Recently, Politico’s Digital Bridge newsletter featured a plea by the Economic Round Table of Industrialists (ERT) against the political reshoring agenda, including its plea for political strategic autonomy. Apparently, this plea is news today. Before, such a plea was considered as common sense. An excerpt:
“I think the principle should be: Avoid it. Avoid reshoring. Avoid talking about bringing everything into one country, or every country should have the capacity to do vaccines or something like that … The concept of strategic autonomy could lead to protectionism, and it’s an excuse for politicians to engage in protectionism. That is not in our interest.”
Jacob Wallenberg, Chair of the ERT Committee on Trade & Market Access on reshoring
Since the 21st century, political nationalism is pressuring economic internationalism – a.k.a. globalism – to reshore its global business activities within political boundaries (eg, EU-27).
To some extent, reshoring makes perfect sense. The banking crisis of 2007-2008 taught that (banking) rescue operations were less complicated when all activities are within certain political boundaries (eg, EU-28).
The 2016 outcome of UK’s Brexit referendum has caused a surge in political nationalism between the EU-27 and its former member state, at the expense of economic internationalism, as illustrated by this recent Guardian article: why are there so many weird shortages?
The 2019 coronavirus pandemic revealed a new political issue: vaccine nationalism. National factories of international pharmaceutical companies were restricted in exporting their vaccines to the countries that had ordered those vaccines. This issue also resulted in a court case between the EU-27 and UK’s AstraZeneca.
The political reshoring debate may also be viewed as an example of decoupling (my blogs) between the belief systems Money and Politics. In my view, this decoupling will reveal the redundancy (my blogs) of the belief system Politics. Please also see my recent blog on Plato’s 5 regime types and its belief systems.
On 24 February 2021, US president Joe Biden issued an Executive Order on America’s Supply Chains, including a “100-Day Supply Chain Review”. His 9 July 2021 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy only mentions to “enhance domestic pharmaceutical supply chains”.
Recently, Bloomberg noticed an interesting agreement: “Beijing and Washington have finally found something they agree on – neither likes Chinese companies going public in the U.S.” This is another example of (i) decoupling and (ii) the war between Politics in China, USA and – to some extent – Europe versus Big Business, Big Data and Big Tech.
We should, however, never forget that political nationalism is about identity. For some time (eg, years), Identity may thrive but it will (always) lose from Power (my blogs on Identity vs Power).
Born in the USA (1984) by Bruce Springsteen
artist, lyrics, video, Wiki-1, Wiki-2, Wiki-3
Note: all markings (bold, italic, underlining) by LO unless stated otherwise.
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