Integrating National Markets: From the Outside-In or from the Inside-Out?

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Since the Cold War ended, a new feature of the postwar world has gained primacy for people in industrialized countries: the threats posed by international trade and the integration of industrialized economies. National and subnational interests are now formulated, and preeminence and decline now measured, in terms of economic well-being. A cartography adapted to chart this new terrain of world politics would be required to show more than the relative military power of states. It might even reverse its perspective and depict geoeconomics, once the background to military security, as the foreground. This new political-economic geography, in which national security is assured through economic diplomacy, competitiveness, and trade wars, began to emerge in the mid-1970s with the end of the postwar economic boom. But its origins were institutionalized at Bretton Woods in 1944 and in Brussels a decade later. In