Ben Chuis policy and analysis correspondent for the BBC. Previously, he was economics editor of Newsnight, the BBC’s flagship news and current affairs programme. He is the author of Chinese Whispers: Why Everything You’ve Heard About China Is Wrong (2013) and Exile Economics: What Happens if Globalisation Falls (2025).
In this wide-ranging piece on a topical issue, Mr Chu explains that the recent shift that we have seen USA, China, India, Russia and the EU make in the direction of self-sufficiency (or autarky) isn’t recent at all. Self-sufficiency is deeply rooted in the human psyche and has an illustrious tradition dating back to antiquity.
The first example of self-sufficiency Mr Chu cites is from ancient Greece:
“The 4th-century BCE Cynic philosopher Diogenes lived in a barrel in the marketplace in Corinth and was said to bark at people like a dog to demonstrate his scorn for social conventions. When Alexander the Great paid Diogenes a visit, the conqueror of worlds asked the ragged ascetic, who was enjoying a siesta at the time, what he wanted, with the implication being he could ask for anything he liked – property, money, power, status, sex? The answer, so the story goes, was that Diogenes asked him to: ‘Stand a little out of my sun.’…
The tale of Diogenes’ extreme indifference to the most powerful ruler in the ancient world has been in circulation for almost 2,000 years as perhaps the supreme example of the desire for self-sufficiency.
Self-sufficiency, or autarky – from the Greek auto (‘self’) and arkeo (‘to suffice’ ) – was seen from the very beginning as a demonstration of personal moral virtue. To be reliant on others was to compromise one’s ability to pursue wisdom….
But, from those earliest days of Western civilisation, the moral virtue of autarky was not just a goal for an individual, but an aspiration for the collective too. According to Aristotle, a contemporary of Diogenes, the ideal city state in the ancient world was also self-sufficient, and those inside the polity would have everything they needed to pursue a good philosophical life – unlike those outside it….”
Mr Chu then moves forward 1600 years and takes us to 13th century Sicily. Here we learn from Thomas Aquinas the spiritual basis for self-sufficiency:
“Drawing on Aristotle, Aquinas talked of the ‘self-sufficiency’ of God, in the context of the argument that all existence ultimately flowed from the creator, and the deity wasn’t reliant on anything exterior to himself. That was the seminal ‘scholastic’ argument of the medieval age. And it led to the view that to be more self-sufficient was to be closer to God.
But, importantly, Aquinas was an advocate for economic, not just spiritual, autarky. He noted that there are two ways a city can feed itself: by growing food on its own surrounding fields, or through trade. ‘It is quite clear that the first means is better,’ Aquinas concluded in De Regno (1265), his book on kingship. ‘The more dignified a thing is, the more self-sufficient it is, since whatever needs another’s help is by that fact proven to be deficient.’ Aquinas also proffered a moral case for autarky when he noted that ‘greed is awakened in the hearts of the citizens through the pursuit of trade.’”
We then move forward another 400 years to 17th century Japan and learn how the Tokugawa nobles linked self-sufficiency with national identity (for perhaps the first time in any Asian society):
“The policy of sakoku or ‘closed country’ was imposed on the islands of Japan in the 17th century by the Tokugawa shogunate, a form of feudal military dictatorship. Western Christian missionaries were banned and those that were already in the country were persecuted. Emigration was forbidden and foreign trade was reduced almost to nothing. ‘The Christians have come to Japan … to propagate an evil creed and subvert the true doctrine,’ proclaimed an edict from the shogunate in 1614.
Autarky was seen as a necessary means to preserve traditional religion and morality in Japan, but economic isolationism was also bound up with resistance to the incursions of foreign empires and was a practical means of securing sovereignty and control, not just an abstract principle.”
We then move on to the industrial revolution in 19th century Europe and read about the formulation of the idea of self-sufficiency (as articulated by leaders like Trump and Modi):
“…Rousseau conjectured in his Discourse on Inequality (1754) that primitive man had been naturally ‘solitary’, coming together with others only for mating, and was much happier for it….
Rousseau inspired one of the paragons of German idealist philosophy, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In his work The Closed Commercial State (1800), Fichte sought to fuse Rousseau’s proto-anthropological perspective with the ideas of Immanuel Kant, who had envisioned a model of ‘perpetual peace’ among nations.
This represented a significant shift in the concept of autarky, marking its first true incorporation into geopolitical theory. The orthodoxy of Fichte’s time was that trade tended to engender good relations between nations. But for Fichte, on the contrary, commerce among rivalrous European states had served to corrupt relations, and economic life had to be disentangled for peace to have a chance.
‘In a nation which has closed in this way, whose members live only among themselves and very little with foreigners … a higher degree of national honour and a sharply determined national character will develop very quickly,’ claimed Fichte.”
Such ideas, says Mr Chu, also found resonance in 20th century Asia. Amongst others, Mahatma Gandhi was influenced by these ideas:
“Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of an India independent of British rule was for a network of economically autonomous villages, ‘tiny gardens of Eden’, growing their own crops and spinning their own cotton for clothing. ‘Every village has to be self-sustained and capable of managing its affairs even to the extent of defending itself against the whole world,’ he wrote. This is why the image of the spinning wheel once sat at the heart of the tricolour Indian flag.
For Gandhi, self-sufficiency did not mean there would be no trade, but rather trade only in the things that the village could not realistically produce itself. ‘Self-sufficiency,’ he stressed, ‘does not mean narrowness. To be self-sufficient is not to be altogether self-contained.’
Yet at other times Gandhi struck a much more isolationist tone, insisting that ‘it is certainly our right and duty to discard everything foreign that is superfluous and even everything foreign that is necessary if we can produce or manufacture it in our country.’”
And so, says Mr Chu, it is not surprising that across the world countries are now planning & building for self-sufficiency. The surprising thing was the brief period of 25 years or so from the end of the USSR to the beginning of the first Trump administration. In those 25 years, various nations opened up their economies like never before and then suffered the political consequences of the same.
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