Following Max Weber’s emphasis on a fundamental change in ethical values behind the modern capitalistic economy, this paper offers an ideational explanation for China’s economic modernization since 1978. It argues that China’s economic reform, which first and foremost changed the official rhetoric about profit-making, endowed the economic preoccupations of ordinary people with a special dignity. Since then, the Chinese masses have been allowed to proudly connect their personal prosperity with China’s national wealth and international status. This dignifying connection, in turn, led them to invest in sustaining the growth of their personal prosperity and national wealth. In other words, it converted the Chinese masses to economic nationalism that prioritized economic development as the chief means for the achievement of China’s glory. The conversion of the Chinese masses to economic nationalism marked the Chinese society’s reorientation to “the spirit of capitalism,” hence China’s economic modernization.

The 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath provided fertile soil for criticism of and alternatives to the international liberal order, including the rise of financial nationalism. Contemporary financial nationalism is a view of the world that is nationalist in its motivation for political action, financial in its policy focus, and illiberal in its conception of political economy. At the same time, it is fundamentally shaped by its emergence from within the international liberal order, which both constrains the policy options of financial nationalists and provides opportunities for them to draw on transnational financial resources and institutions to advance nationalist causes. This article offers a conceptual analysis of contemporary financial nationalism that explores its fundamental characteristics, explains what is distinctive about it, delineates its four major policy subtypes, identifies the resources and capabilities required to successfully engage in it, and discusses the implications of doing so. It aids researchers in thinking about financial nationalism’s internal workings across different contexts, in understanding why it has lasted as long and spread as far as it has, in considering how it may evolve, and in contemplating how it can affect domestic and international political economies.

Over the last decade, a new developmentalism has taken root across Africa, centred on promoting local production and industrialisation. One unintended consequence of this has been the proliferation of economically nationalist policy measures that have increasingly come into tension with the aims of regional integration in Africa. This article sets out to offer insights as to why these tensions are emerging by focusing on the East African Community (EAC) and the growing trend of economic nationalism among its members. Contrary to what rationalist and structuralist accounts might presume, this article argues that this rise in economic nationalism is instead reflective of a weakening of the discursive imperative – or social purpose – that had initially converged various actors around the EAC's integration agenda when revived in 2000. While drawing from the EAC's experience, it concludes by highlighting a broader legitimacy dilemma facing African regional organisations within this ‘new developmentalism’.

This article contributes to the comparative literatures on varieties of financial capitalism, economic nationalism and bank resolution with a focus on Spain and Italy's management of bank insolvency and resolution between 2008 and 2018. Both countries' alternative banks faced enormous challenges through prolonged economic decline and declining loan repayments, both turned to depositors to become investors in lieu of attracting arm's-length investors to inject capital, and both had strong connections with local political authorities that resisted bank reform. But Spanish banks were restructured successfully in accordance with EU law while local government ties complicated Italian resolutions. We explain this outcome through two factors: state strength buttressed by outside assistance from the European Stability Mechanism; and strong international marketization, which enhanced the drive to restructure quickly. Spain's decision to ask for loans from the European Stability Mechanism to help restructure its heavily marketized savings banks allowed it to finish reforms after 2012.

This article investigates the international genre of “retro” and how it is used in Hungary to re-matter the nation’s modern past, repositioning the country within a twentieth-century European history where it was never cut off by an “Iron Curtain” from the modern West. It does this by selecting for modern consumer goods and popular culture from both East and West that fit international criteria for retro. For both young and old, retro “matters” the past in a way that affirms contemporary market sensibilities, infusing it with value through assertions of market equivalence in the past and new value as commodities in the present. If Hungarian Retro works as a form of nostalgia for some, it is for an era of perceived national prestige, value, and economic sovereignty relative to the demoralized present. While distinct from right-wing nationalist politics, Hungarian Retro nonetheless shares in the project of erasing a stigmatized state socialism from national history. This article builds on scholarship on the role of the material in producing the nation in everyday life. It contributes a perspective that brings together: (a) the domestication of international commercial and popular trends; (b) the global hierarchy of prestige based on national exports and imports; and (c) the constitution of value in citizens via the qualities of consumer goods both produced and consumed.

American trade policy under the Trump administration can be summed up in one expression, “America First,” which the US president himself has repeated many times. Driven by a rejection of multilateralism, the United States has adopted numerous measures designed to maintain or stimulate domestic industry or to tighten economic policies both domestically and towards foreign trading partners. Reflecting isolationist and nationalist economic theories, these measures are the anchor for a return of economic frontiers to the United States. Yet the United States is at the heart of globalization and cannot completely isolate itself without risking an economic meltdown. This is all the more true since it has been the driving force behind the creation of the multilateral trading system since the end of the Second World War. This change of economic vision by one of the world’s greatest powers can only be a turning point in the recent history of international economic relations. As such, one may wonder whether America First and the set of measures adopted in its name also foreshadow a phase of retreat for international trade law or whether, on the contrary, they are an opportunity for reform of an area of the law that has been struggling to evolve for several decades.

The Ottoman-Turkish historiography has been largely concerned with the economic nationalism of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which consisted of four doctrines: elimination of foreign dominance on the Ottoman economy, removal of non-Muslims from the economic sphere, creation of a Turkish/Muslim bourgeoisie, and rapid industrialization. Through its focus on the economic activities of the Society for the Ottoman Navy, a CUP-affiliated charitable organization with enormous economic power, the present study investigates how the economic policies of the period can be regarded as a practice of economic nationalism. Based on archival material and in dialogue with secondary sources, this article argues that although the Unionist leadership and intelligentsia employed the language of economic nationalism, the operation of the economy in practice was considerably different from its rhetoric. War conditions, the lack of indigenous capital accumulation, and relations of the Ottoman Empire with foreign powers heavily shaped the implementation of the economic nationalism of the CUP.

Cet article vise à brosser un portrait de l’évolution des politiques et des relations commerciales canado-américaines en replaçant au cœur de l'analyse la variable du « nationalisme économique ». Il s'appuie sur l'approche « nationaliste » en économie politique internationale, qui permet de comprendre tant le protectionnisme que la libéralisation et surtout, le passage de l'un à l'autre ou la combinaison des deux. Le nationalisme économique constitue une tendance lourde des relations commerciales canado-américaines, qui auront été caractérisées depuis 1867 et au-delà par une tension continuelle entre protectionnisme et libéralisation.

Two distinct strands of conservative Canadian economic nationalism—associated with the ideas of John Rae and Isaac Buchanan—helped to inform the country's protectionist National Policy of 1879. These strands of nationalism were much less influenced by Listian ideas than was economic nationalist thought in many other countries at this time. This study of their content, intellectual sources and influence contributes empirically and analytically to debates in Canadian political economy and international political economy, while also advancing historical scholarship. The arguments also have some potential contemporary relevance in an age when protectionist economic nationalism is rising in the US and elsewhere.

This article examines the main theorists of economic nationalism (Romanianization) and their ideas promoting protectionism and anti-Semitism in 1930s–1940s Romania. Trying to offer a rational scientific justification for excluding foreigners, especially Jews, and increasing the role of ethnic Romanians in the economy, major scholars of economics offered solutions toward successful Romanianization. Because some of these economists were also influential politicians and public intellectuals, their investigations and blueprints for the project gained wide publicity and provided steps for achieving it rapidly and thoroughly. These economists disseminated their theoretical and empirical constructions of Romanianization in university courses, public lectures, and publications. Some were important scholars; among them, Virgil Madgearu, Mihail Manoilescu, Gheorghe N. Leon, Ion Răducanu, and D. R. Ioaniţescu, They examined Romanianization of the economy from the 1930s to the 1940s and influenced the agenda of local elites and the general public, due to their prestigious positions as politicians, public intellectuals, and professors at local universities.

How relevant is nationality in global economic behavior? The aim of this paper is to scrutinize the relevance of nationality affiliations and nationality conceptions in cross-border economic transactions, using the case of foreign investment exchanges. In particular, I examine how nationality affiliations may shape the types of commitments that actors will want to realize through foreign investment transactions, and how nationality categorizations influence the evaluation of potential partners in economic transactions. I also stipulate when nationality affiliations and categorizations play a more- or less-salient role. To develop these propositions I use illustrations from cases of foreign investment attempts in which investors from the West try to acquire firms in post-socialist Slovenia. The analysis is grounded in economic sociology and advances a relational understanding of nationality, seen as interpretive codes embedded in actors’ cultural repertoires, situationally invoked, and made relevant (or not) in interactions.