In 1999, protests at a meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle put globalization under critical scrutiny. Advocates of globalization – above all British prime minister Tony Blair and US president Bill Clinton – had contended that it was a progressive development in world history, giving rise to open and free societies, poverty reduction, universal human rights, and so on. While many of globalization's advocates saw these developments as self-evident (Giddens 1998), the protestors at Seattle argued otherwise. For them globalization was associated with growing inequality, environmental destruction and the erosion of labour rights. Globalization's advocates argued that there was no turning back and that globalization was both inevitable and desirable (Desai 2000, 2002) and that “anti-globalization” was both backward-looking and parochial (Lloyd 2001). Most of this debate was against “anti-globalization” activists who were generally associated with the political Left (Klein 2000), who in turn were at pains to point out that they were not anti-globalization per se. How could they be, when they drew on and utilized new technologies associated with globalization and organized across national boundaries? The argument used by these activists was that they were anti-neoliberal or corporate globalization, challenging North– South and wider inequality, the growing power of corporations, the erosion of the public sphere and the public sector, environmental destruction and then, after 2001, Western militarism and liberal intervention.

More recent years have seen the rise of another kind of anti-globalization. Some of this also questions liberal military intervention, and to some extent the growing power of corporate elites, and sometimes there is hostility to neoliberalism. But this anti-globalization is essentially linked to the political Right and what we will call the populist Far Right (Mudde 2016). This takes the form of nativism and the valorization of certain ethnic groups within countries, a defence of national sovereignty against global forces, a defence of social conservatism against liberal values including multiculturalism and a distrust but not outright rejection of liberal democracy. It involves a populist celebration of authentic peoples and marginalization of other groups within nation states, and thus a hostility to immigration, an impatience with democratic deliberation where liberal elites defend inauthentic groups and a preference for authoritarian executive power.