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Nicholas Mulder Profile picture
Nicholas Mulder
@njtmulder
Political & economic history @Cornell. Author of “The Economic Weapon”. Europe, sanctions, geo-economics, Weltinnenpolitik. Writing a history of expropriation.
Oct 22, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The geo-economic discourse that's taken hold in Western capitals in recent months now encounters basic facts of political economy: the US can embrace friend-shoring & ditch trade openness far more easily than the EU, which lacks the domestic demand base needed for bloc formation. One senses a lot of frustration among Atlanticists about Germany's deep-rooted Handelsstaat inclinations, but unless industrial policy, mass investment & genuine redistributive policies are put in place, demanding Berlin commits to decoupling remains a call for economic suicide.
Sep 26, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
For @ForeignAffairs I wrote a preliminary assessment of economic sanctions on Russia so far. Many initial expectations were proven wrong. To paraphrase Moltke, no sanctions strategy extends with certainty beyond the first economic shock that it triggers.

fam.ag/3Rdja3c @ForeignAffairs Some additional points 1) Reserves alone haven't prevented Russia from being severely afflicted by the sanctions. Yet for economies around the world, buffers—whether strategic commodity reserves, liquidity, or trade surpluses—remain key to surviving a world of sanctions turmoil .
Apr 20, 2022 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
How did the first international economic sanctions to stop aggression work? The League of Nations sanctions against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935-36 are a key test case. I'm hosting a @threadablebooks circle around a chapter on this from my book "The Economic Weapon". This historical episode is worth revisiting is it saw sanctions that attempted to drain Italy's financial reserves before it could complete its war of conquest. The League's embargo on Italian exports was an early version of what many people today are calling for against Russia.
Mar 22, 2022 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
What are the global economic effects of the sanctions against Russia? What choices does the West face? How can market turmoil and economic fallout be contained? I wrote about these acute dilemmas for @ForeignAffairs. A short thread: 1/14

foreignaffairs.com/articles/russi… The effects of the sanctions can be divided into 1) direct effects on Russia, 2) spillover effects for adjacent countries & trade partners 3) multiplier effects from business decisions & market (over)reactions 4) escalation effects and 5) systemic effects on the world economy. 2/
Jan 26, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Een goed punt. Ook in de Engelstalige academie bestaat er spanning tussen bredere narratieve en nauwere empirische geschiedschrijving. Naast publicatiedruk en senioriteit hangt het ook af van de auteur's intellectuele aard: er zullen altijd specialisten en generalisten zijn. Demets en Haemers geven een waardevolle aanvulling op Van Loo's voortreffelijke boek. Er lopen echter twee vragen door elkaar: een methodologisch debat over heersers en onderdanen (het voeren waard) en een debat over toegankelijkheid van stijl (een kwestie van publiek & smaak).
Sep 5, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
On World War I, Gabriel Chevallier's assessment in "La Peur" (1930) remains vital and correct:

"Millions of men, because they believed what they were taught by emperors, legislators and bishops in their legal codes, their manuals of instruction and their catechisms,...(1/4) ..by historians in their history books, by ministers on their platforms, teachers in their colleges, and decent, ordinary people in their living rooms, these millions of men form countless flocks that shepherds with officers' braids lead to the slaughterhouses,...(2/4)
Aug 5, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
"The United States is the World but the World is not the United States and in that gap lies a sizeable space for potential action."

Beginning in Novaya Zemlya, a great autobiographical essay ("a Bildungsroman of sorts") by Anders Stephanson for @HDiplo: bit.ly/2DGPcnO Stephanson is at some distance the most theoretically oriented historian of US international affairs. He explains the origins of that turn here, editing Social Text and working with Fredric Jameson, whose work on postmodernism provided "a depth diagnosis of depthlessness".
Jul 17, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Article out in the Journal of the History of International Law, focusing on a consequential aspect of the Treaty of Versailles: how, after four years of economic war, it endorsed the confiscation of German private property around the world.

bit.ly/39cRSW7 Some might remember Keynes' discussion of confiscation in Economic Consequences of the Peace. That a state's citizens could lose legal ownership of nearly all their foreign property was novel. But the significance of this break has been eclipsed by the reparations controversy.
Jul 15, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Voor degenen die zich afvragen: wat is nou de politieke conclusie die ik moet verbinden aan deze technische discussie over of pensioenen wel of geen vermogen zijn? Er zijn een paar simpele punten te maken: 1. Pensioenen helpen om ons leven na werken van een inkomen te voorzien, maar ze zijn geen volwaardig 'bezit' op de manier waarop individueel spaargeld, huizen en vastgoed, financiële effecten, kunst, erfenissen en andere vormen van activa en kapitaal dat zijn.
Jul 13, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The OECD, Credit Suisse, and the Dutch finance ministry agree the Netherlands suffers from very severe wealth inequality, but Dutch media have crafted a misleading counter-narrative that this is wrong because pension savings aren't included in the data.
h/t @CasMudde & @L_Koops ImageImage This is wrong since Dutch pensions are PAYGO claims, so they're 1) effectively a post-retirement extension of *income* and 2) not disposable wealth since they can't be paid out at once nor used as collateral for borrowing. They're effectively financialized mass income support.
Jul 11, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Important question with some good suggestions in the comments. International economic history has no good analytical place for 'illicit' flows, which more or less drop out of the macro-narrative after the role of the British Empire in the global opium trade in the 19th century. Naylor's "Wages of Crime" is a useful overview from the IPE angle (also in deflating some of the sensationalist aspects of media discourse about organized crime): mqup.ca/wages-of-crime…
Jun 30, 2020 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
This 1938 print from the American anti-fascist magazine "Ken" is rich in ironies. It shows global pressure on press freedom, with dictatorships (black) & censorship laws (grey). On its face, it's an early case of anti-totalitarianism in its early left rather than liberal form. 1/ The map colors & phrase "black plague of the 20th century" came from Carl Ackerman, Columbia Journalism School's dean. In 1919 Ackerman had been the first to publish parts of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in English, but after replacing references to Jews with Bolsheviks.2/ Image
Jun 28, 2020 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
There's an interesting backstory to this FT piece on the monastery that Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza (formerly von Habsburg) has revamped as a hotel on the Croatian island of Lopud, a favorite Adriatic retreat of the well-heeled since Diocletian. on.ft.com/3dI47KW In the early 2000s, Habsburg was involved in attempts to buy one of the island's most striking architectural landmarks, the Grand Hotel, designed by Nikola Dobrović and built in the 1930s. ImageImage
May 27, 2020 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Wolf's FT column draws on 2018 Brunnermeier, Doshi & James paper comparing US-China competition to pre-1914 Anglo-German rivalry. Although there are some similarities they are rather overstated, in particular the systemic and geo-economic opposition. 1/ bit.ly/2XvCMWq Imperial Germany was an autocratic state governing an increasingly liberal-bourgeois economy & civil society, riven by distributional conflict. Not only did it lack the state-economy unity of today's CCP, it actually became *less* protectionist in the 1900s and 1910s. 2/
May 6, 2020 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
For those interested in logistics: this fascinating paper by A.J. Heywood argues the Ottoman closing of Turkish Straits was most underrated event of WWI, devastating Russia's economy, causing a railway crisis that cut food supply & led to 1917 revolution: bit.ly/2YGQJmo In 1914 Russia was the world's big fast-growing emerging market economy. Most of its trade went through the Turkish Straits. When both Black & Baltic Seas were blocked, all imports & exports had to pass through Archangel in the Arctic (open 6mo/yr) or Vladivostok 6,000km to east. Image
Apr 16, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
As firepower analogies are in vogue again to describe central bank policy (Fed securities-buying of $83bn per day/$960,648 per second in late March 2020), worth remembering that 75 yrs ago today the Soviet Berlin Offensive began with the largest artillery barrage in history. 1/4 First the density: 9,000 field guns and rocket launchers on an 30km/18.5 mile front, or one gun every 3 meters/10 feet. On the entire 250 kilometer-front from Szczecin/Stettin to the Czech border, 41,600 pieces were assembled–one gun for every 6 meters/20 feet of frontline. 2/4
Apr 9, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
A first deal has been reached. But we must ask why despite reforms the discord of the 2010-2015 period is being replayed in the EU. Partly this is because Germany and NL still have the same leaders, and in the crucial summer of 2012 yielded only to joint southern EU+US pressure. I wonder if the success of the Monti-Draghi-Rajoy-Obama group in pushing the northerners into a compromise then can explain some of agony of the process this time; what NL and Germany didn't learn was the need to quickly & autonomously forge a solution without US tipping power.
Mar 28, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This situation is shifting very fast and the Hanseatic League is definitely over. The three Baltic countries, Slovakia and Cyprus are now also joining the Coronabond bloc in the Eurogroup. The Baltic states are beginning to see the first cases of covid-19 and clearly do not want a repeat of the enormous GDP shock they suffered in 2008. Estonia has issued short-term bonds but is reportedly finding it difficult to issue long-term debt: bit.ly/2vUSNv6
Mar 26, 2020 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
Wrote about the uses and limits of the war economy in fighting the coronavirus for @ForeignPolicy. We're in a state of exception, but beyond expanding production, demanding sacrifice, and doing reform, we need new forms of solidarity and resourcefulness. bit.ly/33NO8Yp The war economy metaphor applies most directly to production: we need an emergency effort in public health provision. Here we must learn from the global nature of war economies; in ventilators, for example, globalized production makes international provision unavoidable.
Mar 23, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Rough calculation suggests @70sBachchan is right: Western ventilator production is insufficient for public health crisis it faces. US hospitals have 160k plus 13k in strategic stockpile. If 30% of US population infected and 2.3% need ventilators, minimum needed = 2.5 million. Major ventilator makers are US ResMed Inc. (in shut-down California), German Draegerwerk AG and Swiss Hamilton Medical (busy in Europe; Hamilton says 6k increase most possible this year). Dutch Philips and Swedish Getinge can make some but this leaves gap: reut.rs/2QEofF3
Mar 22, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
To many in the 1920s the flu showed the need for an international public health regime, but others invoked it as a natural cause of mass death in Central Europe to play down the role of the Allied blockade, whose deprivation exacerbated flu deaths. Cf. US sanctions on Iran today. It should be said that this is extremely difficult empirical terrain to navigate in causal terms. 1918-19 sees 1) deaths from outright starvation 2) influenza deaths, some but not all among already severely malnourished & 3) unattributed excess mortality above pre-war patterns.