Mises tied world peace to unrestricted foreign investment

Evidence

In a 1952 lecture at the San Francisco Public Library, Mises singled out the promise of the first prime minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, that private businesses would not be expropriated in the ten years following independence. ‘You can’t expect people to invest if you tell them you will expropriate them at some time in the future’, Mises retorted. Describing Nehru’s Fabian-inspired socialism as a step backwards even from late British rule, Mises broke starkly with what Gunnar Myrdal was then praising as India’s ‘heroic attempt’ at grand-scale planning. For Myrdal, this attempt was the only alternative to ‘continued acquiescence in economic and cultural stagnation or regression’. For Mises, in contrast, the refusal of peaceful commerce brought back the threat of war. If resource-rich ‘backward countries’ refuse access to foreign corporations on the market’s terms, he asked rhetorically, ‘can anyone expect that the people of the civilized countries will forever tolerate this state of affairs?’ Mises warned ominously that the world was returning to a state in which it was not possible to access raw materials without conquest. World peace depends on unrestricted foreign investment, he argued, ‘not on the boy scouts of the United Nations’. … Realising the neoliberals’ worst fears, delegates from recently independent states increasingly pursued an agenda of permanent sovereignty over natural resources, which sought to secure the ‘inalienable right’ of sovereign states to dispose of the resources located in their territories, including by nationalising the foreign companies that had hitherto exploited them. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 285

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on Western economic elite attitudes toward postcolonial sovereignty and the question of who owns natural resources — links to dependency theory debates and to the reader’s interest in market ethics and human-rights discourse. — connects to: Mises blamed tariffs and war, not capitalism, for interrupting world prosperity — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 361; Mises saw compulsory market integration as advancing both productivity and peace. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 110; Mises justified imperial war as legitimate compulsion to trade — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 261 (+1 more)
• SEED: A potential essay angle: the rhetorical migration of ‘permanent sovereignty over natural resources’ as a human right versus the neoliberal framing of foreign investment as the guarantor of peace — two opposite moral claims over the same resources.

Broader Connections

• International trade led to the need for a global currency. #expands (0.70) — Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects, 1221