In Joseph Roth's novel Die Kapuzinergruft, a Polish count bemoans the fate of a chestnut seller. “He is only a chestnut roaster, but he is quite symbolic. Symbolic for the old Monarchy. This gentleman once sold his chestnuts everywhere, through half of Europe one might say. And everywhere where his roasted chestnuts were eaten was Austria, and the Emperor Franz Joseph reigned. Now there is no chestnut without a visa.”Footnote ¹

H. R. Fleischmann, a real Austrian traveling salesman, reflected on the challenges he faced that year. Before World War I, the Habsburg Empire had been the largest free-trade region in Europe, paradise for traveling salesmen. Now, in addition to the “enmity of neighboring countries,” he had to deal with new currencies and exchange rates, tariffs and trade laws, and passport and visa requirements. In addition, he had to learn new languages because no one wanted to buy from a salesman speaking German.Footnote ² He was unsure if he would ever recover his livelihood.

The struggles of Austrian traveling salesmen were not only symbolic of the monarchy's demise. For decades before World War I, the world seemed to shrink. Millions of migrants crossed the globe. The railway and steamship accelerated their journeys, reducing the cost and risk of travel. The world also arrived on the doorsteps of those who stayed at home through the telegraph, radio, newspapers, cinema, exhibitions, and foreign goods. To many observers, the growing interconnection of people and states seemed unstoppable. They believed that it would produce progress, prosperity, and peace.

These illusions were shattered in 1914, when World War I ushered in a quarter century of antiglobalism. Along with entertainments, globalization now seemed to bring death and hunger to people's doorsteps.

There is no question about the decline of global mobility and trade in this period: in 1914, trade accounted for 30 percent of the world economy, an all-time high. By 1933 it had slumped to a low of 10 percent and did not recover until the 1970s. Transatlantic migration, which reached its peak of 2.1 million in 1913, came to a sputtering halt during the war. While trade, migration, and international cooperation recovered briefly during the late 1920s, the Great Depression dealt a decisive blow.Footnote ³

The economic and political history of globalization and deglobalization are critically important, but my focus is on grassroots political and social movements that mobilized against globalism and internationalism between the wars. In Austria, these actors included women who had gone hungry during the Allied naval blockade of World War I, who now believed that they needed to grow their own food. They included unemployed veterans and workers who hoped that they could become self-sufficient by going “back to the land.” And they included many citizens who were deeply disillusioned by the terms imposed on Austria by the Treaty of St. Germain, who feared that the loss of empire had stripped them of any hope of a viable economic future. These individuals did not use the terms “globalization” or “deglobalization” at the time. They spoke instead of “freedom from” versus dependence on the global economy, “internationalism” versus “nationalism,” “sovereignty” and its violation. They promoted “autarky,” “self-sufficiency,” and “economic insulation.” But their message was clear: the global economy's traumatic fluctuations had made their livelihoods more insecure, families more unsettled, and societies more unequal. The ties that bound the world together needed to be undone.

In this essay—and in my broader project—I use the term “antiglobalism” to refer to political, social, or cultural movements that sought to insulate societies from the global economy by mobilizing against policies, people, institutions, and processes associated with globalism or internationalism. Sometimes these movements produced “deglobalization,” the actual slowdown or curtailment of the transnational mobility of people, goods, or capital. Antiglobalism and deglobalization are not simply aliases for nationalism, long recognized as a defining political force throughout the world in 1918.Footnote ⁴ Nationalism and antiglobalism were (and are) often close relations, and nationalist rhetoric often framed interwar arguments for greater autonomy from the global economy. But while many antiglobalists were nationalists, not all nationalists were antiglobalists.

Of course, we cannot separate “deglobalization” from globalization any more than we can separate nationalism and internationalism: the two can only be understood in relationship and reaction to one another.Footnote ⁵ Studying “deglobalization” does not decenter globalization. Indeed, antiglobalists often organized in transnational or global networks (as they do today), a fact often noted by contemporaries. “The only international which seems to be winning these days is the international of the anti-internationalists,” quipped journalist Dorothy Thompson in 1931.Footnote ⁶

And yet, historians have spent the last several decades combing archives for examples of transnational and global connection while mostly ignoring popular reactions or resistance to globalism. This was a reflection of the era of globalization between 1989 and 2008, when historians produced hundreds of books investigating the history of internationalism and the transnational or global movement of people, ideas, and goods. We were all (myself included) looking to “see beyond” the nation-state because it reflected the world in which we then lived. This project is no less a history of the present.

Deglobalization reshaped societies globally. Between the two world wars, powerful antiglobal movements emerged in the United States, Ireland, India, England, Japan, Turkey, Spain, Germany, and Italy. Antiglobal ideas and policies gained credit among imperialists and anticolonial nationalists, in states that had won and lost World War I, on the far left and the far right. World leaders, including Gandhi, Mussolini, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eamon de Valera in Ireland, and Walther Darré in Nazi Germany, all dreamed that economic and cultural revival could be achieved by going “back to the land” and gaining greater individual or national self-sufficiency. Their hopes were shared (and indeed propelled) by millions of would-be homesteaders and settlers across the political spectrum. In my larger project I focus on several of these movements in the United States and in Europe.

In this essay, however, I zoom in on interwar Austria, an epicenter of antiglobalism and deglobalization with a postimperial accent. The dissolution of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov empires meant that Europe now had thirty-eight economic units instead of twenty-six, twenty-seven different currencies instead of thirteen, and customs frontiers that extended an additional six to seven thousand kilometers. Historian Andrea Komlosy has argued that the Habsburg Empire represented a kind of miniature global economy.Footnote ⁷ That perception was shared by contemporaries, and the empire's dissolution into warring nation-states, each with policies of extreme economic nationalism, was perceived at the time as a microcosm of the global economy's implosion.

As Natasha Wheatley has argued, Central Europe was also “ground zero” for the construction of a new international order after World War I.Footnote ⁸ This seems to contradict the idea of the interwar era as an antiglobal moment. But the view that the Habsburg successor states were semisovereign and “immature” democracies in need of Western tutelage was not the only reason internationalists descended on Central Europe. In realms as varied as economics and finance, hunger and food, migration, minority rights, statelessness, and the control of epidemics, new international organizations swarmed the former Habsburg lands precisely to assist victims of deglobalization and to piece together shards of shattered economic and institutional networks.Footnote ⁹

Austria, like Germany, was also an epicenter of antiglobalism because the Paris Peace Treaties transformed large sectors of the population into bitter critics of globalism and liberal internationalism. Their bitterness was exacerbated by hunger. During World War I, Britain had imposed a successful naval blockade on Germany and Austria-Hungary. The effects of the blockade on civilian mortality have been disputed since the end of the war. Regardless of the body count, it was widely associated with mass starvation. By the end of the war, many Viennese people were reduced to an official allotment of 830 calories per day.Footnote ¹⁰

The lesson Central Europeans learned from this experience was that they should never again depend on foreign imports to feed themselves. But as a result of the Paris Peace Treaties, Austria lost around 60 percent of its former territory and three-quarters of its population, including its industrial heartland in Bohemia and its precious oil and grain fields in Galicia. Some Central Europeans hoped that trade relations between the former Habsburg lands could be revived. Oskar Jászi famously insisted that only a “United States of the Danube” with free trade between its members could guarantee the economic viability and security of the Habsburg successor states. Significantly, Jászi promoted federation as a means of achieving economic autarky, which he called “an intrinsic test of a viable polity.” The United States of the Danube, he argued, would possess “such a wealth of natural, climatological, and ethnographic resources” that autarky would be more attainable in this imagined state than in almost any other polity in world history.Footnote ¹¹

But newly empowered nationalist regimes in Belgrade, Bucharest, and Prague had no interest in a Danube federation that sounded much like the Habsburg Empire.Footnote ¹² In Austria, meanwhile, most citizens chose to look toward Germany rather than Hungary for economic salvation. Historians have long observed that Austrian demands for Anschluss in 1918 were a product of anxieties about economic survival. But these demands should also be situated in the broader context of deglobalization. It was not simply that Austria had shrunk. The problem was that even as the logic of deglobalization and national “self-determination” seemed to require the creation of “small states” between Germany and Russia, tariff walls, economic nationalism, and migration restrictions made the survival of small states more challenging than ever.

The consensus was that Austria could not feed itself. The Neue Freie Presse stated, “We cannot become … a sort of poorhouse of Europe that is maintained by charitable donations. A state can only remain upright if it has the basic requirements for viability.… The regions that once supplied us with food in exchange for industrial products are now closed off and have spiteful economic policies.”Footnote ¹³ Karl Renner, Austria's first chancellor, believed that World War I had been waged “between two imperialisms, that of the Allies, and that of the Central Powers, for domination of the global economy.” But in the end, he concluded, the global economy was defeated. “As a consequence of the war we not only have no free trade, but protective tariffs in every country, direct barriers against foreign goods in every country, and often against foreign people as well. In place of the freedom of all nations, for the first time in history we have a situation in which entire nations are in debt slavery to others.”Footnote ¹⁴ Popular protests echoed these sentiments. A petition from the Lower Austrian business association warned that the Austrian state would be “not only economically unviable but also perpetually subservient,” reduced to a colonial “vassal” or “slave colony.”Footnote ¹⁵

Larry Wolff has recently suggested that Woodrow Wilson and his advisors encouraged the use of the language of “slavery” and “emancipation” in East Central Europe after the war. Wilson liked to compare himself to Lincoln (in spite of having segregated the federal government), an emancipator of the “enslaved” peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. That language was widely adopted by Europeans protesting the peace treaties. A telegram issued by members of the Austrian Christian Social Party and German Freedom Party in May 1919 warned, “We will not allow ourselves with our wives and children to be sentenced to death or eternal economic slavery.… If the Entente wants to prepare a grave for us, all of Europe will be destroyed with us.”Footnote ¹⁶ When these protesters invoked “slavery” they were talking about dependence on the global economy for food supplies—in other words, subservience to foreign powers. The opposite of “slavery,” in their imagination, was greater self-sufficiency at the level of the individual and the nation.

The first step on the road to self-sufficiency was to plant a garden. The size, place, and kind of garden was subject to debate. What would be called the settlement movement in Austria began at the grassroots, as Austrians literally tried to raise food from grass and roots. This movement included many different and sometimes competing plans for achieving self-sufficiency in food production, from the creation of small urban gardens to suburban garden cities to the full-blown colonization of supposedly underutilized farmland. All these ideas had international origins and predated World War I. These settlement movements were originally imagined as solutions to a broad range of social and political problems, such as housing shortages, unemployment, and the social, cultural, and biological dangers associated with urbanization. In Germany before World War I, the settlement movement was already linked to anxieties about insufficient “living space” or Lebensraum, as well as efforts to prevent the “Polonization” of eastern territories.Footnote ¹⁷

During and after the war, however, the settlement movement gained new meaning in the campaign for greater self-sufficiency. In Vienna, so-called wild settlements spread around the city before the war ended, as unemployed workers and returning soldiers occupied parkland; built dwellings out of wood planks, waste material, and dirt; and ate what they could grow. In 1915, Viennese city officials ordered potatoes to be planted in parks. There were at least seventy thousand Viennese allotment gardeners at the end of the war, and they organized themselves into a mass movement, demanding government support. In one protest, one hundred thousand settlers marched on the Ringstrasse of Vienna, shouting slogans like “Settler's cooperatives instead of emigration!”Footnote ¹⁸ Here, settlement was not linked to an expansionist search for more territory or Lebensraum. Instead, it represented an explicit response to the loss of territory. The settlement movement was about turning inward rather than outward, colonizing the homeland instead of the rest of the world. “Inner colonization is pure colonial politics,” explained the Austrian Kronenzeitung. “The only difference is that it does not involve the colonization of some foreign land, but rather the colonization of our own homeland.”Footnote ¹⁹

The settlement movement, like antiglobalism more broadly, was politically and ideologically promiscuous. It attracted Christian Socialists and Social Democrats, German nationalists and Agrarians, and anarchists and life reformers. Across the political and cultural spectrum, however, the movement was linked to fantasies of autarky. Social Democratic settlement advocate Hans Kampffmeyer put it simply in 1926, “The less food Austria has to get from abroad, the better it is for its national economy.”Footnote ²⁰ Austrian settlement activists frequently invoked the consequences of World War I and the collapse of global trade in justifying their demands. “Before the First World War, the treasures of the entire earth were available to the European economy.… This situation has fundamentally changed.” It was now necessary for Austrians to exploit their “shrunken Lebensraum” to “open up every possibility that will offer the population the possibility of producing life's necessities from the land.”Footnote ²¹

In this spirit, in September 1926 Josef Wagner and Franz Reichert led a convoy of sixty unemployed workers from Vienna to an abandoned tract of swampy land in Lower Austria. The men came on foot and on trucks, armed with hoes and hacksaws. They called their movement “Colonies in the Homeland.” Wagner and his group had applied to a state fund for veterans for money to settle 120 people. When their application was rejected, they took matters into their own hands. They began cutting down trees and making demands: they would evacuate only if given a large plot of land close to Vienna.Footnote ²² The occupation attracted widespread attention from the press and parliament. Otto Bauer, the leader of the Austrian Social Democrats, blamed the government for encouraging the “displacement of the local agricultural workers by Slovak migrant workers.”Footnote ²³ The problem, from the perspective of the Ministry of Agriculture, was that the land the settlers occupied had no access to clean drinking water. It was unsanitary, swampy, and the site of a recent malaria outbreak. This gap between the perception and reality plagued the settlement movement more broadly. Settlement activists generally insisted that there were thousands of acres of fallow land just begging to be colonized. In fact, much of the unused land in Austria remained uncultivated because it was either too swampy or rocky for farming (particularly in the alpine regions). But the standoff continued for twenty-nine days, until the ministry finally gave in. Around sixty families each received 2.8 acres in a region outside Vienna. Members of Colonies in the Homeland and its offshoots ultimately created five different settlements.Footnote ²⁴

Requests for support for settlement projects flooded government offices. A group of prospective settlers in 1927 invoked the consequence of the dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire. “The loss of our once large economic territory has had catastrophic effects.… It is the duty of all farsighted statesmen to devote every possible effort to save our people from their downfall.… That requires … inner colonization.” Petitioners compared their plans for inner colonization favorably to schemes for overseas settlement. While overseas emigration entailed the “departure of the most valuable part of the population,” inner colonization would preserve human resources for the homeland.Footnote ²⁵

Initially the settlement movement had strong ties to Social Democracy and prewar life-reform movements. Vienna's first Social Democratic mayor, Jakob Reumann, was a critical ally. In 1920, Otto Neurath, the Vienna Circle philosopher (and Social Democrat), cofounded the Austrian Association for Settlement and Small Gardens with Hans Kampffmeyer, a leader of the German garden city movement. The association created an annual exhibition for settlement on the Rathausplatz, attended by four hundred thousand people a week in 1923. The association also created a settler school in 1921 and recruited architects, including Adolf Loos, Josef Frank, and Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky.

Loos, appointed chief architect of Vienna's Municipal Settlement Office in 1922, believed that the movement was nothing less than revolutionary. “This new movement, which has infested all of the residents of the city like a fever, the settlement movement, demands new humans.”Footnote ²⁶ Autarkic ideals were fundamental to his vision. “One often used to speak of Austrian cuisine,” he wrote. “Only today we have realized that this cuisine was only possible because there was a state form called the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.” Now that the monarchy was defunct, he argued, “We need to create our own national cuisine. The Bohemian dumpling, the Moravian Buchtel, the Italian schnitzel, all things that were an unshakable part of Viennese cuisine for centuries must now be replaced by local foods.”

Local foods were to be cooked in ideal settlers’ homes, designed by Loos and Schütte-Lihotzky. Creating a revolutionary new man required a revolutionary new home design, the architects believed. These homes were to be filled with light and air and a rational organization of space, equipped with large gardens for self-provisioning. The modern, built-in kitchens Schütte-Lihotzky designed for the first settlement homes were a prototype for the efficient Frankfurt kitchen, for which she later became famous.Footnote ²⁷

But while progressive urban reformers and architects endorsed settlers’ ambitions, Vienna's Socialist city government began to distance itself from the settlement movement in the 1920s. Instead of designing suburban settlements and single-family homes, the city planners of Red Vienna shifted toward large-scale urban apartment complexes. The percentage of new homes designed for settlers in Vienna declined from 54.9 percent in 1921 to only 4 percent in 1925. Loos resigned from the Municipal Settlement Office in 1924, and Schütte-Lihotzky left for Frankfurt in 1926.Footnote ²⁸ Increasingly, the settlement movement shifted toward the right.

Red Vienna's shift away from garden settlements and toward the mass housing complex was animated precisely by the concern that workers who spent too much of their free time gardening would have no time for political meetings. On the right, meanwhile, many activists supported settlements because they seemed to reduce the threat of working-class political agitation. They also hoped that settlements would restore “traditional” gender and family roles. Albert Gessmann, who cofounded the Christian Social Party with Karl Lueger, became a strong supporter of the movement in the 1930s. In 1932 Gessmann claimed that in settlements, “The work of the children by the mother's side will have beneficial effects on the education of the children and give new meaning to the family life of the worker.”Footnote ²⁹ In fact, female settlers often had a particularly hard life, working thirteen- to fourteen-hour days to create “self-sufficient” households.Footnote ³⁰ Conservative women, however, praised settlements as the solution to what they called the “new female question.” In 1932, Clara Friedländer, vice president of the Austrian Women's Party, commended settlers’ wives for giving up paid work, leaving their jobs free for men. “Among settlers, marriage recovers its old meaning: a union of equals founded to raise the next generation,” she claimed.Footnote ³¹

In Austria and beyond, antiglobalists often promoted settlement in terms of a “return” to more traditional gender roles. They associated the global economy and its fluctuations with a disruption of those roles. Mass migration broke up families; male unemployment threatened the role of men as providers. The settlement movement would enable men to become “self-sufficient” providers. It would also bring care work and production that had been outsourced to the wage economy back into the home. The entire homesteading ideal relied on a great deal of unpaid labor by women and children.

While many Austrian Social Democrats were uneasy about settlement projects by the late 1920s, the Great Depression and mass unemployment cured them of this ambivalence. In the early 1930s, rural settlement, self-sufficiency, and “inner colonization” appeared to offer a last hope for shelter from the freefalling global economy. Even socialists supported Vienna's first so-called Stadtrandsiedlung, or “settlement on the edge of the city,” in 1932, choosing settlers based on their loyalty to the Socialist Party.Footnote ³² Then, under the authoritarian Dollfuß regime (beginning in 1932), Interior Minister Franz Bachinger of the Austrian Landbund continued to promote settlement as a way out of the economic abyss. In 1933 Bachinger wrote, “In the context of the great economic difficulties of the present … urban circles have made a discovery that is inborn to those of us in the countryside: a nation must ultimately live from what its own land produces.”Footnote ³³

Not everyone got on the bandwagon, of course. Editors of the liberal Österreichische Volkswirt jabbed in 1932, “It is difficult to imagine something more absurd than aspirations for autarky in such an exceptionally interdependent country like Austria.”Footnote ³⁴ The liberal Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises was more emphatic. “An economic policy that strives for autarky would mean the downfall of European culture,” he argued.Footnote ³⁵ Quinn Slobodian argues that Austrian economists like von Mises developed what we now think of as “neoliberal” economic principles in response to the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and interwar antiglobalism. They insisted on the need for state and international institutions that would protect markets from the intervention of nationalist, socialist, and antiglobal political movements.Footnote ³⁶

But Von Mises was in the minority in the 1930s. Instead, experts and activists across political lines shared the goals of achieving self-sufficiency at the national and individual levels, along with combatting unemployment. They shared biopolitical aims as well: rural settlement was supposed to improve the health, welfare, and family life of working-class Austrians. This does not mean that right- and left-wing antiglobalism was the same, however. On the right, antiglobalists typically imagined the nation as the primary victim of globalization and internationalism. Their enemies included Jews, Bolshevik internationalists, liberal internationalists, feminist internationalists, migrants and refugees, and foreigners and foreign capitalists. Antiglobalists on the left, meanwhile, were not necessarily antinationalists. But they generally depicted the worker, rather than the nation, as the primary victim of globalization, understanding it in terms of capitalist exploitation. Many left-wing antiglobalists saw rural homesteads and home production as a shelter from the fluctuations of the business cycle. But they simultaneously demanded land reform and new forms of social protection to address the instability and inequality created by the global economy. And they also saw no contradiction between economic self-sufficiency and political internationalism.

There was a large deficit between the hopes invested in the settlement and the returns. Austrian farmers produced three times as many potatoes in 1931 as they had in 1919, twenty times as much sugar, and ten times as much milk.Footnote ³⁷ But the reality of settler life was often harsh and disappointing. Settlers in Leopoldau on the outskirts of Vienna had no schools, doctors, public transit, gas, electricity, sewage, or stores in the 1930s. They were hungry and cold due to a lack of heating. There was never any food left to sell, and alcohol abuse was rampant. One settlement advocate suggested that settlers trade meat and potatoes for a local diet consisting solely of chestnuts, goat's milk, and apples.Footnote ³⁸

Autarky was never realistic. And when attempts at internal colonization failed to sustain them, Austrians eventually returned to the solution they had demanded in 1918: Anschluss. When the Nazis came to power in Germany and eventually in Austria, they did so on a surge of antiglobal rhetoric. In the July 1932 election campaign, Hitler proclaimed, “There's so much international, so much world conscience … there's the League of Nations, the Disarmament Conference, Moscow, the Second International, the Third International—and what did all that produce for Germany?”Footnote ³⁹ The ideal of “Blood and Soil” was formed in opposition to Jewish cosmopolitanism, migration, liberal internationalism, and the global economy. At the first Reich Farmer Day in 1934, Undersecretary of Agriculture Herbert Backe lamented that, in previous decades, “The relationship between the Volk and its territory was blown up by the transnational global economy. Individuals no longer felt bound to the Volk to which they belonged by blood, did not feel rooted in their native soil but instead belonged above all to a global economic community.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Hitler had announced his Four-Year Plan to achieve autarky in 1936, and by 1939, Germany claimed to be 83 percent self-sufficient in food production.Footnote ⁴¹ But even as Nazi propaganda called upon German women to spin their own cloth and grow their own food, experts conceded behind the scenes that autarky was not a realistic goal. One official in the Reichsbank confessed, “Even if we had twenty million sheep, we would only be able to produce 20 percent of the wool we consume domestically.”Footnote ⁴²

Antiglobalism was ultimately both a product of imperial collapse and a source of new imperial projects. The breakup of empires in 1918 stimulated populist movements for greater autonomy from the global economy. But when autarky proved unachievable, Nazi policy makers shifted their sights toward achieving autarky for continental Europe—dominated by Germany. The Nazis promoted an ideal of Grossraumwirtschaft, or a large regional economy. It resembled the Danube Federation or the Pan-European ideal that would inform the European Union, except that it was to serve only German economic interests and was justified with a language of racial and cultural superiority that devalued all non-German lives.Footnote ⁴³

In April 1938, Der Siedler, the publication of the Austrian Association for Settlement and Small Gardens, celebrated the Anschluss with a portrait of Adolf Hitler on its cover, proclaiming Hitler “the liberator of his homeland.” Editors claimed, “The first days of this victory without precedent have hardly passed, and the powerful Reich is already extending a helping hand to settlers in Austria.… The realization of the dream of a small single-family home with a garden is nearly a palpable reality for even the poorest settler who is ready to work.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Local Nazi Party leaders were instructed to select settlers with “German or similar blood” who demonstrated a “strong determination to create a family with children.” Settlers were instructed that their homes should be made out of local materials and adhere to local architectural styles and forms.Footnote ⁴⁵

The expansion of settlements went hand in hand with the removal of Jews and Slavs. One Nazi report concluded that it would be difficult to evaluate the full progress of the settlement movement on the Austrian border with Czechoslovakia “until the full effects of the removal of the Czechs and Jews is determined.”Footnote ⁴⁶ For the Nazis, there was no question that the settlement movement represented the antithesis of globalism. Internationalists could not be settlers because “whoever is oriented internationally has no appreciation of home, of the homeland, or for attachment to the land and therefore to the fatherland,” an Austrian settlement official concluded.Footnote ⁴⁷

It might be tempting to see antiglobal turn of the interwar period solely as a prelude to fascism. The interwar drive for self-sufficiency justified racist forms of imperial conquest, restrictions on migration, and a “return” to traditional gender roles. It helped produce the cult of the single-family home and garden. But it also inspired many initiatives that improved people's lives, from urban gardens to social policies that reduced the precarity caused by the instability of the global economy. Alongside movements for local foods and home production, it stimulated the creation of synthetic substitutes designed to decrease reliance on imports, and it galvanized efforts to increase agricultural production—including technologies that made land more productive and reduced hunger globally.

The collapse of the Austrian Empire was both a consequence of wartime measures to block global trade and mobility and a prelude to new political and social movements for self-sufficiency. The breakdown of the largest integrated economy on the European continent intensified anxieties about what we would today call food and energy independence and inspired new visions of self-sufficiency in a world of small nation-states. The failure of these efforts, in turn, led Nazis to promote what might be called antiglobal imperialism: a form of imperial expansion that was supposed to increase autonomy from the global economy and the international community.

This essay has attempted to reframe the history of interwar Austria in terms of deglobalization and antiglobalism. It inevitably raises questions about our own antiglobal moment. This project was inspired by contemporary events. It began in 2015–16, in the context of a refugee crisis, the election of Donald Trump, the vote for Brexit, the rise of right-wing populist regimes in Poland and Hungary, and antimigrant voices everywhere, including Austria.

I write this in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people are allegedly fleeing cities, seeking homes with gardens where they can socially distance.Footnote ⁴⁸ Local foods and homespun goods have never been more popular, as antiglobalism now has a new focus on environmental sustainability. A move toward self-sufficiency is also evident in Europe. In the wake of the coronavirus, “Austria has to become more self-sufficient,” argued Marion Rauner, an Austrian economist and expert in disaster management. In May 2020 she insisted that Austria needs to produce more of its own food and medical products or rely on close neighbors. “It makes a difference whether drugs come in a few hours by truck or rail from the Czech Republic, for example, or in a few hours by ship from … countries on the Danube, or whether you have to wait more than six weeks for a container coming from China.”Footnote ⁴⁹

It is a good moment to examine the last major era of antiglobalism, to remember the extent to which globalization is not unstoppable or inevitable. But this is not primarily a project about what the past can teach us about the present. Rather, I have been most struck by the ways in which the present has reshaped my understanding of the past—from the effects of World War I and the Great Depression to the rise of fascism. In particular, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire looks different when viewed not only through the lens of war, nationalism, social conflict, or antiimperialism but also as an epicenter of deglobalization. Between the two world wars, the continent was rebuilt to insulate and protect people from globalization's perceived and real negative consequences. After 1945, international leaders and activists would renew efforts to create more equitable and sustainable forms of globalization. Whether or not they succeeded remains to be seen.