Book. For Westerners, the awakening is both brutal and painful. China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001 was to consecrate the definitive victory of free trade over protectionism and, by extension, sign the superiority of democracies over authoritarian regimes.
Three decades earlier, the international lawyer Samuel Pisar (1929-2015) had even theorized – in the wake of Montesquieu’s “gentle commerce” two centuries earlier -, in Weapons of Peace (Denoël, 1970), the idea that political tensions between nations were reduced by increasing trade. The reconciliation of France and Germany through the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 – which is the cradle of the European Union of 27 – is a perfect example of this. The results of the broken dream of Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022), the last leader of the USSR, who tried to modernize his country through perestroika and by increasing exchanges with the West, before being driven from power and hated by the Russians, appears to him as a counter-example.
The ace ! The rise of China’s successors to Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997) completely changed the perspective. In twenty years, the Middle Kingdom has risen from the status of a poor country to the rank of second world economic power, just behind the United States. China has been able to defend its sovereignty and its internal market very effectively, by resorting to protectionist measures. First the world’s workshop for manufactured products, it then caught up with its technological delays, by forcing multinationals wishing to establish themselves on its soil to give up their industrial secrets. Over time, it has established itself in almost all sectors: automotive, air transport, electronic chips, etc. With the crisis linked to Covid-19, from the spring of 2020, Europe discovered, amazed, that its dependence was total on China in the medical sector, particularly in terms of gloves, masks and of drugs.
A story through the commodities traded
We would therefore be witnessing today a great “revenge” of protectionism, whose political and social history Ali Laïdi traces the political and social history of, from Antiquity to the present day, in the first part of his work. He then establishes a vast historical fresco of trade through the goods exchanged on the planet (wheat, sugar, cocoa, textiles, iron, oil, etc.), thus approaching the question of protectionism through an unusual prism. The latter being usually called upon from the angle of the economic theories of Adam Smith (1723-1790), then of the Englishman David Ricardo (1772-1823) – who conceived the theory of comparative advantage – and his German opponent Friedrich List (1789-1846) – who advocated, on the contrary, to protect infant industries.
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