13 - Distinctive Visions of Economic Regionalism for East Asia, Europe, and the Americas

Summary

This chapter examines some distinctive ideas about economic regionalism that emerged during the interwar years and the early 1940s. Some arose in the context of Japanese debates about a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity, of which the most sophisticated was Akamatsu Kaname’s “Wild Geese Flying Pattern theory” of regional economic integration. Others were associated with post-1933 German designs for Europe’s economy, including “Schachtian” managed bilateralism (Hjalmar Schacht), fascist multilateralism (Walter Funk), and visions of a “great-space economy” (Friedrich Zimmermann). The final example comes from Peru’s Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre who advanced a quite different anti-imperialist vision of regionalism initially through what he called “Indoamerican economic nationalism” within Latin America and then via a wider vision of “democratic Interamericanism without empire” that was inclusive of the United States.