Abstract
This is a book about international trade from the ‘bottom up’. Through sectoral case-study material covering some twenty years, it seeks to analyse the socio-economic roots of the global trade regime, and to look at the complex interplay between what Rosenau has referred to as the micro and macro levels.1 In broad terms, this work will demonstrate that it is the intricate relationships between micro-level economic practices of firms, the politics of industrial adjustment in particular states, and the bargaining among them on a multilateral and bilateral basis, which accounts for the ways in which the politics of the trade regime unravel over time. The case illustrates that there was a systematic and mutually constitutive relationship between the changing structure of production and trade in the sector, and the changing politics of the trade regime over time. Firms employed their institutionalised political resources to structure global production and exchange, especially where they were unwilling or unable to adapt their strategies at the micro level. State and market were not opposing principles or dynamics; the state and the market together functioned as integrated ensembles of governance for the management of distributional conflict across levels of analysis.
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Notes
See by James N. Rosenau: ‘Before Co-operation: Hegemons, Regimes, and Habit-Driven Actors’, in International Organization, vol. 40/4, Autumn 1986, pp. 849–94
As is argued by theorists of the realist and, in particular, neo-realist traditions; see for example Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton University Press, 1986); Stephen Krasner, ‘International Political Economy: Abiding Discord’, in Review of International Political Economy, vol. 1/1, pp. 13–20. For a critique of the realist position, see Helen V. Milner, ‘The Assumption of Anarchy in International Relations Theory: A Critique’, in Review of International Studies, vol. 17/1, January 1991, pp. 67–85.
In particular, the recent dominance of realism and of Hegemonic Stability Theory (HST) in international political economy, which focus almost exclusively on states as actors at the international systemic level of bargaining, has failed to grasp the complexity of linkages between the domestic and international levels of analysis, of linkages between structural economic change and patterns of political conflict, and the importance of non-state actors in the political economy of trade. See for example by Stephen Krasner, ‘State Power and the Structure of International Trade’, in World Politics, vol. 28/3, April 1976, pp. 317–43
Geoffrey R.D. Underhill, ‘Industrial Crisis and International Regimes: France, the EEC, and International Trade in Textiles 1974–1984’, in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 19/2, Summer 1990, pp. 185–206.
For a discussion and critique of the assumptions of neo-classical trade theory, see Michael Kitson and Jonathan Michie, ‘Conflict, Co-operation, and Change: The Political Economy of Trade and Trade Policy’, in Review of International Political Economy, vol. 2/4, Autumn 1995, pp. 632–57.
On what has come to be called ‘neo-liberal institutionalism’, see Robert O. Keohane, International Institutions and State Power (Boulder: West-view Press, 1989).
The book builds on research undertaken over a number of years, developed in articles published since the late 1980s: see Geoffrey R.D. Underhill, ‘Industrial Crisis and International Regimes’, op. cit.; Geoffrey R.D. ‘Neo-Corporatist Theory and the Politics of Industrial Decline: The Case of the French Textile and Clothing Industry 1974–1984’, in European Journal of Political Research, October 1988, pp. 489–511; Geoffrey R.D. ‘When Technology Doesn’t Mean Change: Industrial Adjustment and Textile Production in France’, in Michael Talalay, Chris Farrands and Roger Tooze (eds), Technology, Competitiveness, and Culture in the Global Political Economy (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 139–50.
See Yves Mény and Vincent Wright (eds), The Politics of Steel: Western Europe and the Steel Industry in the Crisis Years 1974–1984 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987).
See work by Brian W. Hogwood, Government and Shipbuilding: The Politics of Industrial Change (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1979).
See the text of the Punta del Este GATT Ministerial Declaration on the Uruguay Round, 20 September 1986, as reprinted from GATT, in Hugo Paemen and Alexandra Bensch, From the GATT to the WTO: The European Community in the Uruguay Round (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1995), pp. 271–80.
Though textile and clothing industries remain among the largest sectors of manufacturing industry in the advanced economies, there has been relatively little scholarship on trade in the sector. Besides the misleading study by Aggarwal mentioned above, see an excellent study focusing on Japan, the US, and Germany by H. Richard Friman, Patchwork Protectionism: Textile Trade Policy in the United States, Japan, and West Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990)
William R. Cline, The Future of World Trade in Textiles and Apparel, rev. edn (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1990).
See discussion in Paolo Guerrieri and Pier Carlo Padoan, ‘Neomercantilism and International Economic Stability’, in International Organization, vol. 40/1, Winter 1986, esp. pp. 35–40.
See Philip G. Cerny, The Changing Architecture of Politics: Structure, Agency, and the Future of the State (London: Sage, 1990)
Richard Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy in Current Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), ch. xvii.
See Alan S. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe 1945–1951 (London: Methuen 1984)
Peter Burnham, The Political Economy of Post-War Reconstruction (London: Macmillan, 1990).
See Geoffrey R.D. Underhill, ‘Neo-Corporatist Theory and the Politics of Industrial Decline: The Case of the French Textile and Clothing Industry 1974–1984’, in European Journal of Political Research, vol. 16, 1988, pp. 489–511.
The discussion here will draw on a number of works concerning anti-protectionist forces, e.g. Helen V. Milner, Resisting Protectionism: Global Industries and the Politics of International Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)
I.M. Destler and John Odell, Anti-Protection: Changing Forces in United States Trade Politics (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1987)
Alain Bienaymé, Stratégies de l’entreprise compétitive (Paris: Masson, 1980)
Paul Krugman, ‘Does the New Trade Theory Require a New Trade Policy?’ in The World Economy, vol. 15, 1992, pp. 423–33.
Paul Krugman, ‘Does the New Trade Theory Require a New Trade Policy?’ in The World Economy, vol. 15, 1992, p. 425.
See discussion in John Zysman, Governments, Markets, and Growth (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983), pp. 37–41.
‘Preface’ by Jacques de Bandt in Benoît Boussemart and Jean-Claude Rabier, Le Dossier Agache-Willot: un capitalisme à contre-courant (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1983), p. 13.
John Stopford and Susan Strange, Rival States, Rival Firms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Geoffrey R.D. Underhill, ‘Organised Business and International Relations Theory’, in Justin Greenwood and Henry Jacek (eds), Organised Business and the New Global Order (London: Macmillan, 1998).
Richard Stubbs draws attention to the importance of private networks of capital associated with success of the Asia-Pacific region in international trade: ‘Asia-Pacific Regionalization and the Global Economy: A Third Form of Capitalism’, in Asian Survey, vol. xxxv/9, September 1995, pp. 785–97.
F. Pyke, G. Becattini, and W. Sengenberger, Industrial District and Inter-Firm Co-operation in Italy (Geneva: International Institute for Labour Studies, 1990).
Bernard Lassudrie-Duchêne, ‘Décomposition internationale des processus productifs et autonomie nationale’, in Henri Bourginat (ed.), Internationalisation et autonomie de décision (Paris: Economica, 1982), p. 45.
Paul Krugman, ‘Dutch Tulips and Emerging Markets’, in Foreign Affairs, vol. 74/4, July–August 1995, p. 31.
See in particular the account by Vinod K. Aggarwal, Liberal Protectionism: The International Politics of Organised Textile Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
See by Peter Gourevitch: ‘The Second Image Reversed: The International Sources of Domestic Polities’, in International Organization, vol. 32/4, Autumn 1978; Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). See also by Geoffrey R.D. Underhill, ‘Conceptualising the Changing Global Order’, in Richard Stubbs and Geoffrey Underhill (eds), Political Economy and the Changing Global Order (London: Macmillan, 1994)
Peter J. Katzenstein, Small States in World Markets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
There are various theoretical accounts of the ‘internationalisation’ of the state which can be referred to: see for example Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), esp. pp. 253–65
Susan Strange, States and Markets, 2nd edn (London: Pinter, 1994).
On the relationship between markets and political institutions, see Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press 1944)
John Lie, ‘Embedding Polanyi’s Market Society’, in Sociological Perspectives, vol. 34/2, 1991, pp. 219–35.
On the importance of structuration in international theory, see Cerny, The Changing Architecture of Politics, op. cit.; also Alexander Wendt, ‘The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory’, in International Organization, vol. 41/3, Summer 1987, pp. 335–70.
A number of studies have emphasised that policy preferences must be translated into successful political strategies if they are to be realised. See Underhill, ‘Industrial Crisis and International Regimes’, op. cit.; Milner, Resisting Protectionism, op. cit., esp. ch. 7; J. Schott and J.W. Buurman, The Uruguay Round: An Assessment (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1994).
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© 1998 Geoffrey R. D. Underhill
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Underhill, G.R.D. (1998). Introduction. In: Industrial Crisis and the Open Economy. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26903-7_1
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