[Eduardo Olier, The global economic war. essay on war and Economics (Valencia: Tirant lo Blanc, 2018), 357 pgs]

June 7, 2021

review / Emili J. Blasco

War is to geopolitics what economic war is to geoeconomics. Eduardo Olier, the driving force in Spain of another related field: economic intelligence, has devoted a large part of his research activity to these last two concepts, which are highly dependent on each other, and professor . 

The book The Global Economic War ( 2018) is a sort of colophon of what we could consider a trilogy, whose previous volumes were Geoeconomics. The Keys to the Global Economics (2011) and The Axes of Economic Power. Geopolitics of the global chessboard (2016). Thus, first there was a presentation of geoeconomics, as a specific field inseparable from geopolitics (the use of the Economics by the powers as a new instrument of force), and then a commitment to the concreteness of the different vectors in struggle, with a prolific use of graphs and statistics, unusual for intellectual production in Spanish for a work of knowledge dissemination. This third book is somewhat more philosophical: it has a certain broom work, finishing off or rounding off ideas that had previously appeared in some cases less contextualized in their conceptual framework , and integrating all the reflections in a more compact building. With hardly any graphics, here the narration flows with more attention to the argumentative process.

The global economic war, moreover, puts the focus on confrontation. "Economic warfare is the reverse of political warfare, just as military wars, always of political origin, end up showing themselves to be economic wars," says Olier. He shares the view that "any economic transaction has at its heart a danger of conflict", that "trade is never neutral and contains within it a principle of violence": at final, that "war is the result of a flawed economic exchange ". The author warns that as a country increases its welfare at the same time it boosts its military capacity to try to gain more power. This need not lead to war, but economic dependence, according to Olier, increases the chances of war. "The possibility of increasing economic benefits from a potential victory increases the likelihood of starting an armed conflict," he says.

Olier is indebted to the development of this discipline carried out in France, where the School of Economic Warfare was born in 1997, as an academic center attached to the technical school Libre des Sciences Commerciales Appliquées. These programs of study place special emphasis on economic intelligence, which in France is closely linked to the actions of the State's secret services in defense of the international position of large French companies, whose interests are closely linked to national imperatives when it comes to strategic sectors. Olier represents in Spain the Choiseul Institute, a French think tank dedicated to these same issues.

Among the interesting contributions of The Global Economic War is the dating and interrelation of the successive versions of the Internet, globalization and NATO: beginning of the Cold War, 1950 (globalization 1.0 and NATO 1.0); dissolution of the USSR, 1991 (globalization 2.0); creation of the Internet, 1992 (web 1.0); entrance of Poland in NATO (NATO 2.0); birth of social networks, 2003 (web 2.0); annexation of Crimea by Russia and consolidation of cyberspace in all activities, 2014 (globalization 3.0, NATO 3.0 and web 3.0). In this schedule he adds at another point the currency war: currency war 1.0 (1921-1936), 2.0 (1967-1987), 3.0 (2010); this is not an outlandish addendum , but very much to purpose, for Olier argues that, if raw materials are one of the keys to economic warfare, currencies "do not cease to be the subject premium of the Economics, since they can mark who has and who does not have power." 

All this reflection places it in a context of a chained game of cycles and counter-cycles, where economic and political cycles are interconnected. reference letter Referring to Kondratiev's long cycles, which are renewed every half century, he recalls that in 1993 the last cycle would have begun, so that "the expansionary period should last until 2020, to proceed to the fall and fill in the 50-year cycle, more or less, towards 2040, when a new expansion would begin" (Olier writes this without foreseeing how the current pandemic would reinforce, for the time being, the prediction).

Just as in geopolitics there are a few imperatives, geoeconomics is also governed by some laws, such as those that move directly to the Economics: when there is economic growth, leave unemployment and inflation rises, and vice versa; the conflict for a country and its international environment is when the Economics goes down, unemployment rises and so does inflation, giving a status stagflation.

Geoeconomics as discipline forces us to look at the present and future realities squarely in the face, without allowing ourselves to be fobbed off with wishful thinking about the world we would like, which is why the outlook on the European Union ends up being gloomy. Olier believes that Europe will live its instability without revolutions, but with loss of global power. "The bureaucratization of the Structures of government in Brussels will only help the increase of populisms. The Brexit (...) will be a new silent revolution that will diminish the power of the whole. What will come increased by the different visions and strategies" of the member countries. "A circumstance that will give greater power to Russia in Europe, while the United States will look to the Pacific in its staff conflict with China".

In his opinion, only France and England, because of their military power, show signs of wanting to participate in the new world order. The other major European countries are left to one side: Germany sample that economic power is not enough, Italy has enough to try not to disintegrate politically... and Spain is "the weakest link in the chain", as was the case just over eighty years ago, when the new order that was taking shape in Europe first confronted the major powers in the Spanish Civil War before the outbreak of World War II. Olier warns that "the nirvana of affluent European societies" will be seriously threatened by three phenomena: the instability of internal policies, massive migrations from Africa and demographic aging that will cause them to lose dynamism.