Is Germany a Mercantilist State? the Dispute Over Trade Between Berlin and Washington Under Merkel and Trump Pierre Baudry
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Is Germany a mercantilist state? The dispute over trade between Berlin and Washington under Merkel and Trump Pierre Baudry To cite this version: Pierre Baudry. Is Germany a mercantilist state? The dispute over trade between Berlin and Wash- ington under Merkel and Trump. international studies association, Apr 2019, Toronto, Canada. hal- 02105531v1 HAL Id: hal-02105531 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02105531v1 Submitted on 21 Apr 2019 (v1), last revised 6 May 2019 (v2) HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Copyright Is Germany a mercantilist state? The dispute over trade between Berlin and Washington under Merkel and Trump Pierre Baudry 2019 © Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes/CNRS, PSL, France Email: [email protected] Pierre Baudry teaches at the University of Tours (France). He is finishing his Ph.D. at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes/CNRS, PSL. His Ph.D. is about the European policy of the Christian-democratic parties, CDU/CSU, under Angela Merkel from 1998 to 2016. He focuses Berlin’s policy during the euro and the migrant crisis and the tensions between the USA and Germany since Trump’s election. He has published articles and books reviews in ournal of Common Market Studies, Revue française de science politique, Revue d’Allemagne et des pays de langue allemande. “Is Germany a mercantilist state? The dispute over trade between Berlin and Washington 1 under Merkel and Trump” Pierre Baudry 2019 © No reproduction without the author’s agreement is allowed. Is Germany a mercantilist state? The dispute over trade between Berlin and Washington under Merkel and Trump Abstract: Mercantilism is certainly one of the oldest concepts of political economy. However, its use to describe pre-liberal and pre-industrial Western capitalism has been highly disputed due to the apparent vagueness of its definition. This paper tackles this issue by developing a historical vision of mercantilism, which rests on a heuristic ideal-type. My goal is to developed mercantilism as a complementary concept to Kindelberger’s of Hegemonic Stability Theory. The pro-free-trade ‘benevolent hegemon’ goes hand in hand with mercantilist states, which need high level of good export and capital import. The question is then to understand two forms of mercantilism: I call the first one ‘early capitalism’, which is typical for developing countries, while ‘late mercantilism’ is to be found among ageing and developed countries, which maintain a mercantilist policy. Empirically, I focus on Germany’s economy since 1945 to illustrate and test this conceptual distinction. I intend to show that West Germany has been an ‘early mercantilist’ power and benefited from the much-needed help by the USA after WWII, while it appears more and more as ‘late mercantilist’ power since the 2000s. This empirical case shall help illustrate my general framework and shed light on the structural reasons for the disputes over trade between Berlin and Washington under Donald Trump. Keywords: Mercantilism; free trade; Germany; USA; Trump; Merkel; Kindelberger; Hegemonic stability theory; capitalism “Is Germany a mercantilist state? The dispute over trade between Berlin and Washington 2 under Merkel and Trump” Pierre Baudry 2019 © No reproduction without the author’s agreement is allowed. Introduction “We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military. Very bad for U.S. This will change”, Donald Trump on Tweeter, 30th May 2017. Since Obama’s and even more since Trump’s election, the USA is worried about the trade surplus that Germany and China generate. It is certainly not the first time in its history that the American hegemon considers with anxiety the rise of economic competitors and accuse them of undervaluing their currency, subsiding their national champion and using bribing as a method to win large tenders. The 1960s and 1970s were in that respect particularly important because they marked the peak of the recovery cycle by the West European economies, which increasingly competitors their American ally. Moreover due do the costs related to the Vietnam War and the necessity to finance war spending through money creation, the US gold reserves were decreasing in the early 1970s and a decade later Japan, an unexpected new challenger for the American economy, was able to destabilize Washington’s confidence in its economic potential and affirmed itself as a powerful industrial actor. All these factors combined led to intense negotiations between the USA and their partners, which after several rounds of international bargaining were compel to accept new the lowered exchange rate for the US dollar.1 However, in recent years, Washington increasingly showed its concerns over the rising of China as an international power and peer competitor, while it reproached to Berlin not to fulfill its duties as the economic leader power in Europe during the 1 Julian Germann, Pivotal Crisis: State Power and Social Forces in the Making of Neoliberal Capitalism, A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies, 2013. “Is Germany a mercantilist state? The dispute over trade between Berlin and Washington 3 under Merkel and Trump” Pierre Baudry 2019 © No reproduction without the author’s agreement is allowed. eurocrisis and the global economic turmoil since 2007/2008.2 The economist Peter Navarro, who had defended unorthodox views on and protectionism, joined Donald Trump’s administration. He supervised a report on Beijing infringement against the rule of world trade3 and explicitly ‘accuses’ China of cheating against the American companies with illegal methods after the new Republican president repeatedly accused Germany not to contribute enough to NATO’s budget and to use the euro as an undervalued currency. In this context, the concept of mercantilism regained popularity among scholars and political leaders alike.4 However, in spite of the inflationary use of this notion, economists and political scientists are still looking for a precise definition of mercantilism, which would be heuristically usable and meaningful in the context of global economy. My contribution in solving this puzzle consists in three points. First, I aim to overcome the traditional opposition between free trade on the one hand and protectionism on the other hand. Free-trade and protectionist do not represent two different stages in the history of the development of capitalism as Adam Smith5 famously argues, but constitute two closely related tenets of modern economy. I argue that a modern conception of mercantilism shows the close interaction between both aspects of world economy by explaining how liberal nations with relatively low trade barriers represent the necessary counterpart of export-orientated countries, which use protectionist or mercantilist policies. Second, I aim to offer an historical account of mercantilism, which is both connected to older definition of this concept coming from Friedrich List and Heckscher, but that defines its meaning in a new context, in which former developing countries are increasing able to compete with the Western economies. I thus introduce a longue durée perspective on world’s economies by connecting the former Western 2 Mark Blyth & Matthias Matthijs (2017) Black Swans, Lame Ducks, and the mystery of IPE's missing macroeconomy, Review of International Political Economy, 24:2, 203-231. 3 Peter Navarro. 4 Rodrik 5 Adam Smith “Is Germany a mercantilist state? The dispute over trade between Berlin and Washington 4 under Merkel and Trump” Pierre Baudry 2019 © No reproduction without the author’s agreement is allowed. domination of the globe since the colonial period and the increasing power reversal at the advantage of the Global South countries. Third, my contention is to show that mercantilism is not necessarily related to unfair economic policies implemented by states that try to fool their competitors through more or less discretionary and opaque industrial policies. Mercantilism belongs to a more comprehensive framework of global imbalances, which are related to saving, portfolio decision and investment as Blanchard underlines.6 If one really wants to overcome the traditional vision opposition between the ‘mercantile system’ and liberalism, one must then assume that mercantilist is a multilayered phenomenon grounding on complex macroeconomic, ideological and demographic reasons. To put in a nutshell the central contention of this article, I argue that one should rethink the concept of mercantilism to give him a scientifically satisfying definition based on a renewed conception of realism I propose to call post-liberal realism. Moreover, I consider that the tensions between Washington and Berlin over the US trade imbalance is one the best examples to scrutinize this question. In this article, I will then focus on Germany’s economic policy and its dispute over trade with the USA under Donald Trump. To clarify the issues at stake, I defend in this article both a theoretical and an empirical thesis. First, my theoretical claim is that both IR theories and economics have ignored each other and are unable to integrate critical insights, methods and results from the other discipline from an interdisciplinary perspective. Such an interdisciplinary dialogue alone makes it possible to understand the new form of political and economic power that Trump’s rhetoric over protectionism and the critics against German export surpluses highlight. Almost taboo concepts such as ‘capitalism’7, ‘inequality’, ‘the richest 6 Olivier Blanchard and Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, Global Imbalances: In Midstream? 7 Piketty, Thomas, Le capital au XXIe siècle, Paris : Éditions du Seuil, [2013].