There are fundamental commonalities in the way nationalists view the economy and these commonalities are important enough to speak of a distinct nationalist approach to economic thought and policy. This does not mean all nationalists think and act in the same way – many policy positions are hotly contested among nationalists. But it does mean that nationalists choose their economic aims from a common menu. This introduction develops a conceptual framework to investigate this policy menu. I argue that the basic options on this menu are, firstly, isolation from the world economy, and secondly, economic expansion. Attempts to overcome the potential conflict between these two aims drives much of nationalist policy making. The introduction then focusses on solutions nationalists have used to overcome this dilemma through compromise, regulation, political reform, or imperial expansion. It proceeds to discuss the degree to which these choices are determined by interests or ideas, and finishes by analysing how such ideas are commonly translated into policy.

This chapter examines ZANU PF’s presidential succession politics, which gathered strong momentum from the late 1990s onward. Mujuru joined active politics as a ZANU PF Member of Parliament after his retirement from the military in 1992 and he led a faction in the internal fight to succeed Mugabe. The chapter examines the elite politics of this succession struggle, in which Mujuru never sought the presidency for himself. It contends that the primary reasons for Mujuru and Mugabe’s political falling out centred on issues such as Mujuru’s opposition to Mugabe’s one-party-state project, Zimbabwe’s 1998 military intervention in the DRC and the deleterious effects of Mugabe’s policies on Mujuru’s commercial interests. The chapter also lays bare the causes of Mujuru’s important rivalry with Emmerson Mnangagwa, a presidential succession contender. Lastly the chapter surveys Mujuru’s business activities and considers his private life as husband and father.

Economic developments have long shaped what we think of as the main themes of global as well as national history, from the story of capitalism and the industrial revolution, to the age of empires-cum-nations. Yet peacemaking at the end of the Napoleonic wars brought onto the international scene financiers, rentiers, and bankers, funding the future of Europe. Their presence was indicative of the emergence of a new capitalist economic order shaped by industrialisation and imperialism. This chapter uses a focus on this rising class as a lens through which to survey the social and ideological influence of shifting economic relations, practices and identities on the politics of peacemaking and on political agendas, from their impact on foreign policies and questions of ‘security’, to the proposals for political consideration brought to the peacemakers by Benjamin Constant, Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen.

This chapter investigates how economic interests played a role in the European security culture of the nineteenth century. At the Congress of Vienna, the principle of freedom of navigation of international rivers became institutionalised in the first intergovernmental organisation of modern history: the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine (CCNR). Beyond the context of territorial demarcation during peace negotiations, the monitoring of – literally – rival interests became embedded in contemporary liberal theories of free commercial navigation as a precondition for international peace and security. This was the context in which the CCNR became the institutional framework within which conflicting interests converged in a form of international institutional cooperation that is still effective today.