Response to "Economic Integration and the European International System in the Era of World War I"

Abstract

IN HIS THOUGHTFUL COMMENT, PAUL SCHROEDER has pointed out that the debate over economic integration and the origins of World War I turns on one of the central questions of modern politics: the relationship between political and economic power. And, as he correctly points out, the way in which leaders and the public believe political and economic power are related is as important as how these two kinds of power actually do interact. Given the present momentous crossroads in the post-Cold War world, I can only second Schroeder's call for policy makers and the public to work for mutually beneficial economic and political relations between nations. In addition to the need to reach out to the former Soviet bloc, which Schroeder justly stresses, one could also argue that U.S.-Japanese relations, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and European integration are areas in which we need to remind ourselves that, in the long run, the advantages of cooperation and negotiation outweigh the dangers inherent in conflict and self-interested nationalism. Although Schroeder's comment provides a number of important insights, I wonder whether we can perhaps draw a stronger lesson than he does from history. Schroeder argues that, despite the international cooperation in the economic sphere before 1914, a major war was still virtually inevitable. Leaders and most of the public believed, first, that international economic relations, just like great power politics, were necessarily rooted in conflict rather than cooperation and, second, that as a result states had to use political and military power to strengthen their international economic position. By and large, everyone assumed that the state, to ensure its citizens' security and prosperity, had to succeed simultaneously in two fields of competition in the international arena, both inextricably intertwined and mutually interdependent: politics and economics.' Yet, given that an enormous degree of economic integration did occur, perhaps we should also investigate whether all European leaders actually believed that political and military power were essential to economic success. Just because the assumption that international relations will always tend toward conflict has been so deeply rooted and because the results of that assumption can be so disastrous, historians would do well to question it. After all, if excellent scholars on the