>Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> nationalist/autarkic
>.
>Is autarky necessarily the same as nationalism? Do, say, controls on foreign
>exchange holdings necessarily lead to exclusionary politics? Why exactly
>can't you have exchange controls *and* internationalism?
Maybe you could, but the examples Patrick and others point to were nationalist.
What small to medium sized poor country could really make a go of it on its own for any length of time? Maybe a big one with some technological resources, like Brazil or India, could for a while, but Zambia or Argentina? Cuba got by only because it was subsidized and defended for 30 years by the USSR. But now? At minimum, you'd need a bunch of countries to ally, take a common stance with their creditors, make some serious attempt at developing serious economic and social links, and arrange some sort of trading system with a division of labor. The focus on exchange controls comes from an excessive focus on short-term capital flows - ditto ATTAC and the Tobin taxers - and not enough on the fundamentals of the global economic hierarchy.
That aside, I think more serious attention should be paid to the paranoid, hierarchical, and repressive psychopolitics of so many nationalist schemes. Mahathir isn't very admirable; Smith's Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa are even less so. And on the left, what about the proper critique of socialism in one country? There was a lot of paranoia, hierarchy, and repression in Stalin's USSR. Attempts to bracket out these things remind me of the folks who point to the virtues of Nazi economic policy - the 1% unemployment rate - as if the repression of unions could be bracketed out of the model.
Doug