Where do we want to go? We are witnessing these days, between the United States and some European countries, a perceptible divergence in the proposals on what to do in Ukraine. It is also natural that this is the case, given the nature of these countries with a long tradition of democratic dialectic and also considering the different stakes regarding the consequences of what to do in Eastern Europe.
The American position is taking shape more and more clearly. To understand it, we are following in particular the very frequent interventions of Paul Krugman. The Nobel prize reflects in a lucid and reasoned way the position of the moderate liberal area to which the Biden administration also seems to refer, albeit with some unscripted by the President. And Krugman is getting nervous.
The big conundrum: Germany
And he's starting to lose his temper with Germany. As we know, Germany is the country that suffered not a shock, but a double shock on February 24th. And he staggered.
It may be that in the face of this double formidable blow to the nation's position in the world, German public opinion and politics have reacted with a certain emotionality that you would not expect from a solid and assertive community like the German one. An emotionality that, moreover, we had already seen, to the surprise of many, also with the case of the Syrian refugees. So, at the moment, military aid to the Ukrainians, rearmament, cancellation of the gas pipeline along the Baltic, harsh sanctions and, why not? gas.
Then it happens that, once the feelings of fury and indignation have cooled, one begins to think, to evaluate, to weigh up and the Germans go back to being Germans: “primum prosperitas, deinde…” (complete at will). Hence the great disappointment of Krugman and the Anglo-Saxon politicians.
In the speech that we offer you in the Italian version, Krugman tears apart one of the pillars of the German conception of peace and war which has become a gospel after the disaster of the two world wars. That is, the belief that i trade and economic relations may bring peace and brotherhood among peoples and prevent the use of arms to resolve disputes.
This idea was also part of Enlightenment thought and which we find widely expressed, for example, in Voltaire. But, as Krugman says, it is not always true, indeed it is a principle that can be a deadly boomerang.
But let us now follow Krugman's reasoning.
A historical precedent: the American Civil War
On April 12, 1861, Confederate artillery opened fire on Fort Sumter, thus starting the American Civil War. Eventually, the war turned into a catastrophe for the South, which saw more than a fifth of its youth perish. But why did the secessionists resort to war?
One reason was the widespread belief that they possessed a deadly cheap weapon. The economy of England, the world's leading power at the time, was heavily dependent on cotton produced in the Confederate South.
Thus, Southern politicians believed that a shortage in the supply of cotton would force England to intervene on the Confederacy's side. In fact, at the beginning of the civil war there was a "cotton famine" which plunged the English cotton industry into recession with thousands of jobs lost.
In the end, of course, England remained neutral – not least because English workers saw the Civil War as a moral battle against slavery and supported the Union cause regardless of the suffering the war had brought to their condition.
Economic dependence as a weapon of war
Why do I tell this old story? Because it has a clear analogy with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It seems pretty clear that Vladimir Putin counted on the dependence of Europe, and of Germany in particular, on Russian natural gas as the slave owners counted on King Cotton.
The idea common to the confederates and to Putin was and is that a strong economic dependence would force the nations to acquiesce to their military ambitions.
And they weren't entirely wrong. Last week I chastised Germany for its unwillingness to make economic sacrifices in the interests of Ukrainian freedom. However, it must not be forgotten that even on the eve of the war, Germany's response to Ukraine's repeated calls for military aid had been pathetic.
The UK and US were quick to supply lethal weaponry, including hundreds of anti-tank missiles that have been so instrumental in repelling Russia's attack on Kiev. Germany offered, dragging out the delivery … 5.000 helmets.
And it's not difficult to imagine, for example, what if in America there was still President Donald Trump, Putin's bet to use the weapon of international trade as a factor of coercion and not of unity, would have had a good chance of succeeding.
Trade is trade
If you think he is trying to goad Germany into shame and becoming a better defender of democracy, you are not at all wrong. But I'm also trying to make a more general point about the relationship between globalization and war, which isn't as straightforward as many have made it out to be.
There has long been a belief among Western elites that trade sustains peace, and vice versa. America's traditional push for the trade liberalization, which had begun even before World War II, was partly a political project: Cordell Hull, Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of State, strongly believed that lower tariffs and increased international trade would help lay the foundations for a stable peace.
Even the European Union is a project at the same time economic and political. Its origins lie in the European Coal and Steel Community, established in 1952 with the explicit aim of making French and German industries so interdependent as to make another European war impossible.
The roots of Germany's current vulnerability go back to the 60s, when the West German government began pursuing Ostpolitik – "Eastern policy" – seeking to normalize relations, including economic ones, with the Soviet Union, in the hope that Russia's growing integration with the West would strengthen civil society and usher in democracy in the East. And so Russian gas in 1973 began to flow to Germany.
Trade and authoritarian regimes
It is therefore true that does trade promote peace and freedom? Of course, it happens in many cases. In others, however, authoritarian governments more concerned with power than prosperity may begin to view economic integration with other nations as leverage for bad deeds, assuming that democracies with a strong economic stake in their regimes will turn a blind eye to theirs. repeated misdeeds.
I'm not just talking about Russia. The European Union has tolerated Hungarian for many years Viktor Orban which systematically dismantled liberal democracy. How much of this weakness towards Orban can be attributed to the investments of large European companies, especially German ones, to carry out cost-saving outsourcing?
And then there's the really big question: the China. Does Xi Jinping see China's tight integration with the world economy as a means to avert adventurous policies – such as an invasion of Taiwan – or to secure a weak Western response to such policies? Nobody knows.
The priority of national security
Now, I am not suggesting a return to protectionism. I am suggesting that the concerns of National security in relation to trade – the real concerns, not the farcical versions like Trump's national security call to impose tariffs on Canadian aluminum – need to be taken more seriously than I, along with others, used to take.
In the short term, however, law-abiding nations must demonstrate that they cannot be deterred from defending liberty by the trade argument. Autocrats may believe that economic exposure to their authoritarian regimes will make democracies hesitant to defend their values. We have to prove them wrong.
And that basically means that Europe must move quickly to cut imports of Russian oil and gas, and that the West needs to give Ukraine the weapons it needs, not just to keep Putin at bay, but to achieve a clear victory.
The stakes are much bigger than just Ukraine.
. . .
From Paul Krugman, Trade and Peace: The Great Illusion, The New York Times, April 11, 2022
