Tara Zahra, "Against the World"

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Tara Zahra, "Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass

Politics Between the World Wars" (2023)

 

뉴욕 타임즈 서평을 읽고서 도서관에서 빌려다 읽기 시작했다가 아무래도 이건 내 책으로 밑줄 그어가며 읽을 책이란 생각이 들어서 결국 사서 읽은 책이다. 그런데, 다 읽긴 했지만 그러느라고 쓸데없이 시간을 많이 썼다는 생각이 들어서 그 점이 좀 아쉽다. 나는 그냥 도서관 책으로 'Introduction'과 'Conclusion'만 읽었으면 좋았겠다

 

1차대전 종전 후 독립 당시의 Czechoslovakia에 대해서 인상적인 사실들을 알게 됐다: "It was one of the fifteen strongest economy in the world. It had almost 100 percent literacy. It was ... seen as the most 'Weatern' and 'modern' of the new Eastern European states."

 

국가나 지역 사이의 분쟁이나 그 가능성을 전제하면서 세계화 또는 국제주의를 말하기 어렵다. 그리고 국가주의나 민족주의가 그런 분쟁에 이르게 하는 경우가 많다. 결국 대다수 시민들 -- 특히 선진국의 -- 이 세계와 인류가 하나라는 '세계 시민' 정신을 갖게 되는 게 중요하다.

 

 

 

뉴욕 타임즈 서평에서:

 

 

 

Much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was marked by a flourishing internationalism — more travel, more migration, greater cross-border flows of money and goods and ideas. But “globalization,” as we call it today, was never universally beneficial or beloved, and underneath it coursed a growing discontent. Its victims included families separated by emigration; migrants toiling away in dangerous jobs; shopkeepers and farmers ruined by foreign competition. During World War I, blockades disrupted food imports and hundreds of thousands of Central Europeans starved to death. “The importance of food security,” Zahra writes, “had been seared into the bodies of hungry citizens.”

 

Globalization connected people, for good and for ill; they were more vested in — and vulnerable to — whatever happened on the other side of the world. Zahra trains our attention on the nationalists, on the reactionaries, on the back-to-the-land activists on both the left and the right who gained political momentum between the two world wars.