November 14, 2026

Closer to Home: Why Globalism and State Multiculturalism Have Failed, and What Should Replace Them

By Stuart M. Williams

This essay reflects the personal views of the author.

For a generation, Western leaders sold us two big ideas. The first was globalism: that more and more of the decisions shaping our lives, about trade, law, borders and budgets, should move upward, away from elected national and state governments and toward supranational bodies, international courts and a sprawling network of unelected organizations. The second was multiculturalism as state policy: that governments should manage citizens as separate identity groups, each encouraged to keep apart, rather than ask everyone to share a common civic life.

Both ideas were launched with good intentions. Both have now been tested for decades. And by the evidence, much of it gathered by their own supporters, both have failed. Unless we change course, they will keep failing, for reasons built into their design.

Their own architects called it

You don't have to take my word for it. In October 2010, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel told her party that the approach of people simply living "side by side" had "failed, utterly failed." Four months later, in Munich, Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron said: "Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream. We've failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong." Days after that, France's President Nicolas Sarkozy was asked whether multiculturalism had failed. "My answer is clearly yes, it is a failure," he said. "We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him."

These were not fringe voices. They were the elected leaders of Europe's three largest economies, and all of them made the same point: newcomers were welcome, but the policy of separate development had let everyone down, newcomers included.

Britain had been warned a decade earlier. After the 2001 riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford, the government's own Cantle report found that "many communities operate on the basis of a series of parallel lives" that "often do not seem to touch at any point." Fifteen years later, Dame Louise Casey's 2016 review for the government found segregation and social isolation at worrying levels in parts of the country, and concluded that successive governments had failed to make integration keep pace with the scale of immigration.

Why separate development erodes trust

The deeper problem is trust. Harvard's Robert Putnam, no one's idea of a hard-liner, published a landmark 2007 study, "E Pluribus Unum." He found that in the short run, residents of more diverse US neighborhoods, of all races, tend to "hunker down." Trust, even of their own group, is lower; altruism and community cooperation are rarer; friends are fewer.

To be fair to Putnam, he also wrote that in the long run immigration is likely to bring real cultural and economic benefits, and that "successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities." That caveat is exactly my point. The cure is a shared identity that everyone can join. State multiculturalism does the opposite. It funds, counts and speaks to people through their separate group labels, and so it entrenches the fragmentation Putnam describes. Diversity isn't the failure. Building no common home is.

Globalism hollowed out the places we live

The economic side of the story follows the same pattern: real gains at the top, real losses on the ground. When China joined the world trading system, economists promised that displaced workers would simply move on to better jobs. Research by Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson and Brendan Price estimated that rising Chinese import competition cost the United States 2.0 to 2.4 million jobs between 1999 and 2011. Those losses landed hardest on factory towns across the South and Midwest, including towns not far from here, and many of them never recovered.

Then COVID-19 showed what that dependence costs. The White House's own 2021 supply-chain review found that 87 percent of facilities making active ingredients for generic medicines were outside the United States. When the crisis hit, a country that had spent decades offshoring couldn't reliably make its own masks or secure its own medicines. Efficiency had quietly become fragility.

Even voices inside today's government now admit it. Speaking to the Federalist Society on November 13, Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticized the "weaponization of international law" against national decisions. On trade he said that when jobs were sent overseas, prices did fall, "but you just wiped out a bunch of jobs, gutted a bunch of communities."

Who decides? The democratic deficit

Underneath all of this sits a simple question: who decides? Globalism moves decisions upward to people voters cannot remove. In the European Union, the Commission that proposes laws for 27 nations is appointed, not elected. International courts and agencies increasingly claim to set rules for countries that never consented to them. And a dense web of NGOs, funded from far away, now shapes policy in places where none of its staff will ever live with the results.

When people cannot vote out the decision-makers, they eventually vote out the system. In June 2016, 17.4 million British voters, 51.9 percent on a 72.2 percent turnout, chose to leave the EU. Since then, voters across Europe and here at home have kept sending the same message in election after election. You can call that populism. I call it a democratic signal, and it has been ignored for too long.

There is a bill for all this, too. Governments that hand away control rarely hand away the costs. As of November 12, 2026, US federal debt stood at about $40.6 trillion, according to the Treasury. Policies made far from the people who pay for them tend to be policies nobody feels responsible for paying for.

Nation-building from the outside

Nowhere is the top-down model clearer than in international aid and nation-building. For more than half a century, Western governments, the World Bank, the IMF, United Nations agencies and large NGOs have tried to design prosperity and good government for other countries from the outside. The sums are enormous. William Easterly, a former World Bank economist, wrote in The White Man's Burden (2006) that "the West spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths." In Dead Aid (2009), the economist Dambisa Moyo, who grew up in Zambia, wrote that "in the past fifty years, over US$1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa," and argued that heavy reliance on aid had trapped many countries in a cycle of dependency, corruption, market distortion and further need.

Afghanistan is the starkest recent test. Over 20 years, the United States appropriated $145 billion to rebuild the country. America's own watchdog, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), found that the US government struggled to develop a coherent strategy, to ensure its projects were sustainable and to "tailor efforts to the Afghan context." SIGAR credited real bright spots, including lower child mortality and higher literacy. But in August 2021, the government built at such cost collapsed as the Taliban took Kabul.

Aid has done genuine good, especially in targeted health campaigns. But the grand designs failed for the same reason globalism fails at home. Easterly contrasts "Planners," who impose big blueprints from above, with "Searchers," who find what works on the ground and answer to the people they serve. Plans written in distant capitals, accountable to donors rather than citizens, cannot produce self-governing, self-reliant nations. Ownership has to be local, or it isn't ownership at all.

In my view, this record helps explain how we got here. Globalism and state multiculturalism did not arrive from nowhere; in large part, I believe, they grew out of these failures. When decades of outside-led aid and nation-building did not help struggling countries stand on their own, the fallback was more supranational management of those countries, and large-scale migration out of them, as people understandably went looking for the opportunity their own economies could not provide. What began as stopgaps hardened, over time, into policy orthodoxy. I can't prove that chain of cause and effect, but I find it hard to read the record any other way.

The strongest case for the other side

Fairness demands I acknowledge the best arguments on the other side. Global trade has helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty: the World Bank estimates the share of humanity living in extreme poverty fell from 38 percent in 1990 to under 9 percent today. Cheaper goods have helped American families. And immigrants have made enormous contributions to this country, as entrepreneurs, soldiers, doctors, neighbors and some of the proudest citizens I know.

None of that rescues the policy model. Trade can be good without surrendering self-government. Immigration can succeed without separate development. As Secretary Rubio put it, there is "a difference between coming to live and work in America and coming to be an American." The failure was never the people. It was the choice to move power away from citizens and to stop asking anyone to share a common civic life.

Why it will keep failing

These policies will keep failing because their flaws are structural. Decisions made far away carry no accountability to the people who live with them. Policies that organize citizens by group, rather than as fellow citizens, steadily wear down the trust that every free society runs on. And economies built on long, fragile supply chains trade resilience for a lower price tag, until the next crisis presents the bill. No amount of better branding fixes a design that cuts the link between those who decide and those who live with the consequences.

A better way: government close to home

The alternative isn't isolation, and it isn't hostility to anyone. It is self-government. Nations and states should make their own decisions, as close as possible to the people who live with them. We should insist on a shared civic identity, one language of citizenship and one set of laws for all, and warmly welcome newcomers who choose to join it. And we should rebuild resilient local economies that make essential things at home, so that a crisis overseas does not become an emergency on Main Street.

America's founders understood this. They built a union of self-governing states and kept power close to the people for a reason. Two hundred fifty years on, that idea has outlasted every grand scheme to replace it. It is time we took it seriously again.

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