Hans F. Sennholz, “Globalization Under Fire” — Summary

Hans F. Sennholz’s “Globalization Under Fire” is a polemical essay in political economy that defends globalization as peaceful exchange made possible by falling trade barriers, post-Soviet liberalization, capital mobility, and international production. Its governing claim is that globalization is not a conspiracy against workers, nations, or cultures, but an expansion of voluntary cooperation; the true danger lies in protectionist politics, subsidies, and international economic management.

The barriers to international trade continue to fall and "globalization" is moving ahead.

Sennholz frames the late twentieth century as a moment of unusual commercial opening, while stressing that this progress is fragile. Trade and investment require peace, legal security, and confidence; war, nationalist agitation, and anti-market ideology can quickly interrupt them. His opponents are labor unions, environmental groups, agrarian protectionists, and anti-capitalist activists who blame globalization for unemployment, exploitation, pollution, cultural homogenization, and migration. He treats these criticisms as old protectionist impulses in humanitarian language.

A major strand of the essay defends multinational corporations. Sennholz argues that foreign investment brings capital, technology, management, and higher labor productivity to poorer countries, while also benefiting consumers and workers in wealthier ones. He rejects the picture of multinationals as uniquely exploitative, insisting that their ability to hire abroad depends on offering better opportunities than local alternatives.

American corporations operating abroad tend to pay higher wages and set enlightened labor standards to which their ability to attract much foreign labor clearly attests.

The essay’s theoretical core is its defense of private property and market labor relations. Sennholz denies that “human rights” and “property rights” are antagonists, since productive property permits calculation, stewardship, investment, and the division of labor. He also answers Marxian exploitation theory by emphasizing competition, worker mobility, and entrepreneurial exit. Labor markets may contain hardship, but coercive domination is checked more effectively by alternatives than by political controls.

Three market features negate any such power: competition among employers, the mobility of labor itself, and the freedom of self-employment.

Sennholz’s free-trade position is not an uncritical defense of global institutions. He distinguishes open exchange from bureaucratic international management, criticizing the IMF for rescuing inflationary or corrupt governments and the WTO, NAFTA, and the European Union insofar as they preserve subsidies, side agreements, protected industries, and retaliatory mechanisms. His target is therefore double: anti-globalists who would restrict commerce, and political managers who invoke liberalization while maintaining privilege.

The later sections answer claims about globalization’s “dark side.” Sennholz argues that drug traffic, environmental harm, and cultural anxiety do not arise from trade as such. Crime and pollution predate modern globalization, and environmental degradation is worst where ownership is insecure and political power replaces market responsibility. Cultural contact, in his view, need not produce cultural erasure; exchange may widen choice without dissolving inherited identity. He likewise argues that trade and foreign investment reduce migration pressure by improving opportunities abroad.

The conclusion turns historical. Sennholz invokes the Depression-era tariff spiral, especially Hawley-Smoot, as a warning that prosperity can give way to retaliatory nationalism when bad doctrine becomes law. Globalization is therefore not inevitable. It depends on resisting the temptation to blame foreigners, imports, or corporations for domestic distress.

I am fearful that it will repeat the follies of the past and, stirred and prodded by the anti-globalists, strike at international trade.

Overall, “Globalization Under Fire” presents globalization as an extension of liberal economic order: property, contract, competition, specialization, and peaceful interdependence. Its central anxiety is that moralized attacks on trade may revive the very economic nationalism that once deepened international crisis.