“A Global History of Protectionism”: The Great Return of National Economic Interests

They. For Westerners, the awakening is brutal and painful. China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001 was supposed to herald the final victory of free trade over protectionism and, by extension, sign the preference for democracies over authoritarian regimes.

Three decades earlier, the international lawyer Samuel Pizar (1929-2015) even proposed a theory – following in the footsteps of Montesquieu’s “gentle trade” two centuries earlier. A weapon of peace (Denoël, 1970), the idea that political tension between nations was reduced by increased trade. The reconciliation of France and Germany in 1951 through the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community – which is the cradle of the EU 27 – is a perfect example of this. The aftermath of the broken dream of the last leader of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022), who tried to modernize his country through perestroika and increased relations with the West, before being ousted from power and hated by the Russians. as a counterexample to him.

Ace! The rise of Deng Xiaoping’s (1904-1997) Chinese successors completely changed the perspective. In twenty years, the Middle Kingdom rose from the status of a poor country to the second world economic power, behind the United States. China has been able to protect its sovereignty and internal market very effectively by using protectionist measures. First a world workshop for manufactured goods, it then succumbed to its technological disruptions, forcing multinational companies eager to establish themselves on its soil to give up their industrial secrets. Over time, it has established itself in almost all sectors: automobiles, air transport, electronic chips, etc. With the crisis related to Covid-19, since the spring of 2020, Europe has been surprised to find its dependence on China in the medical sector, especially in terms of gloves, masks and drugs.

A story about trading goods

Thus, today we will witness the great “revenge” of protectionism, the political and social history of which Ali Laid describes in the first part of his book, the political and social history from antiquity to the present day. He then constructs a vast historical mural of trade across the planet through traded goods (wheat, sugar, cocoa, textiles, iron, oil, etc.), thus approaching the issue of protectionism through an unusual prism. The latter is usually called in terms of the economic theories of Adam Smith (1723-1790), then the Englishman David Ricardo (1772-1823) – the theory of comparative advantage – and his German opponent Friedrich List (1789). -1846) – who, on the contrary, advocated the protection of infant industries.