On April 12, 1861, rebel artillery opened fire on Fort Sumter, starting the American Civil War. The war turned out to be a catastrophe for the South, which lost more than a fifth of its youth. But why did the secessionists believe they could win?
One reason was that they believed they possessed a powerful economic weapon. The economy of Great Britain, the leading world power at the time, was heavily dependent on cotton from the southern United States, and they thought that cutting this raw material would force the British to intervene on the side of the Confederacy. Indeed, the Civil War initially created a “cotton famine” that left thousands of Britons out of work.
After all, of course, Britain maintained neutrality — in part because British workers saw the Civil War as a moral crusade against slavery and sided with the Union cause despite their own suffering.
Why tell this ancient story? Because it has obvious relevance to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It seems quite clear that Vladimir Putin viewed Europe’s, in particular Germany’s, dependence on Russian natural gas in the same way that slaveholders viewed Britain’s dependence on King Cotton: a form of economic dependence that would coerce those countries into allowing the ambitions his military.
And Putin was not entirely wrong. Last week, I criticized Germany for its hesitancy to make economic sacrifices for the sake of Ukraine’s freedom. But let’s not forget that Germany’s reaction to Ukraine’s requests for military aid on the eve of the war was also pathetic. The UK and US rushed to supply lethal weapons, including hundreds of anti-tank missiles that were crucial in repelling the Russian attack on Kiev. Germany offered and took too long to deliver… 5,000 helmets.
It is not difficult to imagine that if, for example, Donald Trump were still US president, Putin’s bet that international trade would be a force of coercion, not peace, would have been confirmed.
If you think I’m trying to shame Germany into becoming a better defender of democracy, you’re right. But I am also trying to make a more general thesis about the relationship between globalization and war, which is not as simple as many people assumed.
There was an old belief among Western elites that trade is good for peace, and vice versa. The old American push for trade liberalization, which began even before World War II, was always in part a political project: Cordell Hull, Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of state, firmly believed that lower tariffs and greater international trade would help lay the foundations of peace.
The European Union was also an economic and political project. Its origins lie in the European Coal and Steel Community, created in 1952 with the explicit aim of making the industries of France and Germany so interdependent that there could never be another war in Europe.
And the roots of Germany’s current vulnerability can be traced back to the 1960s, when the West German government began to pursue Ostpolitik—”Eastern policy”—attempting to normalize relations, including economic ones, with the Soviet Union, in the hope that the growing Integration with the West would strengthen civil society and move the East towards democracy. Russian gas began to flow into Germany in 1973.
So does commerce promote peace and freedom? Of course, this happens in some cases. In others, however, authoritarian rulers more concerned with power than prosperity may view economic integration with other countries as a license to misbehave, assuming that democracies with strong financial stakes in their regimes will turn a blind eye to their abuses. of power.
I’m not just talking about Russia. The European Union watched for years as Viktor Orban systematically dismantled liberal democracy in Hungary. To what extent can this weakness be explained generally by the large investments in Hungary that European companies, especially German ones, have made as they embrace outsourcing to cut costs?
Then there’s the really big issue: China. Does Xi Jinping see China’s close integration with the world economy as a reason to avoid audacious policies — such as invading Taiwan — or as reason to expect a weak reaction from the West? Nobody knows.
Now, I’m not suggesting a return to protectionism. I am suggesting that national security concerns about trade — real concerns, not farcical versions like Trump’s invocation of national security to impose tariffs on Canadian aluminum — need to be taken more seriously than I, among others, used to believe.
More immediately, however, law-abiding countries need to show that they will not be prevented from defending freedom. Autocrats may believe that financial exposure to their authoritarian regimes will make democracies afraid to defend their values. We need to prove them wrong.
And what that means in practice is that Europe must act quickly to cut Russian oil and gas imports and that the West must provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs, not just to keep Putin at bay, but to clearly win the war. war. What is at stake here is much greater than just Ukraine.
Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves
