Paulsen: The Past, Present, and Potential of Economic Security

Mona Paulsen (London School of Economics - Law) has posted The Past, Present, and Potential of Economic Security. Here's the abstract:

This article responds to industrial economies’ ever-frequent invocation of economic security to indefinitely justify activities that impair other states’ trade within the post-war global economic order. It makes two crucial contributions to the discourse. Through richly detailed archival research, the first contribution is to show how governments have long grappled with state interventions on critical materials, unpacking questions of self-sufficiency, conservation, and defeating foreign economic competitors within the embryonic postwar global economic order. I expose complications by assuming the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was a site for security through rules-based trade by probing the dispute between the US and Czechoslovakia, exploring how Czechoslovakia faced increased insecurity of supply owing to US controls on defence-capable materials. Through historical examination, I disprove contentions that Cold War-era trade institutions are no longer fit for purpose. After that, I investigate the underexplored influence of the Korean War upon GATT contracting parties and reveal the importance of equitable distribution of strategic materials in what one US congressperson called a ‘super-government’ cartel. I redescribe the contingent character of these legal structures, showing the functions (and limits) of economic planning and military preparedness when governments and firms – fresh off the Second World War experience – demanded economic security and access to strategic supplies. The second contribution is normative – showing the potential to govern economic security strategies within existing World Trade Organization intuitional structures. Drawing on my historical contribution, I develop a conceptual framework that dissects economic security into four categories and explains how governments can – and should – address security ambitions without abandoning coordination and collective goals for the future.