In the post-war period, US imperialism had an incentive to encourage the dominant nation states in Europe to achieve this task of creating a multinational EU state without further wars between them. After all, US multinational corporations now operated globally, particularly in Europe, and benefited from that same level playing field of a European single-market. It similarly benefited from a creation of such a single market in the Asia-Pacific Region, under the dominance of its new ally Japan, where, again, US multinationals operated.
This was not the same as having its own single-market, because each of these large, new blocs had their own historic development, and so their own existing sets of rules and standards to be harmonised. But, at least, a US corporation operating in the EU, or in Japan, would operate on the same level playing field as every other capital operating there. In so far as the need to expand trade between these blocs, that was the role of the new international bodies set up after WWII, such as GATT/WTO, IMF, World Bank and so on.
The determinant, as I have set out, elsewhere, of where this multinational, industrial capital invested, is the stage of national economic development. Economies, such as Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan, as well as South Korea, were already adequate to support the investment of large-scale industrial capital. Similarly, imperialist capital had little reason to invest in large parts of Africa, because it lacked sufficient development of its infrastructure and so on. The role of Africa and the Middle-East, as with much of Latin America, after WWII, remained, for a long-time, solely as a source for primary products, and export market for manufactured goods. But, as Trotsky noted, the process of combined and uneven development, proceeds at an accelerated pace.
“The law of uneven development of capitalism is older than imperialism. Capitalism is developing very unevenly today in the various countries. But in the nineteenth century this unevenness was greater than in the twentieth. At that time England was lord of the world, while Japan on the other hand was a feudal state closely confined within its own limits. At the time when serfdom was abolished among us, Japan began to adapt itself to capitalist civilization. China was, however, still wrapped in the deepest slumber. And so forth. At that time the unevenness of capitalist development was greater than now. Those unevennesses were as well known to Marx and Engels as they are to us. Imperialism has developed a more “levelling tendency” than pre-imperialist capitalism, for the reason that finance capital is the most elastic form of capital.”
In the developed, imperialist economies, this process, in the 1980's, also, in part, driven by the crisis of overproduction of capital in relation to labour, and need, therefore, to seek out new global supplies of exploitable labour-power, led to a relative decline in those economies, and rise in some of those new industrialising economies such as the Asian Tigers. In the old imperialist economies, that same process of slower capital accumulation, and falling interest rates, in the 1980's, and its attendant rise in unemployed labour, led to the void being filled by small capitals – the return of the petty-bourgeoisie.
The petty-bourgeoisie has grown by 50% since the end of the 1970's. That fact played a significant role in the transformation of the main bourgeois parties - Conservative and Labour in Britain, for example – from being conservative social-democratic parties, into being reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalist parties, as well as the rise of new, overtly reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalist parties, such as Reform. Trump represents the same trend in the US. The reactionary, utopian nature of that trend, in respect to Europe, is clear, that it seeks a return to the global competition between small nation states in an era in which that competition has become one of huge, continental sized, multi-national states. It is the idiocy of Brexit.
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