Economic Patriotism in Open Economies, Ben Clift and Cornelia Woll (Eds.), London: Routledge, 2012

How do governments answer to the demands of their electorate for prosperity and protection from the vagaries of the market place, if governments have pledged to steer away from protective interventions in markets? This tension is what motivates this timely little book, edited by Ben Clift and Cornelia Woll. “Economic patriotism in open economies” has to find other ways than the outright protective measures of the past by which competitors were excluded from national markets in order to foster national champions. The volume builds on the literature of economic nationalism, popularized by authors such as Helleiner (2002), which has pointed out that liberalization might be an effective industrial policy by certain nation states, thus, making it possible to interpret acts of liberalization as nationally motivated. The volume makes two distinct theoretical contributions, related to its conceptual shift from economic nationalism to economic patriotism: on the one hand, it points out that economic patriotism can also evolve on the subnational or supranational level, which can create tensions with economic patriotism on the national level. Second, this evolution can happen not only on the basis of an imagined patrie, but an imagined patrie to be. Economic patriotism in this sense, they maintain, is as much a discursive device as it is economic policy, a point most clearly made in the contribution by Callaghan and Lagneau-Ymonet when they explain the failure to arouse economic patriotism in France to defend the Euro-next stock exchange from a take-over by the NYSE.