Questioning the (happy) narrative of geoeconomics

Abstract

A quarter of a century ago, as the tensions of the Cold War were already winding down or virtually gone in fact, Edward Luttwak’s thesis (1990) predicted that states would continue to find themselves in a competitive situation in trying to secure the resources and modalities of their economic development. Luttwak explained this competition in terms of states’ interest in securing the welfare of their populations through employment, the state’s inherent drive to rival with other states around it and to outdo them as much as possible („relative advantage”), bureaucracies’ „urge of role preservation” connected to the latter, and domestic interest groups’ pressure on governments to make them work to their advantage.