Varieties of Economic Nationalism in Cold War Europe

Investigating the trajectories of economic nationalisms in Cold War Europe this open access book explores the scope and limits of small (nation-)state actors pursuing and defending national economic interests in a globalizing world. In so doing it contributes a new perspective in the economic history political economy and nationalism literatures on post-war Europe. With this remit underscoring the inherent vulnerabilities of smaller national economies and their strategies of economic survival beyond the constraints of Cold War alignments <i>Varieties of Economic Nationalism in Cold War Europe</i> reconstructs national economic discourses and policy objectives of smaller states and sub-states on both sides of the Iron Curtain from the mid-1960s through the late 1980s. <br/> <br/>Examining the impact of economic turning points such as the simultaneous crises of Western Keynesianism and Eastern Marxism-Leninism the oil and financial shocks of the mid-1970s or the interplay of economic liberalization and decolonization on small state economic policy-making and diplomacy eight empirical case studies are here brought together to illustrate the variety of Cold War-era economic nationalisms and their oscillation between protectionism and free market approaches. Far from being powerless and subjected to the geo-economic binaries of the early Cold War small states in East and West were as the contributions demonstrate very capable of turning smallness into a strategic asset and expanding their room for manoeuvre in a quickly shifting global economy.<br/><br/><i>The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Austrian Science Fund.</i>