Emmanuel Macron is playing the emperor again. Last week he proudly announced a grand new strategy, but without any indication of how to pay for it. The French President said that ‘“Made in Europe” should be our motto,’ and urged Europeans to ‘take back control of our supply chains, energy and innovation’.
Macron’s call for Europe’s reindustrialisation reflects a new transatlantic consensus. The age of ‘globalisation’ and ‘neoliberalism’ is over. We were too naive about our trading partners during the 1990s and the 2000s, and we now need to build up national resilience. Heavy-handed industrial policy and protectionism are making a comeback in the United States and Europe alike.
But the western world rejected those policies in the 1980s and the 1990s for a good reason: they kept down economic growth. In the developing world too, a strategy of industrialisation of ‘import substitution’ – i.e.
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