Angell, Cordell Hull, and Henry George. Still, this is not a flaw in any other regard than style. Left-wing visions of free trade are a fresh, relevant, and legitimate object of study, especially in our moment. Pax Economica, I thought, deftly tackles the intersection of intellectual and social history that such a diverse subject necessarily entails.
Palen’s approach is neither strictly narrative or thematic - although his book traces the left-liberal free trade movement more or less linearly from its origins in the early nineteenth century until today, it also treats the different flavours of left-wing free trading - anti-imperialist, socialist, Christian, and feminist - separately. However, I think that this can be distilled into two (for the purpose of summary, at least) familiar periods: the long nineteenth century and the short twentieth. In the former, left-liberal free trade existed to resist neo-mercantilism and imperialism with the view that both were intertwined with war. After the world wars, however, Palen’s activists change tack. Like their ordoliberal doppelgängers, managing decolonisation and new international institutions became a top priority - even if their solutions differed from those of the ordo-globalists. Often contesting the same rules and institutions, by the new millennium the ordoliberal vision of a free-trade world had supplanted the left-wing one. Today, Palen argues, Fair Trade is the clearest legacy this left-wing free trade history has to offer - for now.
Two rather different individuals dominate the first span of Palen’s narrative: Friedrich List, and Richard Cobden. The first was not a free trader at all; rather, he was their original bête noire - the godfather of neomercantilism. The leading proponent of the protectionist “American System”, the German-American economic theorist wrote the bible of neomercantilism in 1841: The National System of Political Economy. His theory of economic development - rooted in tariffs, Zollverein, and militarism - would be exported globally during the period Hobsbawm dubbed the ‘age of imperialism’, 1875-1914. By the early twentieth century, it would even have infected Britain. List and his followers - Palen counts Bismarck among them - reveal how “protectionism was… synonymous with militarism, jingoism, war, and imperial expansion” during the long nineteenth century; even if it does not appear that way now. This is why List matters for Palen - because the left-wing visions of free trade that grew against him were not motivated by avoiding deadweight losses, or making gains from trade, but by the fear protection leads to anything but doux commerce.
Cobden is the anti-List, and the most important figure in Pax Economica. Those who followed (in particular, Norman Angell, J.A Hobson, and Henry George) never seem to escape his shadow - they are always “Cobdenite intellectuals”. Cobden made his name in the 1840’s, as a leader in the great push against the highly protectionist Corn Laws of post-Napoleonic Britain. Until his death in 1865, he set his sights on all the enemies of free-trade-and-peace: imperial preference from Spain to Germany, American Slavery, British India, the Crimean War, and the Opium Wars. He was a key figure behind the pioneering Cobden-Chevalier treaty of 1860 - arguably the first ever modern free trade agreement. Crucially, Cobden is also the source of the social side of Palen’s story. The “economic peace” movement of the late nineteenth century, with its grassroots base of Quakers, Benthamites, and liberal socialists, was indebted to him. The man dominates Pax Economica, and for good reason. Learning about him was a joy.
These nineteenth century figures live on after 1945 - their torches carried on by peace societies and socialist parties. But it is Cordell Hull, Secretary of State 1933-1944, who exerts the largest presence, if briefly. For between the Second World War and the start of the Cold War, internationalism, free-trade, and co-operation have a moment in the sun. Bretton Woods, and institutions including the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the doomed International Trade Organisation represent as close as had ever been reached to the left-wing vision of a free trade world becoming reality. Cordell Hull, according to Palen, was this “pacifistic programme’s progenitor”. Within short order, the Cold War, accompanied with “neocolonialism , neo-mercantilism, and neoliberalism” would interrupt this, and left-liberal free trade retreated once more to the periphery, where it would remain until at least the nineties, and perhaps still does today. This postwar saga reveals a key difference between the ordoliberals of Globalists and Pax Economica’s free traders. Their battle over the ITO reveals that the left-liberal free traders were not market fundamentalists, and were willing to make compromises with the underdeveloped world, which they saw not as an existential threat to ‘order’, but instead needing of accomodation if the wider project of peaceful economic peace was to prevail. Although not explicitly framed as such, this distinction appears again and again in the background of Palen’s narrative - he calls it the ‘alter-globalisation’ vision.
I have neglected Karl Marx here - after all, Pax Economica’s third chapter is dedicated to him. But, I must admit, it was this section I found the least convincing. Palen tries to argue that Marx spawned a tradition of free trade thought that was more than just the familiar strains of accelerationism. For Marx himself, no such argument is made - Palen is clear the endorsement was “pragmatic” and “in anticipation of the global proletarian revolution [free trade] would help foster”. But it is argued that the “Marx- Manchester” tradition which followed possess genuine free trade sentiments. From reading Pax Economica, however, I just do not see it. If anything, the arguments made for Marx-Manchester seem to indicate precisely the opposite - when authentic free-trading did appear further left than Cobdenism, it was not under the aegis of Marx. The impression from reading is that Henry George, not Marx, is the real godfather of Marx-Manchester. Other than Kautsky, the Marxists who do appear in this section - Rosa Luxembourg, W.E.B De Bois - are closer to List than Cobden. This is the more or less the same after 1945, when Palen points to the survival of the Marx-Manchester tradition in various European trade unions. A pertinent example he cites is the 1959 Godesberg programme of the German SPD, which called explicitly for free trade as a requirement for world peace. Although Palen presents this as Marx-Manchester living on, is it not instead simply the postwar rise of liberal socialism contra Marx? Terence Renaud - Palen’s citation here - believes the latter, writing that “the Marxist holdouts in the party likely cringed” at this aspect of Godesberg. Although this quotation is in the footnote, it is not otherwise mentioned; which is strange, given Renaud is Palen’s source on the matter. Compared to the Cobdenites and Hullian alter-globalists, Marx-Manchester is a difficult concept to pin down historically. I am left wondering if it is a helpful one at all.
Still, it is important to remember what Pax Economica is, and what it is not. Palen does not provide a counter-narrative to Globalists, nor rewrite the intellectual history of the twentieth century. He also does not seriously tackle the issue of why the free-trade left has withered in recent decades, more or less allowing his figures to exit the historical stage quietly, and without much ado. But Pax Economica was never about any of this. First and foremost, it is a history that aims to inspire; to reveal the full breadth of intellectual possibilities, rather than explain their narrowing. There is a touching naïveté to the commercial peace movement, one that might even be attributed to Palen; who, ventriloquising the sentiments of his characters, asks the reader “must a Pax Economica be in opposition to a Pax Americana, Pax Europa, or Pax Atlantica?” In our ‘neomercantilist moment’, where both left and right-wing visions of free trade are on the backfoot, this optimism can be hard to share. It is also difficult to see, as Palen does, organisations like Fair Trade as ‘achievements’ in a substantive sense - Ndongo Samba Sylla reminds us as much. Pushing against such cynicism, however, is Palen’s goal, and for good reason: in matters like this, optimism is a tonic maybe only history can provide.