Global South nations pursued protection and liberalization simultaneously rather than one ideology
Evidence
Scholars often use overly broad characterizations of Global South countries as adherents to the ideology of dependency theory, which supposedly privileged the protection of infant industry above all else to diversify the economy. In that narration, the exceptions are those countries with especially close ties to the United States—Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea—whose export-oriented industrialization models are usually seen as prefiguring the direction in which development would go once the Third World snapped out of its dependency-theory-driven delusions. Looking at the response to the Haberler Report, one sees that the truth is less black-and-white. In fact, developing countries were advocates of both protection and liberalization at the same time. They followed a policy of “both-and” rather than “either-or.” It was not a protectionist imaginary against a free-trade imaginary, with the developing world as atavistic advocates of the failed 1930s world. Rather, weaker nations used all policy tools available to them, including GATT. In the case of the Haberler Report, developing nations used the master’s tools against him by suggesting that Europe and the United States adhere to their own much-preached liberal principles. The Haberler Report shows that the rise and spread of neoliberal ideas can be understood only through its piecemeal adoption by Global South nations as a development strategy. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 663
Categorization
- XREF: Corrects the common dependency-theory-vs-export-orientation binary taught in intro development courses; links to any standard IR/development historiography. — connects to: Preferential trade deals for the Global South replaced universal free trade — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 714; Two-thirds agreement on the UN corporate code masked irreconcilable North-South divides — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1796
- SEED: Angles toward an essay on how ‘both-and’ economic strategy in the Global South complicates the clean free-trade/protectionism binary in popular histories.
Broader Connections
- Preferential trade deals for the Global South replaced universal free trade
#complicates(0.82) — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 714