Review of The National Interest: Politics After Globalization by Philip Cunliffe (Polity, 2025)
Philip Cunliffe is an associate professor of international relations at University College London, an academic supporter of Brexit, and a prominent contributor to the contrarian right-wing comment site Unherd.
His new book, The National Interest: Politics After Globalization, argues that globalism has hollowed out the nation-state, stripping sovereign institutions of their domestic legitimacy and opening up a potentially terminal rift in Western democracies, with rulers (transnational elites) pitched on one side against the ruled (geographically anchored electorates) on the other.
Cunliffe’s solution to this crisis of representation is for political leaders to embrace the post-global moment to revive “the national interest” as the unifying “lodestar” of twenty-first-century democracy. But what is the national interest, precisely, and how might politicians go about reviving it?
Cunliffe doesn’t say. Instead, he offers a string of conceptual nonspecifics. The national interest, he suggests, isn’t “a thing” but “a way of doing politics,” a “rhetoric of accountability” that enables “ordinary citizens” to exercise “the most political agency, both individually and collectively.”
Cunliffe sees globalism everywhere — even, or especially, where there is none.
What does this mean and how are we, as readers, meant to process such verbiage? It’s not clear; clarity isn’t one of Cunliffe’s strengths. And yet, from here, somehow, things get muddier still. Cunliffe sees globalism everywhere — even, or especially, where there is none.
Secessionist movements are globalist, he writes, because they weaken the power of centralized states. Environmentalism is globalist because it casts climate change as a matter of “human survival.” Even the leftist anti-globalization campaigns of the late 1990s and early 2000s were globalist because they…
Auteur: Jamie Maxwell
