The “International Disorder”: Some Historical Digressions on the Structure of Global Interdependencies

The highly visible political phenomenon which motivated the author of this book to undertake, structure, and carry out this study was the “growth of protectionism” in the global economy. We want to emphasize at the outset, however, that this investigation is not a study about protectionism in the traditional sense. While the general aim of our work was to examine the circumstances surrounding government policies which are aimed at protecting domestic economic activities from foreign competition, the specific goal was to study entrepreneurial response to these policies. Thus the particular object of our detailed research is New Forms of International Investment (NFII) and New Forms of Export Financing (NFEF), what is referred to jointly as New Forms of Internationalization (NFI). The rise and utilization of these new forms cannot be understood without reference to the current employment of protectionist policies by national governments in both the industrialized and the developing countries. At the same time our approach (moving from protectionism to new forms of entrepreneurial behaviour) enables us to situate political conflicts within a long-term historical context. Thereby we are able to identify dogmatic, ideological, and out-dated theories for what they really are and thus to identify patterns of inconsistency between domestic policies and global realities.