Liberal Economy

During my last presentation, I quoted from a poem by Kurt Tucholsky. Here is the full text, as translated by me:

Europe

The wines from the Rhine are good, they say-
but you can’t sell them in UK-
Buy British!
The people from Vienna make great cakes and pies
which can’t be sold under Swedish skies-
Köp svenska varor!
Oranges rot in Italy-
but we have to protect German farmers, see?
Germans, buy German lemons!
And on each square inch of territorial space,
Dreams are dreamt of the glory of each race.
And quietly the wind whispers in the tree…
Territories are imaginary.
There lies Europe. What state is it in?
That of a garishly painted loony bin.
The nations indulge in a common sport:
Export! Export!
The Others! Let the others buy!
Let the others import our rye
Let the others rent our ships!
Let the others eat our chips!
We?
import licence and customs raid:
we won’t let anything into our state.
Not us. We follow an ideal:
We hunger. But with national zeal.
Into everything flags and anthems are crammed.
Europe? Europe? Europe be damned!
And if everything drifts towards ruin and decay:
Let the nation only stay!
Humans are a redundant quantity.
Long live England, Poland and Italy!
The state devours us. A ghost. A definition.
The state is a thing without much of inhibition.
The thing has grown huge, towards the stars it is reaching-
Even the church could learn from its teaching.
Each one should buy. No one can buy.
The national funeral pyre burns high.
On the altar of national sacrifice
the meaning of life is to let taxes rise!
May heaven be our bankcruptcy court!
Modernity plays a medieval sport.
The nation is the eigth sacrament-!
May God bless this continent.

Kurt Tucholsky, 1932

When Tucholsky wrote this poem, the world economywas experiencing the Great Depression. One of the reasons why a recession was turned into a depression was a new round of protective trade tariffs that was started by the USA in 1930, in the shape of the Smoot-Hawley tariff that triggered countervailing duties in the rest of the world, and world trade contracted, or rather collapsed, by 30%.This came on top of an already fragile world economy – Europe was deeply indebted to the US after World War I due to the costs of the war, but the US had gone protectionist and isolationist after the Republicans took over in 1920, so Europe – and especially Germany – could not rebuild its economies through exports, instead relying on new credits to pay off the old ones.

The Great Depression caused widespread despair, and in Germany it helped propel Hitler and the Nazis to power in 1933, less than a year after Tucholsky wrote this poem. The imagery of fires and dark sacrificial rites that he employs in this poem send a deep chill down my spine each time I read the poem due to its prophetic quality; it presages the fires that devoured Europe after 1939, and the return to barbarity became more real than even Tucholsky could have imagined. He comitted suicide in 1935, deeplys depressed about the descent into barbarity that Nazism represented.

It is this experience, and the realisation that the Smoot-Hawley tariff was an unmitigated disaster, that propelled the USA to construct a different global economic order after World War II, bringing back an era of relatively free trade, allowing Germany and Japan to grow rich through exports, a path later followed by other countries such as Taiwan, Korea, etc.

One last aside: Tucholsky was a leading leftist intellectual of his time, fairly close to the communist party for some time (though never a member, and becoming increasingly critical of it in the last years of his life). German leftists with a sense of history are therefore very startled when they come across this poem that praises free trade and lambasts protectionism. Just goes to show that the understanding of the real effects of trade has been lost among much of the Left…