This final chapter provides a concluding summary of the book's main arguments, not through a straightforward outline of the previous chapters, but rather by putting the “crisis of globalization” and the conservative response into a historical context, first alluded to in the second chapter. The first section provides a final summary of conservative anti-globalization, including its strengths and weaknesses. The second section then examines globalization through a focus on current developments in the international order, and how we might think of (“anti-globalization”) alternatives within and beyond this order. Finally, we bring these arguments together by focusing on the relationship between conservative populism and the crisis of liberal democracy.

Conservatism and (anti-)globalization

This book has examined conservative responses to globalization and located the rise of conservative populism in the context of the neoliberal turn from the 1980s and the financial crisis of 2008. In this respect it might be argued that this is one of many books that locates the populist turn in the context of the crisis of globalization, focusing in particular on the so-called left-behinds and the conflict between the national and the global. However, the book has more specifically attempted to take these conservative responses seriously, not only in terms of the analysis of political movements, but also in terms of intellectual traditions and conservative political theory. While some attention has been paid to conservative theory in a number of countries, the main two case studies – Britain and the US – were selected because on the face of it they constituted two very different responses to globalization. British Conservatives offer a global Britain as the alternative to the EU, and American conservatism through Trump offers a supposedly isolationist America-first policy. We have seen, however – not only through these two cases, but other conservative populisms discussed briefly in Chapters 2 and 6 – that the story is more complicated than this. In particular, in drawing on a specific understanding of neoliberalism (Kiely 2018), the argument was made that while the populist revolt is a response to neoliberal globalization, it is not necessarily one that rejects it wholesale, as opposed to the social neoliberalism of the cosmopolitan, multiculturalist third way.