Economic Warfare: Better Safe than Sorry

Abstract

Trade, it has been argued, is an ‘economic equivalent to war’. The French eighteenth-century philosopher Benjamin Constant once remarked that ‘war and commerce are but two different means of arriving at the same aim which is to possess what is desired. Trade is nothing but a homage paid to the strength of the possessor by him who aspires to the possession; it is an attempt to obtain by mutual agreement that which one does not hope any longer to obtain by violence. The idea of commerce would never occur to a man who would always be the strongest.’¹ East-West economic relations have indeed at times come close to an ‘equivalent of war’.