About 20 to 30 years ago, globalization was on the rise worldwide. The European Union was actively expanding; the Davos forums were the main event of the year; G7 and G20 summits were held with great fanfare and accompanied by anti-globalization protests; Europe was widely accepting migrants; and developed countries were shifting business to developing ones. In recent years, trade blocs have been falling apart at the seams; countries are increasingly isolating themselves economically; Britain has left the EU; within the EU, the Schengen Agreement is being called into question; and migrants’ rights are being increasingly restricted. In many countries, far-right parties are beginning to win elections. And, of course, there is a major war raging in Europe, and the Middle East is engulfed in conflict—neither of which contributes to the development of trade and relations.
We are launching a series of articles on the new nationalism; here is the first one, based on an interview with Ilya Matveev.
How should we describe what has happened? Is globalization losing out to nationalism?
The Resurgence of Nationalism
It should be noted that even at the height of globalization, the movement of people was never as free as the movement of capital. Borders were open to capital, and as a result, corporations became powerful international players capable of blackmailing governments by moving production and money to another country.
But this has never been the case with people; borders have never been fully opened to migration. Migration during the pre-globalization era, in the 1960s and 1970s, was legally even easier than in the 1980s, 1990s, and later.
But the fact is that the whole world has begun to unite into a single, global production system. And it seemed as though all of this was being controlled by a single class of people. Samuel Huntington coined the term, and Peter Goodman later wrote an entire book, *The Davos Man*, about the people who grew wealthy through globalization and about the prevailing narrative that globalization is a good thing that benefits everyone.
But now, clearly, a reversal is taking place. And generally speaking, it is accurate to say that this is a return to nationalism. It is the resurgence of the nation-state.
During the heyday of globalization, national authority was not only transferred to global institutions—such as the IMF, the World Bank, various transnational organizations (including civil society organizations), and the European Union—but was also devolved to the local and regional levels. In Europe, regions were grouped into supranational structures known as “Euroregions.”
All of this was collectively referred to as multilevel governance, and the national level ceased to be the key one. Sovereignty began to fragment into global, local, and regional spheres. And in the 1990s, for example, there were even articles claiming that we were returning to the Middle Ages, when a person had a local lord, as well as the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope. And a person would declare some kind of loyalty to all of them, finding themselves subject to different sovereigns.
The concept of the nation-state implies that there is only one supreme authority within a given territory, and that the jurisdictions of national governments do not overlap geographically. This gave rise to the concept of a national economy, coordinated from the center—the capital. And that is why, for example, in the 19th century, capital cities were the most powerful: Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg.
And national culture is also shaped for this territory. Everyone here shares roughly the same culture; they’re all taught the same national history in school; they share a common historical imagination; and they have a shared national literature. All of this is part of the national canon. At the height of globalization, much was written about how national culture was becoming a thing of the past, with different cultures interacting with one another and hybridizing. And the idea that there is some distinct German, French, or Russian culture is now largely a thing of the past.
What are we seeing now? The idea of national sovereignty is reemerging in politics. And it’s not just, say, Trump or Putin—they’ve held this view for a long time. But even people who were once champions of globalization are starting to talk about sovereignty. Take, for example, Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, who delivered a famous speech in Davos this year: the old rules-based order is becoming a thing of the past, and national sovereignty is making a comeback. And Canada, for example, must rely on its own strengths and develop its own economy. It cannot depend on global supply chains. It must produce key goods itself or, at the very least, in partnership with friendly countries. It was a speech about sovereignty. Although Mark Carney worked for a long time at Goldman Sachs and served as head of the Bank of Canada and later the Bank of England, he was once an advocate of globalization but has now become a moderate—yet staunch—advocate of sovereignty.
The reason is a separate issue. Of course, he didn't want this himself; rather, the entire system is actually changing.
Another example is an article by Andrei Melnichenko in *The Economist*: big business must align itself with its government’s goals and adhere to these national objectives. And this is the only way to survive and thrive in the new world. Clearly, he had a simple, pragmatic goal—to butter up Putin in some way so that he wouldn’t take away EuroChem and other assets. But at the same time, he also signaled a global shift. Melnichenko could have delivered a speech like this in Davos, and everyone there would have understood him and said: Yes, that’s right—that’s the trend right now.
Melnichenko was also a beneficiary of globalization—a typical global entrepreneur with interests in Russia, but not only in Russia. And he didn’t want to be dependent on Russia; he didn’t even want to live there. But now he says: I’m returning to Russia; I want to build closer ties with the national government.
All of this reflects a global trend. At the political level, it is national sovereignty; at the economic level, it is protectionist measures, tariffs, and industrial policy.
It’s the same with culture. Suddenly, it turned out that national cultures around the world are under attack by some external forces, and they need to be defended immediately. Now that “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) has won the election in Saxony-Anhalt, they’re defending German culture. In other words, national cultures that seemed to be fading into the past have suddenly become a fetish for a huge number of people.
The national is gaining the upper hand over the global and transnational. But why is this happening?
The Poor Who Have Lost Out
There are two main trends. The first: globalization has left many people behind. Their lives have gotten worse. These are the people in the West who live in the “rust belts”—industrial areas where factories are rusting away because they’ve shut down.
National industry used to be tied to national economic coordination. But when capital became global, it began relocating production to wherever it was profitable and coordinating the process from global cities. Saskia Sassen wrote a book about global cities as early as 1991. She showed how the entire global economy is coordinated from global cities and how these cities benefit from globalization. Capital flows there, and firms that serve global business move there. New centers of economic activity are emerging—primarily large cities where the global economy flourishes. But new peripheries are also emerging. These are industrial belts. They are losing out as production is shifted to developing countries. In the late 1990s through the early 2010s, this was called the “China shock.” In the U.S., it gave rise to highly concentrated areas where manufacturing had once been based but then shut down because it became more profitable to produce in China. And groups of discontented people have concentrated in these areas.
Moreover, technological progress is generally making production more efficient, so fewer people are needed to produce the same amount of goods. Industrial employment is declining, and industrial regions are suffering.
José Rodríguez-Pose, an economic geographer, wrote an article titled “The Revenge of Places That Don’t Matter.” In other words, “the revenge of the hinterlands.” The hinterlands around the world are rising up against globalization. And they identify with nationalist politicians who promise to turn back the clock.
Here it is, the first reason: people who have been left behind choose politicians who promise to reverse the trend. They are elected in deindustrializing cities and rural areas that have gained nothing from globalization—on the contrary, they are forced to compete with cheap imports—and these places are turning into the “heartland,” which is rebelling against global forces and beginning to vote for nationalists. And we see this in virtually every country in the West. Both in the U.S. and in Europe—the same process is playing out everywhere: new peripheries are forming, discontent is concentrated there, and these peripheries are beginning to vote for nationalists.
The Rich Who Lost
But there is another reason: capital has not yet become fully global. For example, Chinese business is tied to the state. The Chinese use their government to capture markets and expand their share of them. The Chinese government is concerned about its own brand of Chinese capitalism. And American and European businesses have realized that while China used to be a convenient manufacturing hub, it has now turned into a powerful competitor. This issue has become extremely sensitive. The Chinese, for example, are outcompeting the European automotive industry, on which so much depended. China has become the world’s largest exporter of automobiles.
China acted like a virus here. After all, it was the main engine of globalization. In the 1990s, global businesses celebrated the opening up of a new labor pool. Back then, they calculated that China and Eastern Europe, combined, would provide a billion new workers! It was precisely because of this that the profitability of global businesses—which were moving their production there—skyrocketed. And China was considered a kind of El Dorado. It was viewed not as a threat, but as an opportunity, right up until very recently. And then that opportunity turned into a threat.
Because the Chinese government has always viewed its economy as a national one. But it’s one thing to simply hold that view. For example, Russia has a super-nationalist view of its economy, but no one fears the Russian economy because it is very small. By purchasing power parity, the Chinese economy is already larger than the U.S. economy, let alone the European one. And for some time, there were more Chinese companies than American ones on the Fortune Global 500 list of the world’s largest corporations. Chinese business has surpassed American business in both size and concentration.
At that moment, all other major businesses around the world panicked and decided they needed to align themselves with their governments in order to protect themselves. Developing countries, too, to some extent followed the same path, adopting the same policy of supporting domestic capital.
And we see a two-pronged movement. Capital wants to hide behind national authority; it wants the government to help protect it from China, for example. At the same time, a disgruntled population begins to vote for nationalists. A cross-class coalition emerges: the elites support them to some extent, and certain segments of the population support them as well. Because both the elites and the population support national revenge, it becomes so powerful.
Issues of Identity
Globalization has not only created deindustrializing regions but also led to an extreme concentration of wealth. Capital has become concentrated at the very top. And as a result of the weakening of tax policies and the erosion of redistribution, a class of all-powerful billionaires has emerged that did not exist before. In the U.S., for example, there were no people like Elon Musk until the 1980s.
Economists have a theory that the rise in inequality is due to the post-industrial economy itself, in which the premium for education is higher. In an industrial economy, everyone earns roughly the same wage working in factories. But in a post-industrial economy, people with a college education are paid more. People without a college degree no longer have stable factory jobs with unions and good wages. They start working in the service sector, where they are paid less than they used to be paid in factories. There is a division not only between the very wealthy and everyone else, but also within the group of “everyone else”—a division into white-collar workers, blue-collar workers, and former blue-collar workers, who earn less in the service sector.
All of this is creating pockets of extreme economic deprivation. Who votes for Trump? People without a college education, low-income white men. It’s not just this group, but they make up the core of the MAGA movement.
But why do poor people vote for nationalists? Why do they vote against their own economic interests? This is particularly evident in the U.S. The essence of Trump’s entire policy is redistribution from the poor to the rich. He’s like an anti-Robin Hood. And during his last term as president, he passed a law that cut taxes for the rich, while taxes for the poor either stayed the same or went up. And now he has passed a budget bill under which the rich get tax cuts, while the poor face cuts to benefits, insurance programs, and food stamps (the SNAP program). And the poorer a person is, the more they’ve lost proportionally. And the richer a person is, the more they’ve gained. These are estimates from the Congressional Research Service.
And poor people vote for Trump. Why?
It’s very important to understand that people don’t have just one scale of values in their minds, but two. The first is economic, and the second is a scale of social well-being. And on the first scale, Trump gives them nothing—he only takes away. But on the second scale, he gives them the opportunity to feel like human beings. For example, he speaks directly to the working class—unlike the Democrats. There were many instances when Trump specifically used the term “working class.” And he started doing this before the Democrats began doing so through Bernie Sanders. Trump built his entire campaign on this.
On top of that, anti-immigrant policies are in effect. Unfortunately, people feel better about themselves by belittling others. They’re told: “Yes, you may be poor, but migrants are even lower than you because they aren’t white and have no rights at all.” And so a person feels like they’re somewhere near the bottom of the economic ladder, but at the top of the social well-being ladder.
And this opportunity to feel like someone is so important to people that they start voting for nationalists just to feel good about themselves. Nationalists give them an identity that turns out to be a privileged one.
This is exactly how economic discontent turns into a nationalist vote. People want to feel better about themselves. Elections have just taken place in Saxony-Anhalt, where there are no migrants at all, because it’s a poor region—nobody goes there. If there are any migrants there at all, they’re all in the major cities, but it’s precisely in those cities that support for the AfD is lower. It’s the so-called “backwoods” that are voting for the AfD—places where people have never even seen a migrant. According to polls, for AfD voters, migrants are the most important issue. Even more important than the economy.
This is purely a psychological issue. It has nothing to do with the actual situation. It has to do with their identity and sense of self. The AfD says: “All migrants are savage barbarians, but you Germans are just great.” And people feel: “I’m German.” A positive sense of identity emerges. And it’s the same in France. Those who vote for Le Pen say: “I’m French.” Maybe I’m poor, but I’m French. And “French”—that sounds proud.
There is also a purely populist factor at play: dissatisfaction with the current government. In most parts of Europe (though this is no longer the case in the U.S.), the far right has not yet been in power. Or, at most, they have been junior partners in coalitions. In Germany, there was a “firewall”; in France, a “cordon sanitaire”—unspoken agreements not to cooperate with the AfD and Marine Le Pen in order to keep them out of power.
We managed to keep them out, but that ended up making Le Pen’s party and the AfD symbols of hope—after all, they haven’t been in power, haven’t proven themselves yet; so far, they’ve only made promises. Take the CDU, for example—how long have they been in power? Decades. And things just keep getting worse. So, let’s vote for the AfD; they don’t have a negative track record, and they haven’t really shown their true colors yet.
And Trump has managed to present himself as the kind of underdog that even Black and Latino voters might vote for. What matters to them is that he’s a new face; he’ll “drain the swamp of Washington corruption.”
Russia — the leader
In her book *Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right*, sociologist Arlie Hochschild writes about residents of a coal-mining district in the Appalachians. They lost their jobs and, with them, a source of pride—both in themselves and in the place where they lived, which had become a depressed region. Pride gave way to shame. Trump, in turn, proposes replacing this shame with anger directed at “those to blame”: immigrants, the “establishment,” and liberals.
Hochschild proposes the term “economy of pride,” which explains why people vote against their own material interests.
If Arlie Hochschild had traveled, for example, to Kemerovo, our coal-mining region, she would have found a very similar picture—and one even more pronounced than in the Appalachians. Russia is a country of “stolen pride,” according to Hochschild. And, of course, when Putin came to power, this played a huge role. He restored the symbols of lost or stolen pride. For example, he restored the Soviet national anthem, and people simply felt better about themselves because they had been living in a country where even the anthem was foreign, and the Yeltsin administration claimed that it was not focused on them, but rather on the young, energetic, and efficient people who had adapted to the market.
And then Putin came along and brought back Soviet symbols. The cult of victory in the Great Patriotic War was revived and intensified. Of course, this played a huge role in Putin’s support. The Weimar-style dynamics, in a broad sense, were very noticeable in Russia. In the rest of the world, this is only now taking on such a sharp form, but we in Russia have already been through it. It was relevant in the 2000s, but now that logic—that “we’re poor, but we’ll show the whole world and take over Ukraine”—no longer works. People no longer buy into that explanation; the war has become too painful for them. They want the war to end. It’s unclear why Putin is waging it.
In other words, there are limits to how much you can squeeze out of “stolen pride.” And here in Russia, we’ve reached those limits. In the West, they’re just starting to play the game, but here, the game is already over.
The Mistakes of the Left
The left made a whole series of mistakes, which allowed the right to gain ground.
There was a strategic mistake. Thomas Piketty, in particular, wrote about it in his book *Capital and Ideology*. Center-right parties in the West have always relied on the more affluent. In the past, during the 20th century, those with money—regardless of their education—voted for the right and the conservatives. This included shopkeepers and small business owners. The poor and the working class voted for the left and the social democrats. Those with less money. In the 21st century, center-right parties have maintained their focus on wealthier people—parties like the CDU, for example, or the Tories in England. Left-wing parties have discovered the emergence of a new group of people—urban “white-collar workers”—who have moderate incomes but a high level of education. And the left began to see its audience in these urban professionals. The figures show that the electorate of center-left parties has changed: the working class has shrunk (especially since that class itself was in decline), and people with higher education and jobs in the post-industrial sector have become the core.
An “orphaned” electorate emerged—a group of people with low incomes and no higher education. There was a difficult question: How could a coalition be formed between white-collar and blue-collar workers? In most countries, the Social Democrats simply chose not to address it. They focused their efforts on white-collar workers. The idea was this: the group of poor people without a college education is small and will continue to shrink. Therefore, they are unimportant. It was a completely deliberate strategy.
But these people haven't disappeared anywhere. What’s more, they have come to play a key role in national politics. In the U.S., Republicans have learned to draw them into their orbit and have built a coalition of affluent people and those without a college education. This is a powerful coalition that continues to secure Trump’s victories to this day.
Meanwhile, in Europe, special parties—far-right ones—emerged to cater to the poor without a college education, and they began to rally this group behind them. They grew like wildfire, tapping into an unclaimed voter base. By the time the Social Democrats realized what was happening, it was already too late. These people already considered the Social Democrats to be traitors—if they had ever voted for them in the first place. In general, they no longer saw themselves reflected in the Social Democrats’ agenda at all.
Another problem: support for the left has historically relied on an organized class. In other words, the working class was organized into unions, clubs, and associations. The parties themselves were mass-based, with millions of members. And the left has always relied not merely on electoral institutions, but on the mass organization of people. Today we are seeing a decline in union membership, the disintegration of political parties, a drop in their membership, and, more broadly, the breakdown of social ties between people and of all possible voluntary associations—a phenomenon Robert Putnam wrote about in his book *Bowling Alone* back in the early 2000s. People have become isolated. They have stopped coming together. For the left, this is a serious problem.
But not for the right. Because people vote for the right based on some fantasy of power, of superiority over others. People vote for the left, however, based on class organization. When that class organization was lost, the left faced a huge problem. Rebuilding that organization is much harder than engaging in right-wing demagoguery. It requires actually going out and knocking on doors, convincing people to join the party, to get involved in something. Rebuilding from scratch is a huge and complex task.
The left has also lagged behind when it comes to social media. Now, however, we’re seeing some success. The German Left, for example, doubled its support in Germany, in part due to a successful social media campaign during the 2025 elections. Or take Mamdani in New York—he’s a master communicator who really has a knack for the format. It’s not just about the message, but the format itself—how to present it right so that people watch the posts and enjoy them.
But social media alone won’t solve the left’s problems; the right will always have the upper hand there, and the right-wing agenda will always be more appealing when people are socially isolated. If a person stays at home, they’re more likely to become right-wing. If they interact with other people, they’re more likely to become left-wing.
We need to organize grassroots movements. The left, whenever it has been successful, has always relied precisely on a powerful grassroots social movement. Take Mamdani, for example: a massive movement, with hundreds of thousands of people marching, knocking on doors, canvassing, and talking to their friends. In person, not on social media. It’s the same with the left in Germany. There’s a very powerful grassroots movement, with tens of thousands of activists campaigning in that old, classic way.
Without this, there will be no revival of the left.
What Can Be Done
The current generation of far-right extremists is in many ways similar to historical fascists—for example, in their hypernationalist, xenophobic rhetoric and their reactionary, revanchist ideas. But the difference is that historical fascists were not afraid to seize power through a coup d’état and dismantle democracy itself. They often came to power through democratic elections, but then abolished democracy.
Today’s right-wingers are in no hurry to do so, and we’re all very fortunate that they have no plans for a coup, for example. There are no leftists threatening revolution, which is why the right isn’t as radical in its methods. They generally operate within the framework of the existing representative system—yes, they’re undermining it from within, weakening it, and paving the way for authoritarianism. But all of this is happening gradually. Trump is gradually dismantling American institutions, but he doesn’t declare himself a dictator or a Führer, nor does he abolish democracy as such.
So, it’s still possible to combat the right within the existing institutions. But how? What options are there? For example, there was an attempt to hijack the right’s agenda. The right is against immigrants—and centrists must shift to the right on the immigration issue.
That was a mistake. Because the more people talk about immigrants, the more important the issue becomes, but centrists will never be tougher than the right on immigration. People for whom the anti-immigrant agenda is important will always support the AfD, because the AfD are the most extreme xenophobes and racists. People who are against migrants want to deport everyone in shackles, just like Trump. So, the more anti-immigrant the mainstream agenda becomes in society, the more people vote for the most radical anti-immigrant parties. There are even quantitative studies that show this.
As we can see today, the concept of firewalls doesn't work.
It’s clear that a strong alternative must be put forward. Anti-fascist, anti-right-wing parties must propose some kind of new model—a coherent idea that is economically, politically, and culturally convincing. This is precisely what mainstream parties are afraid to do—because they’re afraid of losing their voters. Some people will like it, while others won’t. That’s why they’re trying to cobble together a Frankenstein’s monster out of various demands. But it doesn’t work because it doesn’t convince anyone. You can sense the insincerity.
We need to propose some kind of strong alternative. I can't say exactly what that will look like. Perhaps an alliance between the far left and traditional social democrats, where they mutually agree on their demands and begin to build a strong coalition around a new social contract: a green agenda and improved conditions for the working class, as during the social democrats’ most successful period in the 1940s–1970s. A cross-class coalition could be built around this. Or the far left could act independently and sharply increase its influence, as Mélenchon has done in France.
In any case, the key issue is a program of change that combines environmental protection, internationalism, and improved living conditions for broad segments of the population.
Ilya Matveev
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