When did the second great era of globalisation end? In a recent Jacobin essay, the sociologist Branko Milanović posits different symbolic endpoints: either Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Chinese imports in 2017, or, more symbolic, Trump’s second accession to power in January 2025. But in Britain, we can say it ended with the Brexit vote of 2016, a provincial revolt against globalisation and its baneful effects on the nation-state that continues to this day, as we observe the nation’s electoral map turn turquoise.
The historian Linda Colley explained in her 1992 book, Britons, how our globe-spanning rivalry with the neighbouring French Other, and commitment to a shared project of imperial expansion, forged a new British identity: centred on Westminster it was forged from the disparate nations of mainland Britain. Three hundred years on, the Reform Party’s electoral conquest of the British heartland shows the same process of nation-building turned inward, or inverted — the globalised Other is now within the nation’s borders, while Westminster, still clinging desperately to one form or another of Global Britain, is the target of provincial rebellion.
As Philip Cunliffe observes in The National Interest: Politics After Globalisation, “the government’s vision of ‘Global Britain’ […] was explicitly devised to neutralize the risk that Brexit Britain might develop a national interest distinct from corporate globalism.” That Global Britain’s architect, the cosmopolitan former mayor of a global city, was also the failed champion of Brexit, emphasises the ironies inherent in Britain disentangling itself from the world economy built around America’s brief imperial moment. But, unlike the last century, Cunliffe points out we no longer have “the civic nor political infrastructure nor the economic dynamism to absorb or reconstitute the societies they have inherited from the twentieth century”.
The most vociferous opponents of Brexit were, as Cunliffe notes with anthropological detachment, the white-collar “clerisy” of globalisation, who in fear of the changing world around them would cling to their privilege. They exist, as they do in every country within America’s imperial reach, detached from the countries that host them: the consumers of globalised liberalism approaching a separate transnational identity of their own. Actual or aspiring provincial administrators of someone else’s empire, spiritual Americans, their world has ended, as abruptly and totally as that of the middleman minorities of the age of British imperial globalisation. Yet what, and who will replace them?
Each writing from a broadly equivalent perch on the anti-imperialist Left, Cunliffe and Milanovic differ in their visions of the world to come. For Cunliffe, a “Brexit Bolshevik”, the break-up of the globalised world-system leads to the revival of the nation-state, if not a return to the nation as once was. For the dismantling of Britain’s national economy from Thatcher onwards to enable neoliberal globalisation has made the old structures impossible to reconfigure. The British bull has been slaughtered, its meat long consumed, its fat rendered away: the skeleton cannot be reassembled. Nation-building is then, for Cunliffe, a project far beyond sprinkling policy documents with references to industrial policy and state capacity. “New reserves of political authority are needed… This is a project that requires a new political form with a new political legitimacy and representation.” It is, in short, a nation-building project for a new nation, as different to what came before it as Colley’s new imperial Britain was from the Early Modern kingdoms which preceded it.
For Cunliffe, “The construction of new nations in the member states of crumbling globalization involves deepening and broadening mass politics and democratic self-government” — which is undeniably what Reform’s victory now represents, to the horror of Britain’s political class. In failing to build a new political form centred around mass democracy and the nation state, he warns, “Brazilianization” is the risk. That is, “societies with no industrial base to guarantee their independence, ramshackle state machines whose lack of capacity is compensated for by authoritarianism”. It is the encroaching petty anarcho-tyranny of the vestigial Westminster state. Just as the Risorgimento required the leaders of the new kingdom, having made Italy, to then make Italians, “we too”, at the tail-end of globalisation “have formally constituted legal states; we do not have nations”.
The task ahead is clear, and daunting: it is a project as risky as any of the great nation-building efforts of history. And yet, like the failed champion of Brexit, who British history will remember primarily for the migratory wave named after him, Nigel Farage is a man ideologically and temperamentally unsuited to the historical moment thrust on him. Politically, loitering around the gilded corridors of Trumpism, vowing a DOGE for every British council, he is no less a spiritual American than any of the relics of globalisation he has come to replace. The Reform Party’s napkin-sketch policy statements are so vague as to be meaningless — what does it mean to say, as Farage has, that Reform will bring back British manufacturing?
“Nigel Farage is a man ideologically and temperamentally unsuited to the historical moment thrust on him.”
It is true to say, as Cunliffe does, that “Thatcher herself had dismantled the national economy that had been built up over the post-war years — an economy organized around national policies and priorities”, so that “the results of her effort to extend the market was to dissolve the nation and with it, the very patriotism that she had appealed to”. Uneasily straddling two distinct and opposing political constituencies — the Thatcherite middle class of southern and eastern England and their economic casualties in the post-industrial north — as an increasingly likely future prime minister, Farage must find a way to appease both rival grievances if he, too, is not to be spat out by the volatile electorate.
A serial beneficiary of protest votes, Farage is, for now, triumphantly riding anger with the economic worldview he supports as much as he is coasting on opposition to the mass immigration it entailed. Just as the British-led period of globalisation shuffled peoples around the world for short-term advantage, whatever the feelings of their new hosts, so did the American moment. The increasingly contested Britain of 2025 is its result. Johnson transmuted a national revolt into a vastly accelerated Global Britain, a full break-neck thrust on the joystick just before the crash. And just like Johnson, Farage is an uneasy figurehead for an inward-looking project of national revival.
Like Cunliffe, Milanović traces the angry populism of the hour to the simple fact that the losers in Globalisation 2.0 were the middle classes of the Western world, squeezed between the growing wealth of their financial overlords at home and the newly affluent workers of Asia. Yet unlike Cunliffe, Milanović sees little prospect of a better settlement for Western voters in revolt. The emerging tariff regime may indeed spell the end of globalisation, ushering in “a new world of nation- and region-specific trade and foreign economic policies, moving away from universalism and internationalism and into neo-mercantilism.” Yet at the same time, for Milanović, “the domestic part of the standard neoliberal package will, if anything, only be reinforced under Trump”, slashing state spending and services at home while dismantling the structures of the Washington Consensus abroad, like a retreating army burning whatever its opponent may find useful. Whether it can hold together the Red Wall and Reform’s North Sea beachhead is yet to be seen.
In all this, the years-long, furious debates about the economic effects of Brexit seem absurd: the impacts so far are a mere rounding error compared to the convulsions ahead, as America rejects the world it created. The present moment is one of the rare historical turning points that shapes the world’s future course. The loss of Britain’s American colonies helped forge a British political consciousness, as Colley shows, and a turn to global empire as London instead set its sights on the riches of Asia. Britain’s imperial dominance brought about the first wave of globalisation, enabling America’s rise, safe from European meddling behind the Royal Navy’s ships and its own tariff walls. As Britain’s empire collapsed, happily dismantled by its American supplanter, the United States then repeated the cycle with China as the new beneficiary. That cycle, too, has now come to an end, and we have entered a new era. And the challenges ahead are greater for Britain than America, which remains a vast continental empire — and perhaps, acquisitively eyeing Canada and Greenland, a still-expanding one. History may yet grant the American empire, as it once did Britain’s, a glorious second act. Yet Britain itself, having reordered its economy as a parasite on the City, and the City as a parasite on America’s imperial order, is left with an unenviable hand to play.
Political change, in Britain, now comes from the provincial fringes, while Westminster tries to hold on to its role as enthusiastic middle-managers for a now vanished order. The British people were an early adopter of the populist revolt against neoliberal globalisation, and the revolt continues to this day, council seat by council seat. The restructuring of British society to fit the neoliberal vision, a process tempered by the Cold War and brought to ruinous success by America’s unexpected victory, brought with it, as Cunliffe observes, Westminster’s self-destruction as either a wielder of meaningful power or as a source of political legitimacy, opening up “‘the void’ between rulers and ruled” that it will soon be Farage’s role to fill. Britain entered the era of globalisation as an empire-turned-nation-state: it leaves it as something less, and worse.
It is a narrative of absurdity as much as it is of tragedy: the world-historical drama of the rise and fall of empires, and the reordering of the world economy, leads, via the provincial byways of British politics, to Darren Grimes winning a seat on Durham council. Whether or not this is progress is a question for the beholder: it is change, at any rate. Politically, economically, the current interregnum cannot long continue without ensuring system failure. Like a dying star, Global Britain has collapsed inward: the Westminster press now roams around provincial England, reading the shuttered shops, the newly-raised flags and refuse-strewn streets like ominous entrails. Whether Reform can fulfil its name is increasingly an existential question.
