The Nationalist Dilemma: A Global History of Economic Nationalism, 1776–Present By MarvinSuesse, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. pp. viii + 422. ISBN 9781108917087. £30)

Marvin Suesse's wide-ranging and ambitious book provides an important complement to Quinn Slobodian's The Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018). Together, they offer a compelling account of the long debate between economic nationalists and internationalists. In Slobodian's account, ‘Genevan liberals’ at the League of Nations in the 1930s, above all Friedrich Hayek, feared that national sovereignty and state planning would threaten the economy as spontaneous and unknowable, a matter of market signals. International rules and institutions should guard ‘providential planlessness’ from the delusions of nation states and their planners. Although Hayek and his colleagues do not appear in Suesse's impressive book, they provide one counter example to economic nationalism; another would be Cobdenite free trade, which could itself be a form of national self-interest. Suesse analyses two forms of economic nationalism. The isolationist variant rests on separation from the world economy and priority to exchange within the nation by removing barriers to internal trade, and in some cases appealing to identity. By contrast, the expansionist variant seeks economic growth, possibly by using liberal policies with the difference that they focus on the nation rather than individual utility. The dilemma facing nationalists was how to reconcile isolation and expansion. In some cases, the dilemma could be avoided because a country had sufficient natural resources and markets of its own. In other cases, it might entail economic union with like-minded countries, as proposed in Latin America as a way of securing larger markets for import-substituting industrialization, or by territorial conquest as pursued by Hitler. At different times, politicians might downplay one or other horns of the dilemma. Suesse explores how politicians responded to the dilemma across the world and over 250 years, combining an intellectual history of nationalist thinking with detailed knowledge of how governments made a choice. There are excellent accounts ranging from – to name a few – Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay in the United States to Juan Perón in Argentina, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Chung-hee Park in Korea, Deng Xiaoping in China, and in our own day, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. The extensive cast of characters is not confined to politicians, for Suesse is concerned with the intellectual history of economic nationalism. Readers will be aware of economic writers such as Friedrich List, Max Weber, Werner Sombart, and Sun Yat-sen. Others are less well known, such as Ahmed Midhat Efendi in the Ottoman empire, the German Gottfried Feder, or Chinese Ma Yinchu. Suesse supplies clear and lucid explanations of their ideas and influence. The Romanian Mihail Manoilescu, to take one example, was influential not only in Romania, but also in Fascist Italy and in Brazil under Getúlio Vargas. Manoilescu offers a reminder that the Genevan liberals did not get their way in the new international institutions, for he influenced the thinking of Raūl Prebisch at the Economic Commission for Latin America. As Suesse comments, ‘many nationalists in Latin America and Africa embedded their development plans within frameworks of international collaboration’ (p. 181). More generally, institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) became fora for national interest rather than supranational limits on sovereignty. The strength of the book is not only in the excavation of the intellectual history of economic nationalism, but also in the ways that the ideas were applied and shifted over time. The account is rich in specific historical detail, but Suesse does suggest a general pattern. The crucial point, he suggests, is a reaction to inequality. Where inequality exists between nations, the result is more likely to be expansionist nationalism to close the gap. Where inequality exists within nations and is blamed on integration with the world economy, the outcome is more likely to be isolation. He admits that ‘these are highly stylised patterns’ (p. 11), and he does not push them too far. He notes other factors, from the level of foreign ownership, hostility to internationalized elites, the existence of war between states, movements in the terms of trade, or the recent impact of pandemics. Nevertheless, inequality does provide a useful way of understanding the complexities of his story without becoming mechanistic. Despite the geographic range of the book, there is one gap that at first sight appears surprising: the Soviet Union. It was, as he says, a closed economy that dominated the heartland of Eurasia for much of the twentieth century. His justification for leaving it out of his account is that ‘seclusion of the Soviet economy was not primarily the product of purposeful nationalism’ (p. 226), and that the main reason that trade was held back was not isolation for its own sake so much as a commitment to planning. Further, the Soviets combined the construction of the state with many different nationalities. Suesse does provide an excellent account of events after the demise of the Soviet Union and shows how the constituent republics – including Russia – adopted different forms of nationalism. The choices are important for understanding our current geopolitical problems. In some cases, such as Belarus, the high cost of nationalistic isolation led to reintegration with Russia despite the threat to sovereignty. By contrast, Ukraine – the second largest industrial economy in the former Soviet Union – had a powerful nationalist movement and opted for isolation to build a strong national economy, which was difficult given reliance on Russian inputs and markets. Suesse also provides a clear and convincing account of the shifts of policy in Russia which have culminated in Putin's current policy of isolation. The subtle and clear analysis of post-Soviet economic policies makes one wish for some engagement with Soviet-era economists to test his claim that they did not pursue a nationalist agenda. However, this is too cavil: Suesse's chronological and geographic range is combined with a depth of historical understanding that avoids succumbing to simple models.

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