Periods of economic recession are known to foster protectionist tendencies. This has been especially marked after the global crisis, when trade openness has become a useful battering ram in the developed world, skillfully used by policy makers and employers to pass the buck on to the threat posed by foreign producers. The significantly increased threat of unemployment is then seen – even by Northern workers – not as the result of domestic macroeconomic policies that prevent employment from rising as it feasibly could, but as something determined by trade patterns, especially exports from the developing world.
Even so, the recent trade wars over the use of “green” technologies are surprising in how extreme and openly self-contradictory the positions have been. And what is most surprising – and even alarming and distressing – is how such thinking has permeated to the working classes in the North, who now openly identify their own interests with those of their employers rather than with workers in developing countries.