The free market will not bring us a European Google

Since Donald Trump made his chaotic bid for tariffs, something very strange has happened. A rebound effect has flooded our public conversation with an uncritical defense of the benefits of globalization and free trade, to the point that you now hear left-wing spokespersons sounding like Margaret Thatcher resurrected. But the fact that Trump wants to use political power to intervene in the market and reindustrialize the nation doesn't mean that intervening in the market and reindustrializing the nation is a reprehensible project; on the contrary. The vast majority of the voices we hear these days speak as if there were no alternative to the current system, as if global trade operated neutrally, independent of power relations and laws that permit one thing or another; in short, as if we had learned nothing from what led to the Great Recession. The United States' imperialist turn is Trump's way of channeling the desire of American democratic voters who want their Parliament to regain power over the markets that have impoverished the vast majority of them. Although we suspect the honesty of Trumpism and do not share its methods, it makes no sense that we in Europe are defending a return to the globalization and free markets of recent years as if nothing had happened here.

Because if we in Europe don't have our own Google, Microsoft, or Amazon, it is precisely because the idea that free trade and globalization are neutral is a deception. The model for understanding this is that of 20th-century decolonization. Once the old empires were dismantled, liberal economists argued that countries in the Global South should focus on agriculture and that the North should continue with interesting industries because the division of labor and competitive advantage would favor collective wealth. This, which would be fine in the borderless utopia of a global democracy, is a trap in the real world. Because, as we saw during the pandemic, having factories like China or having universities and a pharmaceutical industry like the United States is not the same as being an avocado exporter. And, as we see in Europe's scornful role in the invasion of Ukraine, in the event of war, having a lot of money from tourism isn't the same as having a large military apparatus. If a nation has industries that produce strategic products, it achieves qualitative improvements that go beyond the doctrine of free trade.

The big tech American theories illustrate very well how a country can end up using trade to establish relationships of interdependence that, in reality, are the domination of the strong over the weak. The sarcasm increases when this colonialism 3.0 is disguised with the rhetoric of competitiveness and the free market, because the success of Silicon Valley has very little to do with its entrepreneurs and much more with a sustained political commitment by the American state, which financed universities, assumed risks, and created the conditions for it. With this competitive advantage generated by public planning and spending, America has flooded Europe with free technological products that, like a Trojan horse, have entered into such fundamental aspects of our lives as interpersonal communication, education, and consumption. Democratic digitalization (Green Lightning), Simona Levi compares it to a drug dealer giving away free drugs at the door of a school, and explains how Google and company offer closed-source services, so the more we become intertwined, the more expensive it is to leave and the more difficult it is for free and open alternatives to compete. If data is the oil of the 21st century, today's Europe is not so different from a colony where natural resources are exploited by American multinationals.

Maybe so, as I was saying. Dani Rodrik In these pages, it seems likely that tariffs are not as useful as they were in Asian countries to escape the fate of the South and industrialize, and that reproducing the protectionist operations of the 20th century in the 21st century is much more complicated. But we must not allow ourselves to give up, in the name of economic resignation, the fight to regain control over global markets and the qualitative benefits of having our own strategic industries. Whatever the strategy needed to have a European Google, it will surely require a mix of regulations, investments, and taxes to favor our own industries, which in spirit cannot be so different from what Trump said he wanted to achieve with his tariffs. The choice cannot be between free markets and protectionism, but between good and bad ways of protecting ourselves.