Globalism: naming an enemy, never defining it

From Trump to Orbán, from Wagenknecht to the red-brown convergence: how a vague word became the extremes' favourite weapon against the centre

There is a word that has crossed every radical right movement on the planet over the past decade, from Washington to Buenos Aires by way of Rome, Budapest and Paris, without ever quite pausing to explain what it actually means. That word is "globalism," and it is precisely its vagueness that makes it so effective: it does not describe a phenomenon, it designates an enemy.

But the more interesting fact, worth isolating straight away, is that this word does not belong to the right alone. The radical left has used it too, often against remarkably similar targets. Sahra Wagenknecht, a historic figure of the German left first in Die Linke and later as founder of her own movement BSW, titled an entire book against what she calls the "fashionable left," accused of embracing the dogmas of cosmopolitanism, globalism, Europeanism, multiculturalism. In Italy and elsewhere, the more careful observers have documented, with appropriate caution, what they call "red-brownism": small but not negligible segments that slide from a left-wing critique of financial capitalism into alliances with right-wing sovereignism, through a shared rejection of "neoliberal globalism."

This is not a curious footnote. It is the clearest confirmation of this piece's thesis. When Giovanni Sartori described polarised pluralism, the system in which competition shifts from the centre towards the margins, he was describing exactly this dynamic: the extremes stop fighting over substance and start recognising each other through a shared enemy, regardless of where their own ideological trajectory began. "Globalism" may be the purest example of this convergence: a word that works identically whether uttered by a sovereigntist minister or a former communist leader, because in both cases it serves the same purpose, not explaining the world, but naming whoever one wishes to expel from it.

It is worth reconstructing its genealogy, because it speaks directly to this autumn's European debate: to Sequi's care home, to Sartori's hollowed-out centre, to the competitiveness Draghi demands and the Union struggles to find. Globalism, as we shall see, was never an analysis. It has always been a rhetorical weapon.

A dusted-off isolationist insult

Donald Trump invented nothing when, during the 2016 campaign, he began hammering the terms "globalism" and "globalists," pitting Americanism against Hillary Clinton's "corrupt globalism," and later, as president, rejecting from the United Nations podium the "ideology of globalism" in the name of the "doctrine of patriotism." The pejorative use of the term had circulated for decades on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States during the Second World War, isolationist wings of the Republican Party were already using it against Franklin D. Roosevelt: in 1943, Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce mocked Vice President Henry Wallace's "globaloney" on the House floor. It was an era in which isolationism, not globalism, was Washington's true compass, right up to Pearl Harbor.

In the twenty-first century, it was far-right activists and propagandists who brought the concept back to the centre of public debate, a convenient tool for building a Manichean opposition between an "us" and a "them" against a backdrop of recession and deep cultural upheaval. Steve Bannon, before becoming Trump's 2016 campaign strategist, built an entire nationalist discourse pitting productive capitalism against the speculative capitalism attributed to "globalist elites." Alex Jones, for his part, went as far as calling globalism "a worldwide digital panopticon control system." Earlier, though, in the 1990s, the term had lived a far more sober academic life: sociologist Ulrich Beck distinguished globalisation, an economic process, from globalism, the ideology that wants the world market to supplant political action. It was only after the 2008 financial crisis, once globalisation stopped appearing a natural and beneficial process, that the radical right appropriated it to channel popular resentment.

An international that speaks the same language

What is striking, and what concerns Europe most directly, is how thoroughly this language has become a genuine esperanto of the illiberal right. Viktor Orbán has used it since his return to power in 2010, and in 2018 he echoed Trump's United Nations words almost verbatim: "We reject the ideology of globalism and stand instead for the culture of patriotism." In a 2016 speech he already spoke of "faceless, occult world powers," with a none-too-subtle reference to George Soros, the Hungarian-American Jewish philanthropist: a classic dog whistle, coded language that evokes without naming the old narrative of a global Jewish conspiracy.

In Italy, Fratelli d'Italia's foundational policy document, the 2017 "Trieste Theses," denounces "unregulated globalism backed by multinationals and high finance with the complicity of the European Union," pitting patriotism and a return to tradition against what it calls "wild globalisation." In France, Marine Le Pen opposes "patriots" to "mondialisme," which she describes as a two-faced totalitarian project, one financial, one jihadist. In Spain, Vox's entire Agenda España is written against "globalist agendas" accused of seeking to destroy the middle classes and national sovereignty. In Brazil, Bolsonaro's former foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo, defined globalism as "a present-day configuration of Marxism." In Argentina, Javier Milei took the same language to the UN General Assembly, describing the organisation as a model of supranational governance by bureaucrats imposing a particular way of life on the world's citizens.

It is no accident that the intellectual foundations of this international are shared. Yoram Hazony's national-conservatism places the rejection of globalism at the second point of its statement of principles. And here lies a detail that ought to give pause to anyone following the European debate in good faith: Hazony's interpretation, that globalism is the imperial project through which the West imposed, after 1945, a world regime founded on supposedly universal human rights, bears a striking resemblance to the one developed by Russian theorist Aleksandr Dugin in his writings on Eurasianist geopolitics. Two intellectual traditions that present themselves as rivals, American conservative Occidentalism and Russian anti-Occidentalism, converge on the same target.

From a word to a conspiracy

The next step, from globalism as ideological critique to globalism as outright conspiracy, was taken publicly in Italy too: this past May, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts stood in the Italian Parliament and called globalism "a conspiracy" and "a selfish, infamous oligarchy." It is the same step that leads straight to the "New World Order," one of the most resilient conspiracy theories of the contemporary era, whose origins trace back to the Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), and which during the pandemic fused with the "Great Reset" theory, according to which the World Economic Forum supposedly used Covid to impose a totalitarian global regime.

This is not a marginal detail. It is the endpoint of a path that begins with a vague accusation against "the elites" and consistently slides into coded antisemitism. As the obsessive references to Soros show, from Orbán to Farage, antisemitism surfaces almost automatically whenever a globalist conspiracy is invoked, even when no one says so explicitly.

A weapon-word, not a diagnosis

Globalism, in the end, is a catch-all term with high conspiratorial potential: a hopelessly vague ideology, embodied by omnipotent, never clearly defined transnational power groups, adaptable to any context, capable of meaning anything and its opposite, from industrial offshoring to immigration, from environmental policy to multilateralism.

What is striking, at the end of this journey, is not so much the variety of targets as the uniformity of the tool. Whether spoken by a former Trump adviser, a Brazilian minister or a Hungarian MP, the rhetorical mechanism is identical: a real, complex, often legitimately criticisable phenomenon, the financialisation of the economy, the erosion of democratic sovereignty, the imbalances of trade globalisation, is compressed into a single, occult, hostile subject. There is no longer any need to argue each problem on its merits. It suffices to name the enemy, and the enemy will do the rest of the rhetorical work.

It is precisely this economy of language that makes it so exportable. It requires no doctrinal coherence, it does not even require its users to agree on what globalism actually is, so long as everyone agrees it must be rejected. And this may be the most uncomfortable fact for anyone in Europe who still responds to these narratives with nothing but data and factual rebuttal: against a word that does not claim to be true, only to be effective, technical refutation is rarely enough.