Economic nationalism: from Friedrich List to Robert Reich

Three principal schools of political economy — economic liberalism, economic socialism and economic nationalism — are offered to students of international political economy by the professional literature. Since the end of World War II and in the context of the rivalry between the ‘liberal West’ and the ‘Socialist East’, economic nationalism has been a neglected field of study.Notwithstanding, some excellent studies of economic nationalism have been published. In the field of international relations, see R. Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, 1987), and J. Mayall, Nationalism and International Society (Cambridge, 1990). In the field of economic development, see D. Seers, The Political Economy of Nationalism (Oxford, 1983), and P. Burnell, Economic Nationalism in the Third World (Brighton, 1986). For a study of the interaction between Communism and nationalism, see R. Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List (Oxford, 1988); for the economist's point of view, see H. Johnson (ed.), Economic Nationalism in Old and New States (Chicago, 1967), and A. Breton, ‘The Economics of Nationalism’, Journal of Political Economy, 72 (1964), pp. 376–86. For an excellent review of the origins of the concept, see J. Kofman, ‘How to Define Economic Nationalism?: A Critical Review of some Old and New Standpoints’, in H. Szlajfer (ed.), Economic Nationalism in East-Central Europe and South America, 1918–1939 (Geneva, 1990), pp. 17–54. During the Cold War period and up until after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, economic nationalism attracted more attention among scholars of Africa, Latin America and Asia than among those of us who studied the political economy of the ‘centre’ (e.g., Mayall, Burnell and Seers, to mention just three, are all scholars of economic nationalism who were initially concerned with the study of developing countries). Economic liberalism and economic socialism have vied for scholarly attention, resulting in greater theoretical and analytical sophistication. During the interwar period the situation was different: economic nationalism was well represented in widely read textbooks on international relations and enjoyed attention from both its proponents and its opponents.F. H. Simonds, The Great Powers in World Politics: International Relations and Economic Nationalism (New York, 1939); J. M. Keynes, ‘National Self Sufficiency’, The Yale Review, 22 (1933), pp. 755–69; J. Viner, ‘International Relations between State Controlled National Economies’, American Economic Review, supp., 34 (1944), p. 328; L. Robbins, Economic Planning and International Order (London, 1937), pp. 326–7; T. E. Gregory, ‘Economic Nationalism’, International Affairs, 10 (1931), pp. 289–306; W. E. Rappard, ‘Economic Nationalism’, in Harvard Tercentenary publications, Authority and the Individual (Cambridge, MA, 1937), pp. 74–112. Now, with the collapse of the Communist regimes, the consequent change in world politics, the current economic problems in North America and in Europe and, last but not least, the lessons derived from the miraculous economic success of the mercantilist states of East Asia,On Japan and East Asian states as mercantilist, see Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle (Stanford, CA, 1982), and Japan: Who Governs? The Rise of the Developmental State (New York and London, 1995); James A. Gregor (with Maria Hsia Chang and Andrew B. Zimmerman), Ideology and Development: Sun Yat-sen and the Economic History of Taiwan (Berkeley, CA, 1981). the time seems to have come to re-examine our perceptions of the discourse of political economy, and redirect scholarly attention toward the theory of economic nationalism.