Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl, a History professor at the University of Lausanne, dives into the evolution of globalization and the powerful US multinationals driving it. She discusses how corporate giants like General Electric and Coca-Cola shaped government policies and countered opposition from labor movements and nationalists. Schaufelbuehl highlights the historical context of opposing voices from the Global South and examines the shifting sentiments toward globalization today, emphasizing the need for a balanced approach in the face of neoliberalism.
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Globalization As A Political Project
Janick Schaufelbuehl shows globalization was politically constructed by powerful multinational executives, not an inevitable force.
These executives built organizations and lobbied governments to expand trade and investment globally.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Discovery Of The US Council
Schaufelbuehl discovered the US Council for International Business while researching archives during fellowships in the United States.
She found the Council influential yet intentionally low-profile and understudied.
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Multinationals Versus Protectionists
The US Council uniquely represented multinational executives who consistently favored lowering trade and investment barriers.
Other business leaders often supported protectionism to shield domestic jobs.
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Crusading for Globalization: US Multinationals and Their Opponents Since 1945 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) tells the story of an extraordinarily influential group of business executives at the helms of the largest US multinational corporations and their quest to drive globalization forward over the last eight decades. Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl argues that the spectacular expansion of international investment, trade, and production after 1945 cannot be understood without considering the role played by these corporate globalizers and the organization they created, the US Council (today’s United States Council for International Business). By shaping governmental policy through their congressional lobbying and close connections to successive presidential administrations, US Council members, including executives from General Electric, Coca Cola, and IBM, among others, consistently fought for ever more market deregulation, culminating in the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995.
Crusading for Globalization is also a book about those who opposed the growing might of multinationals. In the years immediately after World War II, resistance came from business protectionists, before labor and policymakers from the Global South joined the effort in the early 1970s. Schaufelbuehl breaks new ground by offering a panorama of this early anti-globalization movement, and by showing how the leaders of multinationals organized to limit its political influence. She also examines continuities between this early movement and the opposition to globalization that emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century from the left and the populist right and discusses how business responded by promoting corporate social responsibility and voluntary guidelines. The first book to shed light on what caused corporate executives to pursue a pro-globalization agenda and to examine their methods for dealing with their opponents, Crusading for Globalization reveals the historical roots of today’s disparities in wealth and income distribution.
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