Globalism

Lore & Background

The term first entered widespread usage in the United States. The earliest known use of the word is from 1941, recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. In 1943, the book The War for Man's Soul by Ernst Jäckh used the term, but in the context of post-war international order, not to describe Adolf Hitler's global ambitions. While globalization became associated with economy, the origins of the concept are military, bound to the Second World War and its 'Air-Age Globalism.' An awareness of the political significance of the globe as a unitary whole became known as globalism. In their position of unprecedented power, US planners formulated policies to shape a globe-spanning capitalist order centered on the United States. Historian James Peck described this version as 'visionary globalism,' a far-reaching conception of American-centric state globalism using capitalism as a key to its global reach.

Reader's Guide

Globalism emerged as a dominant set of ideologies in the late twentieth century. Manfred Steger distinguishes among different globalisms, such as justice globalism, jihad globalism, and market globalism. Market globalism includes the ideology of neoliberalism. Political scientists Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane generalized the term to argue that globalism refers to any description of a world characterized by networks of connections spanning multi-continental distances, while globalization refers to the increase or decline in the degree of globalism. The term has been used in academic debates about the historical character of globalization. In the 21st century, the term 'the globalists' was popularized by Alex Jones and is now heavily associated with antisemitism, as antisemites frequently appropriate the term 'globalist' to refer to Jews. Globalism has been seen as a pillar of a liberal international order along with democratic governance, open trade, and international institutions.

Did You Know?

• The earliest known use of the word 'globalism' is from 1941, as recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary.
• The term 'the globalists' was popularized by US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in the 21st century.
• Manfred Steger distinguishes among justice globalism, jihad globalism, and market globalism.
• The concept of globalism dates from the 1940s and became a dominant set of ideologies in the late twentieth century.

Military Origins and the Postwar American Vision

The word "globalism" first appeared in print in 1943, when Ernst Jäckh used it in his book The War for Man's Soul to characterize Adolf Hitler's worldwide ambitions. Though the term later became tightly bound to economic integration, its intellectual roots were squarely military, emerging from the total, all-encompassing character of the Second World War and the technological breakthroughs that made the planet feel like a single political arena. Or Rosenboim's statistical analysis of English-language texts confirms that the prefix "global" surged in usage immediately after the war's outbreak. In the aftermath, American planners—sitting atop roughly half the world's wealth while representing only about 6.3 percent of its population, as George F. Kennan's Policy Planning Staff noted in February 1948—crafted a vision of a globe-spanning capitalist order centered on the United States. Historian James Peck labeled this "visionary globalism," a far-reaching, American-centric project that sought to integrate as much of the world as possible into a single economic and political framework, reviving the kind of global economic integration that had collapsed after World War I and the Great Depression.

Theoretical Frameworks and Academic Debates

Political scientists have wrestled with globalism's precise meaning for decades. Paul James, an American academic, frames it as the dominant ideology and subjectivity tied to historically dominant formations of global extension, a definition that deliberately reaches back to pre-modern eras. Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane, key figures in liberal institutionalism, broadened the term to cover any description of a world organized by networks spanning multiple continents, while reserving "globalization" for the measurable increase or decline in the degree of such interconnectedness. Manfred Steger, by contrast, insists that globalism is not a single phenomenon but a family of distinct ideologies—justice globalism, jihad globalism, and market globalism, the last of which encompasses neoliberalism. He warns that collapsing globalism into market globalism alone generates widespread confusion. Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul took that narrow reading in his 2005 book The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World, treating the two as interchangeable and arguing that globalization was already fragmenting into contradictory pieces as citizens reasserted national interests.

Pre-Modern Roots and the Cosmopolitan Tradition

Although globalism is often treated as a modern or even post–World War II phenomenon, its intellectual lineage stretches far deeper. Paul James's definition explicitly acknowledges pre-modern and traditional forms of global extension, pointing to the Roman Empire in the second century AD and, perhaps, to the Greeks of the fifth century BC as early instances of a worldview that transcended local boundaries. Adam Smith, writing in the eighteenth century, embedded ideas about the role of commodities in distinguishing "civilized" peoples from "barbarous" ones within the ideology of empire, offering an early articulation of globalist thinking. In 1788, German Enlightenment writer Christoph Martin Wieland published The Secret of the Order of Cosmopolitans, a work that explored the possibility of transcending national boundaries through enlightened reason. These threads suggest that the impulse to conceive of the world as an interconnected whole is not the exclusive product of capitalism or modernity, but a recurring feature of human political imagination that predates the driving force of global trade by centuries.

Pejorative Reclamation and the Conspiracy Turn

In the 21st century, the term "the globalists" was thrust into popular consciousness largely through the US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who deployed it interchangeably with the ideas of a New World Order and a shadowy deep state. What had been an academic and policy term was rapidly repurposed as a pejorative by far-right movements and conspiracy theorists worldwide. The association has become so entrenched that the word is now heavily linked to antisemitism, as antisemites routinely appropriate "globalist" as a coded reference to Jewish people. This rhetorical shift stands in stark contrast to the term's earlier academic usage, where it described the ideological frameworks underlying international institutions such as the United Nations, NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the European Union—endeavors launched after World War II. The Cold War also shaped the term's meaning, as analysts in the 1970s and 1980s debated a globalism-versus-regionalism dichotomy, with globalists attributing international events to great-power rivalry and regionalists pointing to local causes. The modern pejorative usage has effectively overwritten these nuanced distinctions in public discourse.