Growth, Trade, and Systemic Leadership

4. Explaining Protectionism: Seventeen Perspectives and One Long-Term Common Denominator

4. Explaining Protectionism: Seventeen Perspectives and One Long-Term Common Denominator Protectionism is one of those politicoeconomic phenomena that never quite seem to go away. Nor do new attempts at explaining it. The centrality and salience of the topic seemingly help to account for its analytical popularity. Less obvious is why we continue to spin out new stories about why it occurs. Many of the stories are quite plausible, have ample face validity, and are frequently supported by some type of empirical evidence. Yet one would think if a score or more of explanations for a single phenomenon existed that they could not all be equally correct. Nonetheless, while we do not claim that all protectionism explanations have equal validity , we suspect that many of them do have some claim to validation. A primary reason for thinking this way is that most extant explanations seem capable of being interconnected and integrated. What we have, we believe, is another variation on the hoary elephant fable in which people poke and probe different parts of the animal and identify the ear, the snout, or the tail, without ever quite capturing the whole creature. Each approach to explaining protectionism tends to focus on some partial dimension of the phenomenon at hand. In the process of doing so, the overall contours of the protectionism elephant remain less than fully detected. In this chapter, we look at seventeen perspectives on why protectionism occurs and demonstrate how they can be integrated with the help of a common denominator rubric combining long waves of economic growth and systemic leadership. The seventeen perspectives are ‹rst organized with the help of a 2 × 2 conceptualization contrasting intermittent versus persistent processes and protectionism supply versus demand. Each of these perspectives is then discussed within the context of the cell to which it is assigned. After establishing, albeit brie›y, what these perspectives are about, we 85 suggest how they can be further integrated by examining how they relate to long waves of economic growth and systemic leadership. Thus, we have our main hypothesis for this chapter. H9: Systemic leadership and long waves of economic growth and trade impose fundamental constraints on protectionist behavior . We do not argue that the interconnections work equally well for all political systems. In fact, they are strongly biased toward nineteenth-century British and twentieth-century American systems. The bias is especially appropriate because these two systems have had more than their fair share of in›uence on ›uctuations in world protectionism. If they are treated as but two of perhaps two hundred existing political systems, all with variable propensities toward protectionism, a good proportion of the explanation for protectionism will have been sacri‹ced needlessly. On the contrary , these two nonordinary states have been critical in their own eras as leaders in shaping how much protectionism exists. They have not usually been able to coerce the rest of the world into following their example, but they have still had an unusual degree of in›uence, at least intermittently— and that is very much part of the larger protectionism story. Categorizing Theories of Protectionism A large number of factors and processes have been linked to increases and decreases in protectionism. What is needed is some organizing device that permits us to discuss approaches categorically—as opposed to tediously working our way through the many variations. One way might be to differentiate among short- and long-term factors. Another approach involves differentiating by level of analysis. Either or both approaches could be employed but not without problems in distinguishing short versus long or domestic versus international processes. For instance, a ‹rm that is highly vulnerable to competition from foreign producers confronts the perceived need for some insulation in the immediate short run. Yet if there are a large number of vulnerable ‹rms and their vulnerability persists, their demands for protection may become a long-term factor. Similarly, ‹rms that have sought protection in the past, other things being equal, tend to continue seeking protection. What begins as a short-term impulse can become something much more long term in effect. We will return to the notion of Growth, Trade, and Systemic Leadership 86 short- versus long-term processes at a later point in our analysis but choose not to rely on it as a categorical device. Level of analysis is another useful conventional device for distinguishing types of factors. Electoral processes and business cycles, for...