Commissioned Book Review: Beth Rabinowitz, Defensive Nationalism – Explaining the Rise of Populism and Fascism in the 21st Century

Abstract

This timely and insightful book investigates how defensive nationalism (or ‘populism’) came into being in the twentieth century and asks how this process rhymes with its recent resurgence. The general argument is that to understand the developments that facilitated the rise of populism in the United States and Europe in recent decades, it helps to look again at the same regions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to identify the forces that facilitated an uprush of populism. Each era was preceded by a period of peace, at least between the Great Powers – that is, from 1815 to 1914 and from 1945 to 2020. This enabled a flourishing of international trade and technological innovation. Rabinowitz sees this as the main facilitator of the rise of ‘reactionary movements’ in both eras. To this end, the book centres on a comparison between the Second Industrial Revolution (1860–1910s) and the Digital Revolution (1960–2010s).