Global Policy Volume 3 . Issue 3 .

September 2012
281

Economic Nationalism: Theory,

History and Prospects
Sam Pryke

Research Article
Wolverhampton University

Abstract
This article makes both a theoretical and empirical contribution to understanding economic nationalism. It does this
first through providing an appropriate definition of the term. Taking issue with the generalised remit of economic
nationalism in recent writings, it suggests that it consists of practices to create, bolster and protect national
economies in the context of world markets. Taking this definition, the subsequent history section identifies economic
nationalism’s rise in the late 19th century, the impetus of crisis after 1929 and its institutionalisation after 1945.
Simultaneously, the accelerating growth of world markets through greater exports undermined the reality of national
economies. This takes us to the period after the financial crash of 2008. In its aftermath, commentators warned of a
resurgence of economic nationalism, that is, protectionism. Some states did increase tariff levels but this has not led
to a generalised increase in barriers to trade in the pursuit of national economies for interrelated reasons: (1) the
integration and therefore interdependency of economies; (2) the complexity of the global economy, making it all but
impossible to separate by nationality; (3) the greater extensity of world markets compared to the mid-20th century; (4)
the redundancy of the various models of economic nationalism.

Policy Implications
• Economic nationalism should be understood as a set of practices to create, bolster and protect national economies
in the context of world markets. The rise and institutionalisation of economic nationalism in the 20th century was
a product of economic crisis, nationalist movements and enlarged states.
• There has been no ‘return of economic nationalism’ as in a generalised rise in protective barriers to trade since the
financial crash of 2011. Unlike the 1930s, sovereign debt has not motivated states to withdraw from global markets.
• The integration, complexity and extensity of the world’s economy mean that a reversal of trade as great as during the
interwar period would entail an economic Armageddon. Whatever future ructions the world’s economy experiences
due, above all, to chronic levels of sovereign debt, policy makers should be mindful of this reality.
• Simultaneously, they should be aware that ongoing instability may entail greater economic nationalism. The key les-
son from the period after the Second World War is relevant now at a more overtly global level: the importance of plan-
ning, regulation and respect for models of economic diversity to further global trade.

Four years since the financial crash of the autumn of
2008, the outlook for the world economy is uncertain.
What does seem clear is that a much mooted return of
economic nationalism, construed as a generalised rise in
protectionism, has not occurred. Politicians and com-
mentators have repeatedly warned that financial crisis
and recession might induce a shift away by governments
from the globalisation of our times to the economic
nationalism of the 1930s. Now, as Harold James (2001, p.
204) says, ‘At regular intervals since the publication of
David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy in 1817,
analysts have been predicting the imminent death of
free-trade’. This aside, the forebodings were especially
pronounced from the autumn of 2008 to the winter of
2009. This is hardly surprising if economic nationalism is
taken to be a knee-jerk political response to crisis given
the scale of the financial meltdown.
Take three examples of this discourse. In Britain Vince
Cable, the then Liberal Democrat Finance spokesman,
now the Business Secretary in the Conservative-led coali-
tion government, cautioned readers of New Statesman in
October 2008 that greater state involvement in capital-
ism through bank bailouts should not be equated with a
return to Keynes, let alone Marx, but nationalism (Cable,
2008): ‘The ingredients are in place, in the UK and else-
where, for a return to atavistic ‘‘politics of the soil’’: the

Global Policy (2012) 3:3 doi: 10.1111/j.1758-5899.2011.00146.x ª 2012 London School of Economics and Political Science and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
 Sam Pryke
282
politics of identity, and old-fashioned economic national-
ism’. He traced such reactions back to 1720 when the
political fallout from the South Sea Bubble saw a ban on
the importation of Indian textiles. During early 2009, The
Economist repeatedly warned of the ‘rising spectre’ of
economic nationalism. On February 5th (The Economist,
2009a) it claimed that although ‘global supply chains are
more complex and harder to pick apart than those days
(the early 1930s)’, when ‘nationalism is on the march,
even commercial logic gets trampled underfoot’. The
magazine stressed that ‘American leadership [to avert a
trade war] is the only chance’. Two weeks later a longer
and more considered piece (The Economist, 2009b), not-
withstanding a title of ‘Turning their Backs on the World’,
concluded: ‘Despite the downturn, the nations of the
world have not shunned globalisation. It has been pro-
tected by the belief of firms in the efficiency of global
supply chains’. The contradictory messages of The Econo-
mist perhaps indicate a wider confusion in the ideologi-
cal defence of capitalism in this period: a faith in the
essential good of free trade, beside the self-evident fail-
ure of financial markets to regulate themselves. Hence
the fallback position that even if boom and bust had
not disappeared as complacently assumed, the alterna-
tive to free trade that arose last time there was a crisis
of such magnitude presented the ultimate danger. A
third and predictable example is in relation to fears of
the possible collapse of the Euro. Robert Zoellick, the
outgoing President of the World Bank, warned in June
2012 (The Guardian, 2012) that the collapse of the cur-
rency could trigger a ‘financial meltdown’ that would
have ‘desperate consequences’ – including the demand
for economic nationalism. ‘This is not just an economic
crisis but a political threat as well’, he said. ‘We must
make sure we keep markets open and beware against
creeping protectionism. We are starting to see some
increase in the use of trade restrictions’.1
Irrespective of the exaggerated rhetoric, there was
some retreat from economic liberalisation after October
2008 as a number of states raised tariffs, but this was
not pronounced and systematic. Specifically, there has
been no equivalent of the Smoot-Hawley Congressional
Bill of June 1930 that raised duties on over 20,000 US
imports to record levels, provoking retaliatory measures
across the world. The international agreements on tariffs
of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have held and,
while the efforts of G20 leaders to coordinate a global
response to the crisis have been limited, states have not
pulled away from each other as in the 1930s.
The fact that economic nationalism as defined in these
terms has not happened presents a timely opportunity
to reconsider the subject. This is the objective of this
article. It considers first what definition and remit should
be given to economic nationalism. Second, it looks at
the origination and rise of economic nationalism. Third,
ª 2012 London School of Economics and Political Science and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
it considers whether the term has any relevance in the
period after the financial crash of 2008.
Economic nationalism: definition and remit
Writing on economic nationalism in recent years has
come from various sources with, as is often the case,
little cross-referencing between the various authors. On
the one hand, there are polemical accounts, similar to
The Economist, that equate it with the historic obsta-
cles states erected before and after the first era of free
trade in the mid-19th century. For instance, Martin
Wolf in Why Globalization Works (2004) argues that the
return to premodern mercantilism through militarism,
imperialism and economic nationalism in the late 19th
century stifled free trade, curtailed democracy and pre-
cipitated war: ‘From the point of view of promoting
prosperity these shifts were an error’ (Wolf, 2004,
p. 37).
Within the study of nationalism there has been rela-
tively little direct coverage of economic matters in the
explosion of writings over the last 20 years. Economic
matters are, however, central to the key debate on the
periodisation of nationalism. The modernist thesis of Eric
Hobsbawm (1992) is that nationalism was integral to an
age when states had the ability to establish national
economies. Now that this age has been superseded by a
global one in which capital is mobile, the raison d’être of
nationalism has been undermined and will therefore
decline. The phenomenon is, as he puts it (Hobsbawm,
1992, p. 192), ‘past its peak’.
The ethnosymbolist understanding of nationalism of
Anthony D. Smith should not be considered the polar
opposite of the modernist account. Some of Smith’s
numerous publications review what aspects of the mod-
ernist case are valid. In his 1998 synthesis of his critique
(Smith, 1998, p. 49), he notes that economic nationalism
should be seen as a political reaction to the uneven and
combined development of capitalism. He cites Japan
after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 as a reactive instance
that prized industrialisation to compete with external
competitors. The language of national self-depiction in
this quest was set by a pre-existing Japanese identity.
The role of pre-existing national identity is central to
Smith’s (1995) earlier consideration of nationalism and
globalisation. Here Smith rejected the view that national-
ism arises within modernity to play an ideological role in
the state organisation of national economies, only to be
ushered reluctantly from the historical stage when it
becomes superfluous. Rather, as nations and nationalism
are intrinsic to memory and tradition within humanity,
they are far more durable phenomena. If anything the
homogenisation of globalisation will trigger archaic com-
pensation as peoples resist the smothering of their dis-
tinctive identities.
Global Policy (2012) 3:3
 Economic Nationalism
A major reconsideration of economic nationalism has
taken place over the last 13 years from writers who are
professional international political economists, an aca-
demic offshoot of international relations. Their theoreti-
cal endeavour has been to re-evaluate the realist notion
that economic nationalism is a protectionist policy
instrument of states akin to mercantilism – neomercantil-
ism. Although his direct contribution is slight, Robert Gil-
pin is usually identified by his critics as providing the
standard formulation of this approach. He describes (Gil-
pin, 1987, p. 31) economic nationalism as a ‘central idea
that economic activities are and should be subordinate
to the goal of state building and the interests of the
state’. It acts therefore as a tool as they ‘struggle for
supreme power in the anarchic world of international
affairs’ (Gilpin, 2001, p. 14). This approach still has uncrit-
ical proponents. O’Brien and Williams (2007, p. 17) write
in a core undergraduate text: ‘If realism is the perspec-
tive in international politics, economic nationalism is the
equivalent in political economy’.
The most substantial contribution to understanding
economic nationalism within international relations was
produced by James Mayall in 1990 (Mayall, 1990). May-
all’s commitment to realism in explaining the behaviour
of states is less explicit than Gilpin’s. Instead, he posits a
tension between nationalism and economic liberalism,
one that largely shaped the emergence of the interna-
tional system of states and markets. The upshot is an
inherent fragility in the rules established to allow market
interaction. Although governments may progressively
withdraw from involvement in trade and so on, national
economic interests limit the depoliticisation of markets.
Such understandings of economic nationalism were
first scrutinised in 1998 by George T. Crane in an article
indicatively entitled ‘Economic Nationalism: Bringing the
Nation Back In’ (Crane, 1998). In it, Crane stresses the
importance of the national in economic nationalism,
rather than seeing it as a policy instrument of the state.
Crucial to the economic orientation of a state is the self-
image of a nation at a particular conjuncture. For
instance, German manufacturers in the 19th century sup-
ported Friedrich List’s advocacy of protective tariffs on
imports to boost infant industries in competition with
British firms, because they perceived their nation as a
collection of backward states.
Two years later Stephen Shulman gave this reconfigu-
ration – national identity driving state policy – a more
systematic framework through an examination of the
nationalist sources of international economic integration.
He argued for a decoupling of economic nationalism
and protectionism by demonstrating how the core
nationalist aims of autonomy, unity and identity can
lead to both economic closure and openness. In an
interesting aside on the global impetus to a ‘free market
nationalism’,1 Shulman showed how the politics and
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283
commercial self-interest of Hindu business migrants in
Europe and North America contributed to the liberalising
direction of the governments of the Bharatiya Janata
party (BJP) in India in the 1990s – ‘long-distance free
market nationalism’ to combine the terms of Benedict
Anderson (1998) and Shulman.
These revisions of economic nationalism inform subse-
quent writings in the middle of the last decade. Takeshi
Nakano (2004) attempted to locate the role of nationalist
motivation of economic affairs in a conceptualisation of
a national economic state. The following year, Eric Helle-
iner and Andreas Pickel (2005) brought together a num-
ber of scholars who, broadly, take the view that
economic nationalism is a changing phenomenon. In
introduction they reject the view that it is old, truculent
and indicative of developing countries. They suggest
that the general negative treatment of the term
obscures nationalism’s importance in economic affairs,
and they offer a definition sufficiently broad to capture
its various motivations, rather than tying it to normative
concerns: ‘Nationalism should be understood fundamen-
tally as a generic discursive structure rather than any
particular substantive doctrine … Nationalism is a com-
bination of discourse, action and structure’ (Helleiner
and Pickel, 2005, pp. 7–8). As nations continue to repro-
duce themselves rather than fade away, so economic
nationalism will persist. Addressing the question of
whether globalisation will make economic nationalism
redundant directly, Helleiner and Pickel (2005, p. 228)
state: ‘From our perspective so long as nationalism and
national identities endure, so too will various forms of
economic nationalism’.
One of the contributors to their book, Rawi Abdelal,
had earlier produced the most substantial contribution
to the new approach to economic nationalism. In com-
mon with other recent writings, the starting point of his
National Purpose in the World Economy (Abdelal, 2001) is
the shortcomings of the realist understanding of eco-
nomic nationalism outlined above. Abdelal (2001, p. 34)
claims that seeing the state like Gilpin as an ‘autono-
mous actor pursuing statist economic nationalist policies’
cannot explain the aftermath of the disintegration of the
Soviet trading block in 1991 following the collapse of
the USSR. Specifically, realism cannot make sense of the
varied orientations of the independent successor states
towards and away from economic integration with Rus-
sia during the 1990s. To do this Abdelal proposes an
alternative approach, one he terms ‘constructionism’,
which ‘emphasizes non-material influences on both insti-
tutions and practices’ (Abdelal et al., 2010, p. 2). Rather
than states being autonomous actors that pursue an
objective self-interest, he suggests that they are ‘consen-
sually linked to society’ (Abdelal, 2001, p. 34). If eco-
nomic or any other types of policies are to be adopted
by government, they must cohere with a shared national
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284
identity. Although any group of societal actors can call
for a set of economic policies, they will only be enacted
by the state if they correspond to public opinion. Thus,
in Abdelal’s quasi-pluralist perspective, societal actors vie
with one another in their access to government and
influence on elites.
This approach established, Abdelal proceeds to the
empirical task of examining how national identities
shaped the economic paths of post-Soviet states. With
reference to trade agreements, currency use, etc., he
contrasts the economic orientation of the Baltic States
away from Russia and towards Europe (at some immedi-
ate cost) with the direction taken by Belarus. In Belarus
there were nationalists who sought to reduce the econ-
omy’s reliance on Russia but, as they operated in the
context of a quite different national identity, one less
hostile to Russia, they could make little headway.
As his account develops and examples expand, Ab-
delal incorporates shifts in ideologies of development
in explanation of a given economic nationalism, beside
the inclination of a particular national identity. In dis-
cussion of post-independence Indonesia, for instance,
he shows how its statist economic path in the 1950s
coincided with Third Worldist currents of the era, a
markedly different climate from that of the 1990s.
National identities are therefore filtered through the
political economy of the age. As he puts it, ‘National-
ism has been linked to a wide variety of political pro-
jects; nationalism, in other words, is wanton’ (Abdelal,
2001, p. 195).
This approach to economic nationalism of scholars of
international political economy (IPE) is clearly more ver-
satile than that of either economic liberals or interna-
tional relations realists. With respect to the former, the
understanding is that the intrusion of nationalist govern-
ments into markets is explicable but counterproductive.
With the latter, the assumption is that there must be an
overriding objectivity to an economic nationalism as it
corresponds to a state interest. Both analyses tend to
identify protectionism through tariffs and subsidy as the
primary forms of economic nationalism. The rethinking
of these conceptions and policy corollaries allows the
importance of culture and memory, the stuff of nations,
into understanding the economic policies of govern-
ments. This is not to say that we can thus fathom the
irrational depths of an atavistic force. That, for instance,
the Baltic States might seek to reduce their economic
dependence on Russia was perfectly explicable given
their 20th-century history. Further, the new analysis of
economic nationalism, specifically in the work of Shul-
man (2000), enables understanding of the role played by
nonstate actors like diasporas in economic policy. Finally,
and of major importance, this approach can explain why
overtly nationalist governments have aggressively pur-
sued pro-market agendas over recent history. This is cou-
ª 2012 London School of Economics and Political Science and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
pled in Abdelal’s work with discussion of the ideological
shifts in economic nationalism since 1945.
If these are the benefits of the new writing and think-
ing on economic nationalism, the case also has limita-
tions and flaws. The first is that the definition of
economic nationalism is extremely vague. At times, the
argument rests on the assertion that as national identi-
ties exist, so everything governments do with respect to
economics is ‘nationalist’. From this standpoint, it is diffi-
cult to imagine what would not be included under the
heading. A government that relinquishes all controls
over financial flows and privatises the entire public sec-
tor might be termed ‘economically nationalist’ so long
as it claims that such moves are in the national interest.
Such issues are seemingly in the mind of Helleiner and
Pickel (2005, p. 225) when they belatedly ask:
If economic nationalism can be associated with
very diverse economic policies, does this mean
that economic nationalism is too vague a term
to be useful? No. Although its policy content
can be everything, economic nationalism
remains defined by its nationalism; this is asso-
ciated with core nationalist values such as com-
mitment to sovereignty.
This is the first time in the book that the importance
of sovereignty to nationalism is mentioned. We are left
to wonder what the writers consider sovereignty to be
and, given the title, whether economic globalisation is
undermining it.
Second, although the sphere of economic nationalism
is extended in recent writings, there is very little cover-
age of the role of private capital. The assumption is that
states continue to be the key economic actors and states
promulgate national identity. Now we did not need
recent bailouts and stimulus packages to make nonsense
of the claims of so-called ‘hyperglobalists’ in the 1990s
that the state has become an irrelevance to capitalism
(Held, 1999, pp. 2–10). But one of the key points about
globalisation is that private capital, in the form of multi-
national companies, has increasing discretion over which
country it will invest in. In doing so, in jumping and con-
sequently wearing down the walls of national econo-
mies, it undermines the ability of the state to practise
some form of ‘economic nationalism’, more specifically
national economic management. Third, there is little con-
sideration of how international economic organisations –
the WTO, the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) – are empowered to impose economic dereg-
ulation on states, regardless of whether they consider
the measures to be in their national interest or not.
Finally, there is no discussion of whether government
policy across the world broadly conforms to a similar
neoliberal trajectory. It is now 23 years since the term
Global Policy (2012) 3:3
 Economic Nationalism
‘Washington Consensus’ was first used to describe the
core measures – low tax, privatisation, financial deregula-
tion, etc. – that governments of both left and right are
obliged to accept. Arguably, these writings are not, in
fact, so much about economic nationalism as much as
the nationalist motivation of economic policy. The point
is not a semantic one, it is crucial. Nationalism is indeed
wanton as Abdelal puts it. Every student of the subject is
struck by its enormous power precisely because of its
extraordinary flexibility. It can motivate in different guises
a varied range of policy objectives. With respect to eco-
nomics, they can range from deregulation to national
autarchy. It is pointless to try to establish whether or not
in principle a particular set of policies are more or less in
line with ‘autonomy, unity and identity’. That is a politi-
cal matter for a nationalist leader and supporters in a
given country at a particular conjuncture.
Given this, I suggest that the definition of ‘economic
nationalism’, as opposed to the nationalist motivation of
economic policy, should be more limited and historically
confined. Economic nationalism should be considered as
a set of practices designed to create, bolster and protect
national economies in the context of world markets. The
practice is not necessarily antithetical to external eco-
nomic activity, but it is opposed to allowing a nation’s
fortunes to be determined by world markets alone. The
policies have consisted of controls on imports to create
domestic monopolies, on finance to fix currencies, on
capital to direct investment to priority sectors and
nationalisation to establish state-owned companies. In
some instances the process went further: the nationalisa-
tion of foreign companies (especially in the exploitation
of natural resources, mining and oil), the reduction or
removal of foreign staff, the prevention of the repatria-
tion of the profits of foreign capital, the taking of for-
eign-owned patents, the appropriation of fishing and
prospecting rights by extending offshore waters, the
expulsion or control of ethnic minorities with significant
business interests, self-sufficiency in agriculture and, if
possible, in steel production and heavy industry more
generally (Harris, 1990, p. 248).
The policies deployed determined the relative eco-
nomic closure of the state in question. At the extreme,
there is the pursuit of economic autarchy: economic iso-
lation in the pursuit of self-sufficiency, sometimes involv-
ing an aggressive foreign policy to corral the labour and
raw materials of conquered lands. Autarchy should be
distinguished from dirigiste regimes in which states
played a central role in the 1930s but were not closed to
trade, and developmentalist states after 1945 that used
import substitution while stimulating the external sales
of domestic producers. These political economies differ,
in turn, from the managed economies of developed
countries during the long postwar boom. The point at
which states attempted a particular set of policy mea-
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285
sures – a particular form of economic nationalism – is
itself explicable within the wider material and ideological
stage of capitalism, as we will now examine.
The history of economic nationalism
There are policy similarities in the mercantilism of Euro-
pean states between the 16th and 18th centuries and
economic nationalism in the 19th century. However, as
Greenfeld (2001, pp. 107–114) argues, there are difficul-
ties in designating mercantilism as an early nationalism
as the wellbeing of the country was rarely considered as
distinct from the self-interest of individual merchant(s)
and the collaborating monarchy involved. The explicit
attempt to frame macroeconomic government policy on
behalf of the nation only arises in the 19th century. Most
self-declared national spokesmen in the early to mid-
19th century supported free trade because of its general
association with liberation and advancement. It was the
unacknowledged national bias in the advocacy of free
markets by British industrialists that stimulated reactions
in this period that should be termed economic national-
ism, as distinct from the nationalist motivation of politi-
cal economy. Among them, we can identify those of
Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804) in America and List
(1789–1846) in Europe as particularly important. The
political influence of Hamilton, whose nationalism was
somewhat the more civic, was greater as he was US
Treasury Secretary in the 1790s, while List provided the
most substantial theoretical critique of laissez-faire, prin-
cipally Adam Smith, his followers in Britain and Jean-
Baptiste Say in France.
In part, List advocated protectionism as a temporary
measure to boost the growth of German infant indus-
tries (List, 1909, p. 323). Simultaneously, he rejected the
cosmopolitan assumption that a nation is merely an
aggregate of people. Rather, drawing on Fichte, he sug-
gested that a nation is a cultural reality with a peculiar
history, character and language. On occasion, he pro-
posed that culture, industry and the state should form a
single ‘economy of the people’ (List, 1909, p. 132).
Although List died a broken man, convinced he was
ignored, his ideas had some influence on policy makers
in the latter part of the 19th century, especially in
Germany. While there was no general departure from
economic liberalism as trade grew spectacularly, govern-
ments in Europe, America and Japan made impatient
attempts to force industrialisation through piecemeal
tariff hikes, amid periodic crises and a rising tide of
popular nationalist sentiment.
If economic rivalry, as manifested in protectionism,
was partly responsible for the 1914–18 war, the period
afterwards did not see an abandonment of a common
commitment to international trade. Despite enlarged and
more interventionist states within Europe through war-
 Sam Pryke
286
time expenditure, the immediate aftermath, a period in
which the leading gentlemen of the victorious European
powers tried to turn back the clock to the pre-1914 era,
witnessed chronic financial instability giving way to eco-
nomic boom among industrialised and semi-industria-
lised countries after 1925. By 1929 world trade was
higher than it had been in 1913 and comprised a greater
share of most national economies (Jones, 2005, p. 28).
This made the subsequent collapse all the more dra-
matic. The world’s economy contracted by a third
between 1929 and 1934. Trade declined by 60 per cent
within four years from the Wall Street stock market crash
of October 1929. Britain’s withdrawal from the gold stan-
dard, a cornerstone of free transactions, in September
1931 marked the end of an era that, despite the ructions
of war, imperialism and revolution, had stretched over
the previous hundred years. Therefore, despite diehard
advocates in the world of high finance, government and
academia, the period after 1929 saw a fundamental shift
from the principles of economic liberalism. Hobsbawm
comments (1994, pp. 94–95):
To meet immediate, short term crisis, govern-
ments had, as they saw it, to undermine the long
term basis of a flourishing world economy. States
found themselves building increasingly high bar-
riers to protect their national markets and curren-
cies against the world economic hurricanes,
knowing quite well that this meant dismantling
of the world system of multinational trade on
which they believed world prosperity must rest
… In a single sentence: the Great Slump
destroyed economic liberalism for half a century.
The so-called ‘most favoured nation status’ disap-
peared from almost 60 per cent of the 510 commercial
agreements signed between 1931 and 1939 and, where
it remained, it was usually in a limited form. By 1939
almost half of world trade was restricted by tariffs
(Jones, 2005, p. 28).
The lurch away from economic liberalism after 1929
was not ordered, coherent and backed by theoretical
models. Instead, it was driven by immediate priorities
and medium-term financial fault lines. Crucial to whether
a state moved directly towards greater economic isola-
tion in the early 1930s was its sovereign debt level. Such
shifts were particularly pronounced in certain geographi-
cal areas. Most economies within Latin America and the
advanced colonies of European empires, which relied on
agricultural and raw material exports, suspended the
convertibility of their currencies and tried to stimulate
domestic alternatives to external markets. This involved
the expansion of industry by making costs exceptionally
low and hence profits exceptionally high. Simulta-
neously, measures to restrict imports were introduced.
ª 2012 London School of Economics and Political Science and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
The turn was most explicit in Europe under fascist and
authoritarian regimes from Germany, through its central
belt, to the Mediterranean south. To the east stood the
Soviet Union which, for different ideological reasons, dis-
avowed free markets. Even in areas of the world where
there was no official renunciation of the free market,
there were schemes to cope with its failure. The New
Deal under Roosevelt in America (1933–36) defined the
era. In Britain there was no equivalent of this massive
programme of government works. Instead, British indus-
try increasingly relied on exports to protected colonial
markets to sustain its sales. It was not until the postwar
era that the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, as contained
in his 1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest
and Money (Keynes, 2007), found favour in government
and Whitehall.
It is interesting to note that Keynes expressed a prefer-
ence for economic nationalism in this period. While his
writings had naturally focused on Britain in the 1920s, as
a good economic liberal his chief concern was the bet-
terment of humanity per se, not a particular segment.
Speeches and writings made in 1933 reveal a national
allegiance at odds with a cosmopolitan commitment. He
spoke, for instance, of the quest for ‘national self-suffi-
ciency’ to allow a ‘well balanced and complete’ national
life, allowing ‘English people to display the full range of
their national aptitudes in mechanical invention and in
agriculture; as well as preserving traditional ways of liv-
ing’. After linking various occupations to the breadth of
the national character, he dismissed the notion that
accounts alone should determine economic viability:
‘The country that cannot afford agriculture is deluded as
to the meaning of the word ‘‘afford’’. A country that can-
not afford agriculture, or invention, or tradition, is a
country in which one cannot afford to live’. While self-
sufficiency was in itself desirable, its practical merit was
that an international division of labour linked by trade
was no longer viable. Instead, he wanted to ‘bring pro-
ducer and consumer within the ambit of the same
national, economic and financial organisation’, and thus
avoid the ‘strains and enmities’ that had led to war in
1914 (Keynes, in Skidelsky, 1992, pp. 473–474).
Robert Skidelsky, Keynes’ biographer, comments that
Keynes had moved from Smith to List to Dr Schacht who
was in 1933 taking the levers of economic power in Nazi
Germany (Skidelsky, 1992, p. 476). The comparison with
List is only half accurate because in part List only advo-
cated economic protection as a temporary measure. It is
therefore indicative of how the intellectual climate had
changed that an economic liberal of the 20th century
was for a while more an economic nationalist than the
most prominent critic of laissez-faire in the 19th century.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, an event
that had itself seen the state organisation of economies
on an unprecedented scale, differing models of political
Global Policy (2012) 3:3
 Economic Nationalism
economy emerged with underlying commonalities. The
general policy trajectory followed by the US, the leading
state to emerge from the war, involved both a rejection
of unfettered free market capitalism and autarchy.2 For-
mer Secretary of State Cordell Hull captured the Ameri-
can approach when he claimed that for goods instead of
soldiers to cross borders, the conscious administration of
economies by governments was required (Frieden, 2005,
p. 254). American and British policy makers had, of
course, drawn up the institutional arrangements – cru-
cially fixed exchange rates – for the postwar economic
order at Bretton Woods in 1944.
In Europe corporatism (the integration of business and
labour through government), exemplified by the Labour
government of Britain, 1945–51, and the Monnet Plan in
France, 1945–47, was institutionalised through a set of
arrangements supported by the major political parties.
Contemporaneous was the spread of nominally socialist
countries under Soviet leadership to encompass by 1950
Eastern Europe and China. While trade and some travel
existed between them, their economies relied on the
planned investment and distribution of ruling Com-
munist parties.
Both the US and Western European variants of man-
aged capitalism were, in part, designed to offset the
appeal of communism in the mid-20th century. But this
did not mean that the example of Soviet planning was
lost on policy makers – Hobsbawm refers to a ‘small but
influential flow of socio-economic tourists to Moscow’
(Hobsbawm, 1994, p. 96) – even if they were avowed
anti-communists. Rather, the spectacular growth of
industrial output in the 1930s, coupled with the wartime
role of the USSR in defeating Nazi Germany, made for
grudging recognition that, whatever the political horrors
of Stalin, the Soviet economy was superior in crucial
respects to free market capitalism. Leaders of some
developing countries admired Soviet industrialisation
even when they rejected communism as a system.
This era witnessed the sustained attempt to develop
and diversify national economies across Asia, Africa and
Latin America. It was not an accompaniment to formal
political independence but fundamental to it, an intrinsic
part of national liberation. Harris (1986, p. 159) suggests
that the key development policy of import substitution
to force industrialisation in the postwar era had already
been introduced in the 1930s, a response compelled by
the collapse of export markets. Further, Eastern Euro-
pean intellectuals in the 1930s – Mandelbaum, Balogh,
Kaldor, Manilesco – formulated many of the key claims
in development economics in Latin America and else-
where after 1945.
Nevertheless, these facts should not detract from the
shift involved. Vernon comments on Latin America (1971,
p. 191): ‘Through the nineteenth century to the early
part of the twentieth century, the prevailing view among
Global Policy (2012) 3:3 ª 2012 London School of Economics and Political Science and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
287
elite groups was that foreign investment was a good
thing, helpful to them and helpful to the country con-
cerned’. The postwar era saw a major reconsideration of
this view among policy makers and thinkers. A new con-
sensus emerged that national development could only
be achieved by state intervention to correct inherent
structural weaknesses, born of an overreliance on agri-
culture and raw materials, sectors prone to market vola-
tility and historic declines in value. Of course, there were
marked differences in the theory and practice of devel-
opmentalism. The best known development economist
in this period, Raul Prebisch (1901–86), was forced to
leave his native Argentina in 1948, such were his dis-
agreements with the military government of Juan Peron.
His biographer comments: ‘Both were nationalists, but
they were radically different in style and ideology’ (Dos-
man, 2008, p. 217).
By the 1960s an overview of Latin America (Wi-
onczek, 1966, p. 17) could claim: ‘Government after
government in Latin America, almost independently of
its political colouring, discourages the entry of new for-
eign private capital and uses numerous legal strata-
gems to diminish the relative role of existing foreign
direct investment in certain fields’. Restriction on for-
eign companies existed not simply in industry and min-
ing but banking and insurance, radio and motion
pictures among others. This was accompanied by out-
right expropriation of foreign companies, the nationali-
sation of Mexican oilfields in 1938 being the first
instance. The cumulative results for some investor
countries were dramatic. Britain lost 40 per cent of its
total overseas business assets – more in Asia and Africa
than Latin America – between 1938–56 through seques-
tration, wartime destruction of property and obligatory
sales (Jones, 2005, p. 244).
Space does not allow examination of the degree of
variation with respect to export promotion of developing
countries in this period; suffice it to say that import sub-
stitution did not necessarily militate against it. Speaking
of the South Korean economy in the 1960s and 1970s,
Ohno (2004, p. 139) claims: ‘Export promotion policies
and import-substitution policies, which are often consid-
ered to be mutually exclusive, in fact coexisted through-
out the period in question’. The same was true of
Mexico and Brazil, among others.
This phase of economic nationalism lasted until the
1980s, becoming a normal feature of the world. Most
developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America
became progressively more closed to international trade
and even the richest economies maintained very high
tariffs for agricultural imports, far higher than before
1913 (Jones, 2005, p. 32). The liberalisation that the Gen-
eral Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) achieved in
the 1960s was actually reversed after the abrupt end of
the post war boom in 1973.
 Sam Pryke
288
Simultaneously, total export sales as a percentage of
world output grew by nearly 8 per cent p.a. for the per-
iod 1950–73, higher than the 5 per cent average annual
rise in output as a whole. The economic turbulence of
the late 1970s and early 1980s did not check the momen-
tum of international trade and finance as, measured by
key indices, they actually accelerated. In every year, the
growth in exports continued to outstrip the modest over-
all rise in world output. Between 1970 and 1990, exports
as a proportion of total world output doubled. Politically
and intellectually, the 1980s saw a marked shift away
from the economic ideas associated with Keynes in the
developed world, and with Prebisch and others in devel-
oping countries. Instead, a new breed of right-wing politi-
cians, exemplified by Margaret Thatcher in Britain and
Ronald Reagan in America, made reference to Milton
Freedman and Frederick von Hayek in attempts to curb
the money supply (monetarism), shackle trade unions
and liberalise markets. This trend had been presaged by
General Pinochet’s military coup in Chile in 1973 and the
deregulation of the ‘Chicago boys’.
The 1980s culminated with the vindication of capital-
ism through the revolutions of Eastern Europe in 1989
and the unravelling of the Soviet Union. From 1992
through to 2005, the ratio of trade to GDP across richer
countries increased by some 13 per cent (OECD, 2007).
The 1990s was the decade in which the very term ‘glob-
alisation’ became a catchall for the market integration
that had taken place over the previous 40 years.
Of course, to indicate a decisive transformation in the
world’s economy is not to suggest that complete eco-
nomic globalisation had been achieved by October 2008.
Leaving aside the impact of the subsequent recession,
economic globalisation is uneven and limited by the
extent of the integration of national economies, its inter-
national reach and continuing tariff barriers, national and
regional with respect to the European Union. As Wolf
(2004, p. 134), not a sceptic given to playing down its
extent, put it in 2004, ‘Globalization is not rampant. It
remains remarkably modest’. However, the political and
economic environment produced by the latest wave of
globalisation is rather different from its first phase in the
19th century. This is the backdrop to examine the pros-
pect of a resurgent economic nationalism at the present
conjuncture.
Prospects
As indicated above, it is not difficult to find predictions
of a return to economic nationalism. For instance, there
was speculation that the Asian crash of 1997–98 would
see a nationalist reaction as the World Bank and the IMF
sought to use the opportunity to open protected Asian
economies and overvalued currencies to world markets.
Bello comments (2004, p. 73) that ‘the stabilization pro-
ª 2012 London School of Economics and Political Science and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
grammes imposed by the IMF on the key countries of
Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand reveal that the rollback
of protectionism and activist state intervention were stra-
tegically incorporated into them’.
In fact, these events did not prompt anything that
amounts to economic nationalism. In the aftermath of
the 1997 crash, the Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir
Mohammad, made a number of high-profile attacks on
international financiers (especially George Soros), sacked
and charged his finance minister, Anwar Ibrahim, who
was responsible for economic liberalisation, and imposed
capital and currency controls on Malaysia. However, as
Frieden (2005, p. 394) comments:
In another era the vitriolic Mahathir–Soros
exchanges and the Malaysian prime minister’s
nationalistic rhetoric might have presaged long-
lasting measures to turn the economy away
from global markets. Yet within a couple of
years the episode had largely been forgotten …
Mahathir was indeed careful to avoid blanket
condemnation of global capitalism. ‘We want to
embrace borderlessness’, he said and ‘We have
always welcomed foreign investment and spec-
ulation’. It was just that ‘we still need to protect
ourselves from self-serving rogues and interna-
tional brigandage’ … Despite the great shock
that international markets administered to the
East Asian economies and the wave of crises
that the shock caused, the advance of global
economic integration was barely slowed.
However, the threat to economic globalisation of the
recession of 2008–09 was of a different order. Triggered
by the ‘credit crunch’, following the collapse of the US
subprime mortgage market in 2007, the banking crash
of October 2008 and the subsequent recession are the
products of a 30-year experiment in financial deregula-
tion. The brazen financial irresponsibility involved, the
credo of the financialisation of key economies, was con-
doned by governments and induced by a wider faith
that markets, as self-regulating entities, are infallible –
what Soros (2004) termed ‘market fundamentalism’.
Relevant for our purposes is the impact the financial
crisis has had on world trade. A dramatic fall in demand
saw trade volumes collapse by 12.2 per cent in 2009 (23
per cent in US dollar terms), much the largest contrac-
tion since the 1930s (WTO, 2010). Over the ten years
before the crash, trade grew on average by 5.7 per cent
p.a. This fall was not, as widely expected, repeated in
2010 as it grew by 9.5 per cent and a similar figure in
2011. The exports of China and India have suffered least
over the last four years.
The financial crisis did prompt some governments to
introduce protectionist measures. The Economist (2009c)
Global Policy (2012) 3:3
 Economic Nationalism
reported: ‘The World Bank has counted 47 trade-restrict-
ing steps taken by 17 of the G20 members. Tariffs have
risen in several developing countries, including India,
Russia and Ecuador’. Simultaneously, there were indica-
tions of political pressure to keep government financial
injections within domestic economies. However, this did
not give way to systematic hikes on import tariffs. The
number of trade-restricting measures applied by govern-
ments has actually declined since 2009. WTO Director
General Pascal Lamy could boast (WTO, 2010):
‘WTO rules and principles have assisted governments in
keeping markets open and they now provide a platform
from which trade can grow as the global economy
improves’, before adding: ‘We must avoid derailing any
economic revival through protectionism’. Predictions
about the longer-term future would be foolish, but it
seems clear that the recession has not developed into a
prolonged slump and there has been no clear reversal in
economic globalisation. And there is evidence that the
impact of protectionism on trade in 2009 was negligible.
Research by Christian Henn and Brad McDonald of the
International Monetary Fund (Financial Times 2011) lead
the authors to conclude: ‘Our estimate of a 0.25 per cent
protectionist distortion confirms that protectionism
played only a minor role in the Great Trade Collapse at
end-2008’.
Of course, to say that there has been no ‘return to the
1930s’ is not in itself particularly profound. It is question-
able how likely it was that events would unfold in the
same way with emergency measures followed by a sus-
tained attempt to realign economic activity within
national boundaries. The calls of journalists, politicians
and capitalists that there should be no return to protec-
tionism and so on were rhetorical, rather than analysis-
based projections. Nevertheless, the conjuncture allows
us the opportunity to reflect on why there has been no
real attempt by governments to withdraw national econ-
omies from world markets.
There are various interrelated reasons. First, the inte-
gration and therefore interdependency of economies
through trade and investment make this practically
impossible. In 2008 exports of products and services
averaged just under 60 per cent of GDP internationally
(OECD, 2011). In a considerable number of both devel-
oped economies (e.g. Austria, Belgium, Singapore) and
developing ones (e.g. Angola, Malaysia, Vietnam) the fig-
ure was well over 100 per cent. Even for the relatively
introverted Japanese economy the figure was 35 per
cent. Raising tariff barriers, provoking retaliation and risk-
ing a large-scale reversal in trading levels would not
have seen a mere slump but an economic Armageddon.
The point could be extended through examination of
the expansion of foreign direct investment and the per-
centage of domestic workforces employed by foreign
companies.
Global Policy (2012) 3:3 ª 2012 London School of Economics and Political Science and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
289
Second, the very complexity of the global economy,
specifically the multinational company or bank with its
intricacies of ownership, outsourcing and intrafirm trade
(as much as half of MNC activity in 2000 according to
one authority – Jones, 2005, p. 272), make it all but
impossible to pick apart by nationality. This was revealed
when government stimulus packages to domestic finan-
cial firms actually benefited foreign banks (Callinicos,
2010, p. 103). Thus the American AIG paid $18 billion to
European securities lending counterparts – Barclays,
Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas – of the $180 billion fed-
eral government bailout in March 2009. With respect to
industrial stimulus, the question arose of just what exists
that counts as national. For instance, the foreign-owned
UK car industry received considerable government aid
over 2009. No one objected that foreign capitalists bene-
fited, save some marginal voices on the far right. Where
there still is a domestic car industry in Europe the situa-
tion was not necessarily clearer. The German govern-
ment’s insistence that there should be no job losses in
Opel, General Motors’ German brand, complicated the
rival bids of Fiat, Magna and RHJ for the ailing US giant’s
European subsidiaries.
Third, there is less of a possibility of enacting protec-
tionism within zones of the world economy as in, say,
colonial empires in the 1930s. Now, of course, globalisa-
tion is, in part, the story of greater regional trade and
investment (Held, 1999, p. 168). However, such is the
importance of interregional business within a single
world economy that there is no scope for the world
dividing along geographic or political lines. The extent
of trade and financial flows between China and the US
and Europe are well known. What is less well known is
that China is Brazil’s biggest trading partner through the
sales of commodities and the purchase of manufactures
(Anderson, 2011, p. 11). This is the background to Brazil
under Lula joining with China as well as India and Russia
in the so-called BRIC quartet in 2009. Their objective,
however, is a global reserve currency, not a detached
trading block. The fallout from the financial crisis in the
world’s most advanced regional organisation and market,
the European Union, has been greater disunity as leaders
of northern member states, especially Germany, have,
with great reluctance, bailed out the most indebted
economies of the continent’s south. Nobody has sug-
gested an economic ‘fortress Europe’.
Fourth, the various models of economic nationalism, of
sets of practices designed to create, bolster and protect
national economies in the context of world markets, are
discredited. We saw in the 1930s that temporary mea-
sures designed to cope with the financial crash, as much
as recognition of the system’s flaws, undermined the
basis of economic liberalism. This gelled with an intellec-
tual shift away from free market capitalism. The statist
shift went furthest in fascist and communist regimes but
 Sam Pryke
290

was common across the political spectrum, leaving free Conclusions

market ideologues as isolated academic voices after 1945.
This article has attempted to define, historically situate
Today there is no such intellectual move afoot. No less an
and discuss the continuing relevance of economic
authority than the Financial Times ran a series of articles
nationalism. The present conjuncture presents a timely
on the ‘survival of capitalism’ in March 2009, but this has
moment for doing so as, contrary to much speculation,
not developed into a mainstream rethink on the relation-
the financial crash of October 2008 and the subsequent
ship of state and market. The importance of the former
recession have not seen a generalised rise in economic
has been underlined over the last three years, but only to
protectionism. The article first examined the contention
bail out private capitalism – thereby accumulating mas-
that economic nationalism amounts to protectionism, a
sive deficits – not as a mechanism that replaces the mar-
view that contrasts with the opinion of a number of
ket’s central role. There have been some ill coordinated
scholars of international economy. They suggest that our
moves to reregulate the banks, but this hardly amounts
definition of economic nationalism should be far broader
to economic nationalism. Arguably, in fact, neoliberalism
than a particular set of state policies – tariffs, etc. It was
has been strengthened over the last three years, some-
suggested that, although this new scholarship provides
thing furthered by the ongoing crossover of personnel
important insights, it is actually more concerned with
between high finance and states, a particular feature of
the nationalist motivation of economic policy. Instead,
Wall Street and American federal government.
economic nationalism should be understood as the
In this context it is relevant to consider what is now
attempt to create, bolster and protect national econo-
the most indebted nation in the world, the Republic of
mies in the context of world markets.
Ireland. Irish sovereign debt of 1305 per cent of GDP fol-
Using this definition, we saw how economic national-
lowing enormous bank bailouts has given rise to much
ism arose in the 19th century and became central to
acrimony, but no political attempt to withdraw the econ-
state economic organisation in the mid-20th century.
omy from the global economic networks in which it is
However, in the period after 1945 the accelerating
so entwined. None of the major political parties in the
growth of market integration through trade and finance
February 2011 election called for a withdrawal from the
undermined the reality and ideology of national econo-
euro, a suspension of debt repayments or even the gen-
mies. The financial crash of 2008 necessitated massive
eration of extra revenue through higher tariffs or raising
state aid to domestic banks and industry, but the
the 12.5 per cent tax rate for foreign business. Some
endeavour has been to allow the continued impetus of
older Irish people may recall the closed Catholic Ireland
economic globalisation, not a major reconsideration or
of Éamon de Valera with nostalgia, but anyone suggest-
reversal. Of course, the turbulence of capitalism will con-
ing a return to national self-sufficiency (mythical given
tinue to stimulate political reactions, nationalist and
the importance of dairy exports to Britain and emigrant
other, but this is rather different from what can be prop-
remittances) would be thought a fool.
erly called ‘economic nationalism’.
The political consensus of ‘no alternative’ was threa-
tened by the emergence of a hitherto marginal left wing
political party, Syriza, prepared to withdraw from the Notes
euro, in the June 2012 Greek general election. In fact,
I would like to thank audiences who first heard a version of this
the centre right New Democracy party received the most article at the ASEN conference at the LSE, April 2009 and the ESA
votes and has since succeeded in forming a coalition conference in Lisburn, September 2009. Particular thanks are due to
government. Greek politics remains uncertain given the the three constructive reviewers who made helpful comments on
intractable economic crisis, but it is worth pointing out the initial submission of the article to Global Policy.
that even in a country experiencing acute social break- 1. There are related, more specific, terms that generate concern,
down, there has as yet been no break with an orthodox principally ‘resource nationalism’ and now ‘financial nationalism’.
government. Moreover, whatever challenge a possible 2. The term ‘free market nationalism’ is one used by writers on
Syriza future government might mean for the stability of stateless nations in discussion of whether they might exist as via-
the euro zone, its programme is not that of a traditional ble independent entities (Keating, 2001).
‘left nationalist’ type. 3. It was as late as 1973 that Richard Nixon declared: ‘We are all
Keynesians now’.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that although the after-
math of the global financial crash has not seen states
resolve longstanding disagreements over the imbalances
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Author Information
Sam Pryke, PhD, now teaches Sociology at Wolverhampton
University.