I see the period of 1914 to 1941 as globalization crisis. And what I worry about is that we are to some extent repeating this.
There was a first globalization that starts in the 1870s. Things seem to be going pretty well—you know, Victorian theories of progress and so on, lots of global commerce, Suez Canal, Panama Canal. All these things which seem to be building one world. And then bang—there’s the First World War, and then the 1920s and ’30s, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. And you can see the Holocaust as the low point, the nadir, the final collapse of globalization, because globalization depends upon the idea that, ‘Hey we’re all human, let’s trade things, let’s trade ideas,’ whereas Hitlerian anti-Semitism has the idea that, in fact, some of us aren’t human and anything that’s going wrong in the world can be explained in reference to these unnatural beings.
I worry a little bit now about, just very generally, that with the financial crisis; with the instability in the Middle East; with the Chinese economy tanking; with Russia breaking all the rules in Europe; and with people in Russia, in Europe, in North Africa more freely expressing anti-Semitic views—I worry a bit that we are tilting towards some kind of anti-globalization where the Jews, or somebody else, could become the explanation for why things are going wrong.
