In his account of the beginning of World War I, Europe’s Last Summer , David Fromkin notes that globalization was already well underway prior to 1914, and in fact was in some ways more advanced than at any time since: “You could go to practically anywhere in the world without anyone’s permission. For the most part, you needed no passports, and many had none. The French geographer Andre Siegfried traveled all around the world with no identification other than his visiting card: not even a business card, but a personal one.” Fromkin doesn’t say it, but the rise of passports perhaps is a symptom of a global spread of suspicion and fear, perhaps a product of racial and nationalist ideologies that treated the outsider as a threat.
Capital and goods flowed freely as well: “John Maynard Keynes remembered it, with wonder, as an era without exchange controls or customs barriers. You could bring anything you liked into Britain or send anything out. You could take any amount of currency with you when you traveled, or send (or bring back) any amount of currency; your bank did not report it to the government, as it does today. And if you decided to invest any amount of money in almost any country abroad, there was nobody whose permission had to be asked, nor was permission needed to withdraw that investment and any profits it may have earned when you wanted to do so.
“Even more than today, it was a time of free capital flows and free movements of people and goods. An outstanding current study of the world as of 2000 tells us that there was more globalization before the 1914 war than there is now: ‘much of the final quarter of the twentieth century was spend merely recovering ground lost in the previous seventy-five years.’” (C.A. Bayly makes a similar point in his history of the 19th century.)
All this helps to confirm Fromkin’s point that the Great War remains the landmark event of the twentieth century, in the words of Fritz Stern “the first calamity of the twentieth century . . . from which al other calamities sprang.”
Peter Leithart
Peter J. Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute. He is the author of numerous books on theology, literature, and culture, including Theopolitan, Defending Constantine, and Baptized Body.
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