As CNN host Fareed Zakaria put it after Britain vot­ed to leave the EU, ​“the new pol­i­tics of our age will be not be left ver­sus right, but open ver­sus closed.”

“Glob­al­ists” gen­er­al­ly hail the lib­er­al mar­ket­place as the engine of eco­nom­ic pros­per­i­ty and assail its crit­ics as une­d­u­cat­ed and irra­tional iso­la­tion­ists, while ​“nation­al­ists” instinc­tive­ly iden­ti­fy trade with eco­nom­ic decline (or at least the loss of good work­ing-class jobs), ris­ing inequal­i­ty and a gen­er­al loss of con­trol over the future.

Few issues are receiv­ing a more insipid — and thus more harm­ful — treat­ment in our pub­lic dis­course than world trade. Along with immi­gra­tion, ​“free trade” is now the fore­most sym­bol of a sup­posed either/​or choice between glob­al­ism and nationalism.

Some his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive is first in order. That is the only way to account for the fact that those forces — call them white work­ing class— today most deeply resent­ful of the open mar­ket were among its loud­est cham­pi­ons dur­ing the first three decades after World War II.

The wartime Bret­ton Woods agree­ment togeth­er with the imme­di­ate post-war Mar­shall Plan rein­te­grat­ed the West­ern-plus-Japan­ese economies on the basis of sta­ble cur­ren­cies, expand­ing mar­kets and polit­i­cal democ­ra­cy. After the cat­a­stro­phe of Nazi-era car­tels and hyper-nation­al­ism — includ­ing the Unit­ed States’ own noto­ri­ous Smoot-Haw­ley Tar­iff Act, which set bar­ri­ers of up to 59 per­cent on import­ed goods — West­ern work­ers, gen­er­al­ly well-orga­nized in trade unions, felt as much stake in the ris­ing tide of eco­nom­ic growth as did their boss­es. A slick pam­phlet designed for mass dis­tri­b­u­tion by the Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Labor in 1947 her­ald­ed ​“The Promise of Bret­ton Woods — 5,000,000 Jobs in World Trade.”

In these ear­ly years of glob­al­iza­tion, what we today call the Glob­al South mat­tered main­ly as sources of cheap raw mate­ri­als or as mar­kets for West­ern-pro­duced goods. In hind­sight it is easy to see how the glob­al sys­tem that so long fed Amer­i­can mid­dle-class pros­per­i­ty came back to bite it, once poor coun­tries (in alliance with multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions) devel­oped their own man­u­fac­tur­ing platforms.

In an age of trans­porta­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion rev­o­lu­tions, geog­ra­phy proved less and less a haven for high­er-cost home pro­duc­ers against dis­tant com­peti­tors — and, to be sure, not even that dis­tant. By the NAF­TA era of the mid-1990s, U.S. work­ers were mak­ing ten times the aver­age wage of their Mex­i­can coun­ter­parts. If placed in direct com­pe­ti­tion, how could they pos­si­bly hold onto their jobs?

The ques­tion remains, how­ev­er, how best to tack­le the neg­a­tive effects of glob­al­iza­tion with­out upset­ting the entire apple­cart of world trade? Odd­ly, most oth­er prob­lems of world eco­nom­ic inte­gra­tion have found solu­tions through com­pro­mise, where­as trade has remained the province of extreme either/​or.

In finance and cur­ren­cy crises, for exam­ple, the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund and/​or World Bank reg­u­lar­ly inter­vene to pro­tect a nation­al cur­ren­cy from abrupt free falls. In ocean­ic min­ing and fish­ing, world­wide agree­ments lim­it ter­ri­to­r­i­al over­reach to pre­vent the exhaus­tion of vital resources or whole species. How­ev­er inad­e­quate­ly, even on the cli­mate cri­sis, world pow­ers have accept­ed the prin­ci­ple of lim­its and the need to dis­ci­pline fuel con­sump­tion and car­bon output.

Yet, there is no such move­ment towards an adop­tion of mutu­al­ly-agreed inter­na­tion­al prin­ci­ples on mat­ters of trade. In a polit­i­cal­ly suf­fo­cat­ing man­ner, one is either pro-free trade (most big busi­ness and most Clin­ton-Bush-Oba­ma poli­cies), anti-free trade (Don­ald Trump with a pro­posed 45% tar­iff on Chi­na) or stum­bling in the mid­dle (pro-then-anti-TPP Hillary Clin­ton). The Trans-Pacif­ic Part­ner­ship, in par­tic­u­lar, attempts to over­come First World skep­ti­cism with side agree­ments on labor, affect­ing work­ers in Viet­nam, Malaysia, and Brunei, but the record of enforce­ment for such guar­an­tees is spot­ty at best.

The options here present a sil­ly, self-defeat­ing set of choic­es and one that both work­ers and con­sumers in the Unit­ed States and Europe need quick­ly to transcend.

Inter­est­ing­ly, as ear­ly as the time of Bret­ton Woods, there were voic­es call­ing for a bet­ter inter­na­tion­al archi­tec­ture when it came to world eco­nom­ic inte­gra­tion. The left-of-cen­ter Con­gress of Indus­tri­al Orga­ni­za­tions (CIO) even got ini­tial sup­port from the admin­is­tra­tion of Har­ry Tru­man for the cre­ation of an Inter­na­tion­al Trade Orga­ni­za­tion (along­side the IMF) that would coor­di­nate fur­ther bilat­er­al or mul­ti­lat­er­al trade open­ings with tan­gi­ble com­mit­ments regard­ing employ­ment, devel­op­ment, and invest­ment. Hopes for the ITO col­lapsed when con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­cans cap­tured the Con­gress in 1950. No sim­i­lar idea has been seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered since.

In the spir­it of the ITO, we need a return to the quest for a new world order as under­tak­en at Bret­ton Woods, but this time with a more encom­pass­ing agen­da. Not just finan­cial sta­bil­i­ty, but the reg­u­la­tion of trade and debt must be on the agen­da. Glob­al exchanges should yield equi­table employ­ment as well as enhanced bot­tom lines.

In the case of pro­posed NAF­TA or TPP-type agree­ments, one could imag­ine an actu­al­ized ITO insist­ing on a step lad­der of wage increas­es in the cheap­er-labor coun­tries as well as plans for dis­placed work­ers in the high­er-wage coun­tries before approv­ing mas­sive shake ups. In return, poor coun­tries could count on sig­nif­i­cant debt relief.

Absent a move towards what we might call pro­gres­sive inter­na­tion­al­ism, we are forced to choose between ​“glob­al­ists,” heed­less of the con­se­quences of devel­op­ment for those out­side the pro­fes­sion­al and finan­cial class­es, or ​“nation­al­ists,” sus­pi­cious of and hos­tile towards the world beyond our bor­ders. Nei­ther pos­ture holds out much prospect for eco­nom­ic renew­al, either at home or abroad.