The controversy around the tender on U.S. tanker aircraft show that despite the continuous decline in transportation costs, the Protectionism remains a political choice. Even if one imagined a world where we could teleport free goods from across the globe, the tensions surrounding the closure of borders to foreign products would limit international trade.
Two economists are trying to show that the ability of countries to trade between them is limited by nationalistic sentiments and militarists. According to them, when nationalist ideas are spread within a nation, it will tend to withdraw into himself and demand the implementation of protectionist policies.
In support of their argument, they claim that nationalism caught in a broad sense is usually associated with a renewed vigor militaristic doctrines, including the American experience of September 11 provides an illustration so perfect that it borders on caricature. However, they find that, over twenty years, when a country increases its military spending or the size of its army, the share of foreign trade in GDP tends to decline (even when limiting the analysis to countries at peace). So, the link between increased military spending and fall in the trade may be indicative of the impact of nationalism on the refusal to buy imported products.
This is confirmed by previous studies (including this one and this one), which show that nationalist feelings in an individual are typically associated with support for protectionist policies.
however, difficult to know what we actually measure in this kind of statistical exercise. The idea that the increase of military expenditure is the result of "the political mood of the moment" and in particular the resurgence of nationalism seems fairly convincing. Asserting that the fall of trade associated with it is the consequence of that patriotism is plausible. The problem is that the statistical methods used by these two economists push them to remain deliberately vague about what they really intend to "nationalism". It is understood that, as part of their argument, it would be a general feeling of mistrust vis-à-vis foreigners. They argue that the real definition is not important since other work led to the conclusion that all the statistical measures of nationalism that could be built from field surveys were highly correlated with spending countries' military.
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