Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T17:00:01.908Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Protectionism and World Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Susan Strange
Susan Strange
Affiliation:
Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Get access

Abstract

Much unwarranted gloom and doom has been written of late about the new protectionism. It has been widely held to be a major hindrance to Third World development, an obstacle in the path of world economic recovery, and even a threat to good international relations. The facts about trade in recent years suggest a different story–and the need to look far more critically at some of the myths propounded by liberal economists. For it was not protectionism that was responsible for starting the depression of the 1980s any more than that of the 1930s. Then, as now, it was financial uncertainty and the consequent shrinkage of credit that slowed both growth and trade. Nor is protectionism a serious menace. Not only has it failed to stop the flood of industrial exports from Asian countries, there afe good reasons of state and corporate self-interest why it need not be feared in the future. Far from being a threat to the international economic order, as IMF and GATT ideologues would have us believe, bilateral trading agreements between states and corporations are sustaining continued growth in trade despite financial disorder.

Type
Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , Spring 1985 , pp. 233 - 259
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1985

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. GATT, International Trade 1982/3 (Geneva, 1983)Google Scholar.

2. Cox, R., “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond IR Theory,” Millennium, Summer 1981, pp. 126–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sen, G., Military Origins of Industrialisation and International Trade Rivalry (New York: St. Martins, 1983)Google Scholar; Finlayson, J. and Zacher, M., “The GATT and the Regulation of Trade Barriers: Regime Dynamics and Functions,” International Organization 35 (Autumn 1981), pp. 561–602CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Block, F., The Origins of International Economic Disorder (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977)Google Scholar; and Tooze, R., “In Search of International Political Economy,” Political Studies 32 (1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. This is what the Mitterrand government in France decided when it took no action against Breton farmers incensed by imports of British meat. A contrary decision in 1984 by the Thatcher government in Britain to resist the miners' refusal to accept pit closures has proved immensely costly–according to one estimate it was running after six months into £4 billion.

4. Milward, A., “Tariffs as Constitutions,” in Strange, S. and Tooze, R., eds., The Management of International Surplus Capacity (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 63Google Scholar.

5. Lewis, W. A., Economic Survey, 1919–1939 (1949; rpt. London: Allen & Unwin, 1970)Google Scholar.

6. Kindleberger, C., The World in Depression, 1919–1939 (London: Allen Lane, 1973)Google Scholar; Ashworth, W., A Short History of the International Economy since 1850, 2d ed. (London: Longman, 1962)Google Scholar. For an interesting account of the predicament and policies of a debtor country at that time, see O'Connell, Arturo, Argentina under the Depression: Problems of an Open Economy, mimeo (Instituto Torcuato Di Telia, Buenos Aires, 12 1983)Google Scholar.

7. Chandler, A., The Visible Hand (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Melman, S., Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970)Google Scholar.

8. Patterson, G., Discrimination in International Trade: The Policy Issues (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gardner, R., Sterling Dollar Diplomacy in Current Perspective: The Origins and Prospects of Our International Economic Order, new ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and Milward, A. S., The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–51 (London: Methuen, 1984).CrossRefGoogle ScholarWilcox, C., A Charter for World Trade (New York: Macmillan, 1949)Google Scholar; Harris, S., The European Recovery Program (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Camps, Miriam and Diebold, William Jr, The New Multilateralism: Can the World Trading System Be Saved? (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1983)Google Scholar.

10. Commonwealth Secretariat, Protectionism: Threat to International Order. The Impact on Developing Countries, report by a Group of Experts (London, 1982), para. 1.29, p. 5Google Scholar.

11. Tumlir, Jan, “The World Economy Today: Crisis or New Beginning?” National Westminster Bank Quarterly Review, 08 1983, pp. 26–44Google Scholar.

12. Corden, W. M., The Revival of Protectionism, Group of Thirty Occasional Paper 14 (New York, 1984)Google Scholar.

13. Matthews, R. C. O., ed., Slower Growth in the Western World (London: Heinemann, 1982)Google Scholar.

14. Walters, R. S., “America's Declining Industrial Competitiveness: Protectionism, the Marketplace and the State,” Political Studies, Winter 1983, pp. 25–33Google Scholar. See also Destler, I. M., The Textile Wrangle: Conflict in US–Japanese Relations, 1969–71 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Hudson, M., Global Fracture (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), chap. 16Google Scholar; and Commonwealth Secretariat, Protectionism. The assertion is also made that “protectionism …can have repercussions on all aspects of policy and affect international relations profoundly” (p. 89).

15. Commonwealth Secretariat, Protectionism. Arthur Dunkel is also admiringly quoted as saying (p. 105): “There is no salvation outside a generally applied system of multilateral rules, and every departure from the rules, however temporary or exceptional it is intended to be, helps to create the system and to destroy the confidence which governments and businessmen should be able to repose in it.”

16. Polk, Judd, “US Production Abroad and the Balance of Payments: A Survey of Corporate Investment Experience,” mimeo (National Industrial Conference Board, New York, 05 1966)Google Scholar.

17. Michalet, C. A., Le capitalisme mondiale (Paris: PUF, 1976)Google Scholar.

18. Meyer, F. V., International Trade Policy (New York: St. Martin's, 1978)Google Scholar.

19. Hughes, H. and Krueger, A., “Effects of Protection on Developing Countries' Exports of Manufactures,” mimeo, 01 1983, p. 37Google Scholar.

20. Belassa, B., “The End of a Liberal Era?” SAIS Review, Summer–Fall 1983, pp. 133–42Google Scholar. Belassa, nevertheless, still subscribes to the bicycle theory of multilateral negotiation on trade policies. See also Bergsten, C. F. and Cline, W., “Trade Policy in the 1980s: An Overview of the Problem,” in Cline, , ed., Trade Policy in the 1980s (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1983)Google Scholar.

21. GATT, International Trade 1982/3, p. 5Google Scholar.

22. Dhar, Sanjay, “United States Trade with Latin. America: Consequences of Financing Constraints,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Quarterly Review, Autumn 1983Google Scholar.

23. Morawetz, D., Why the Emperor's New Clothes Are Not Made in Colombia: A Case Study in Latin American and East Asian Manufactured Exports (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1981)Google Scholar, first published as a World Bank staff working paper.

24. World Bank country study. See also Hughes and Krueger, “Effects of Protection”; Cline, W., Exports of Manufactures from Developing Countries: Performance and Prospects for Market Access (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1983)Google Scholar; and Odell, John, “Growing Conflict and Growing Cooperation in Trade between Latin America and the United States,” in Middlebrook, K. and Rico, C., US-Latin American Relations in the 1980s (1984)Google Scholar.

25. An extreme instance of practice diverging from (socialist) theory is the agreement of China to allow the 3M Corporation to set up a 100% wholly owned subsidiary in Shanghai.

26. Kindleberger, World in Depression.

27. Bull, H., “The International Anarchy in the 1980s,” Australian Outlook 37 (12 1983), pp. 127–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. Gilpin, R., U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Keohane, R. O. and Nye, J., Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977)Google Scholar; Krasner, S., Defending the National Interest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)Google Scholar. For a contrary view that finds Keohane's hegemonic stability theory less persuasive than my own explanation of “surplus capacity,” see Cowhey, P. and Long, E., “Testing Theories of Regime Change: Hegemonic Decline or Surplus Capacity?” International Organization 37 (Spring 1983), pp. 157–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. Stein, A., “The Hegemon's Dilemma: Great Britain, the United States and International Economic Order,” International Organization 38 (Spring 1984), pp. 355–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also McKeown, T., “Hegemonic Stability and Nineteenth-Century Tariff Levels in Europe,” International Organization 37 (Winter 1983), pp. 73–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. For a good, realistic summary see Rangarajan, L., “The Politics of International Trade,” in Strange, S., ed., Paths to International Political Economy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), pp. 126–63Google Scholar.