The Economist was first published in September 1843 by James Wilson to "take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress." This phrase is quoted on its contents page. It has taken editorial stances on many issues over the years.
According to former editor Bill Emmott "The Economist's philosophy has always been liberal, not conservative"[1]
The publication's own self-documented history states this about its editorial stance:
What, besides free trade and free markets, does The Economist believe in? "It is to the Radicals that The Economist still likes to think of itself as belonging. The extreme centre is the paper's historical position." That is as true today as when former Economist editor Geoffrey Crowther said it in 1955. The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability. It has backed conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It has supported the Americans in Vietnam. But it has also endorsed Harold Wilson and Bill Clinton, and espoused a variety of liberal causes: opposing capital punishment from its earliest days, while favouring penal reform and decolonisation, as well as—more recently—gun control and gay marriage.
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The magazine opposed the provision of aid to the Irish during the Great Famine. The Economist argued for laissez-faire policies, in which self-sufficiency, anti-protectionism and free trade, not food aid, were in the opinion of the magazine the key to helping the Irish live through the famine which killed approximately one million people.[3][4]
In the 19th century the editorial stance of The Economist drifted away from supporting laissez-faire policies. In January 1883, for example, one editorial noted that:[5]
[…] it required very little observation of current politics to see that the principle of laissez-faire is no longer in the ascendant.
—"The New Radicalism", The Economist, 1883-01-20[5]
In September 1883, another editorial noted that[5]
When once it has been conceded that the functions of the State are not to be strictly limited to those simpler duties […] it is wonderful how soon and how rapidly the number of the outlets in which it is thought that State aid may be advantageously applied becomes increased and multiplied.
—"State Aid", The Economist, 1883-09-29[5]
This change in editorial stance reflected a similar change in British politics itself, which had set aside the notion of laissez-faire as a practical philosophy some 50 years beforehand.[5]
The editorial stance of The Economist on the UK's entry into the Common Market, like the stance of the New Statesman, gradually developed over time. Although it consistently took the position of a cooperative approach to Europe rather than an integrative approach, its initial opposition to European institutions gradually changed to acceptance over time. Once this change occurred, the magazine supported a decentralized and cooperative model for European institutions, and democratic accountability. [6]
In part, the Economist's own editorial stance was a simple reflection of attitudes within the UK in general, and of its two major political parties through the middle to late 20th century (Conservative and Labour), resisting the surrender of sovereignty to a supranational institution for as long as possible, and attempting to preserve the UK's self-image of a world power.[6]
Initially, in the years immediately after World War II, contributors to the magazine dismissed and rejected proposals for European institutions such as the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Defence Community, the European Economic Community, and European Atomic Energy Community.1 Up to the late 1950s, the magazine was pro-American.[6]
However, in the period from 1957 to the 1980s, the magazine's editorial opinion articles gradually came to accept the idea of the UK as a member in the various European communities. Medrano divides this period, and the transition of the magazine's editorial stance, into three periods, which he labels "Denial", "Grudging Acceptance", and "Embrace". The New Statesman went through all three of these phases as well, although unlike the Economist, the New Statesman had not completed the third phase at the point of the UK's entry into the Common Market in the 1970s. The Economist had, and was supportive of UK membership during the initial negotiations for entry in the 1960s.[6]
However, the magazine, whilst supportive of entry, did not conceal its continued editorial dislike of European institutions and pro-American stance. It optimistically predicted that the UK's entry would be able to rectify what it saw as a drift away from the United States by Europe. This is exemplified by one July 1962 editorial:[6]
Doubtless some people in Paris, and some elsewhere on the Continent, at present see Britain as an American Trojan horse. In a sense it is, and quite rightly […]
—"Europe or Atlantis?", The Economist, 1962-07-14[6]
The veto of the UK's entry, by Charles de Gaulle, in 1963 provoked an outraged response from the Economist, which in its editorials predicted the unravelling of European institutions. It also recommended an idea that it had supported in earlier years, that of an Atlantic Community, both economic and military.[6]
Soon after the veto, the Economist's stance on the status of the UK as a dominant world power began to change. One milestone in this is an editorial published in May 1963:[6]
The six and a half years of the attempt to come to terms with the European common market, since the free trade area was proposed in 1956, are the Great Divide of modern British history. For the time being, the attempt has failed; and British opinion is still far from wholly won over to the idea that the European communities qualify as a "good thing". But the effort alone has dealt a mortal blow to the Festival of Britain spirit, the happy pursuit of parochial self-esteem that still dulled the country's awareness of facts in the nineteen-fifties. In the great debate on the common market, the British had seen through some of their own shibboleths; this is something.
The grandest victim of the common market's cold douche has been the illusion that Britain was still a world power, an illusion fostered by a heroic war record and by a touching faith in the welfare state—so half-hearted, so incomplete—as a model for others to emulate, much as British parliamentary institutions were taken as models for the nineteenth century.
—"Breaking out from the Past", The Economist, 1963-05-18[6]
In subsequent years, the Economist continued to support the idea of UK membership in the common market, and began to suggest that it was an economic necessity. It published weekly evaluations of the cost of both entry and of the European institutions, argued that membership of the EC was not incompatible with the Commonwealth of Nations, and discussed industrial and technological advantages that could be obtained as a result of membership. One change, however, was that it no longer pursued the idea of radically transforming the Community from within once the UK was a member, but rather suggested that the UK accept the Community as it already was.[6]
Its reaction to de Gaulle's second veto of UK membership, in 1967, thus differed from its reaction in 1964. Rather than responding with anger and outrage as it had done before, its reaction was introspective and resigned. The magazine no longer argued defiantly on the basis of the UK as a world power, but rather portrayed the UK as too small to stand alone, and thus encouraged resolve and perseverance with entry negotiations. This is exemplified by one October 1967 article:[6]
The British have father to go, less on specific issues of policy than in attitudes. For most of this century it has been natural for Englishmen to think of themselves as part of the English-speaking world, of which the United States has become the visible leader. Only now are they beginning in any number to think of themselves as Europeans as well.
—"And Now", The Economist, 1967-10-14[6]
The magazine took to minimalising the economic importance of the Commonwealth in its editorials, calling into question the interpretation of statistical data by those who had an emotional investment in the self-image of the UK as one-time head of an Empire:
Why is this sort of clamor set up whenever any new hope of entering the EEC dawns? The truth is that there are some people in Britain who are bitterly opposed to union with Europe on emotional grounds, or on the grounds of what they call the "bureaucratic monster" at Brussels and in that it interferes with Britons' independence to run their own affairs. Such people are to be found in the economics profession, politics, and the civil service; and this quite clearly does affect their sense of statistical balance.
—"Oh Moo", The Economist, 1969-07-12[6]
It pointed to the civil service as one of the ways in which parliamentary sovereignty, something that the opponents of entry argued would be eroded by membership, had already been eroded. Whilst it no longer advocated radical transformation from within, it observed that the UK would have a significant voice within the EC, by virtue of its size. Medrano equates the magazine's change in editorial stance, immediately before and after the UK's final success in gaining membership, to a "religious conversion". It made economic arguments for membership, on the grounds of growing globalization of markets, political arguments based upon the idea of holding the government of West Germany (which was, at the time, the SPD with its then policy of Ostpolitik) in check, and emotional arguments that played on the British antipathy towards the French by presenting its own federalist view of European communities as an anti-French alternative to the French government's proposals of intergovernmental union.[6]
Whilst, as observed, The Economist's editorial stance was pro-American when it came to postwar international alliances, it was not always so. One particular editorial, that was at the head of a nadir in Anglo-American relations in World War II, was "Noble Negatives".[7] It was published in the 1944-12-30 edition of the magazine2, and is believed to be the work of Owen Fleming.[7][8] The so-called "noble negatives" were two cornerstones of U.S. foreign policy: non-intervention with the object of non-involvement.[7]
"Noble Negatives" appeared at the height of mutual criticisms between the UK and the U.S., and provoked wide discussion and comment in the newsmedia of both.[9] It was ostensibly a reply to the "outburst of criticism and abuse" that the U.S. had directed against the UK in previous weeks[10] (that had been, in part, triggered by the Carlo Sforza affair).[8] Its outspoken views on both U.S. foreign policy and sectors of U.S. public opinion were widely quoted, and in the view of Thomson, Meyer, and Briggs, writing in 1945, did much to "clear the air" between the two allies.[9]
The editorial made several remarks. It questioned whether the price that the UK had paid for collaboration with the U.S. during the war was not "too high for what we are likely to get".[11] It characterized U.S. public opinion of the UK as "Britain is stealing a march on the poor repressed American exporter, Britain has no intention of fighting the Japanese, [and] Britain is not really fighting in Europe. […] Britain is imperialist, reactionary, selfish, exclusive, restrictive.".[8]
It reflected on this attitude by noting that "All is painfully familiar, the only novelty in the recent epidemic is the evidence that [the] American government itself—or at least part of it—is more anxious to provide ammunition for the miscontents than to correct their wild misstatements.". The editorial called for a change in U.K. policy towards the U.S., saying "Let an end be put to the policy of apeasement which, at Mr Churchill's personal bidding, has been followed with all the humiliations and abasements.", and concluded by saying that:[8]
Hypocrisy is a common Anglo-Saxon failing—indeed, a failing of the rich and comfortable, all over the world […] the British have many times have made themselves cordially disliked by it. But that does not exempt them from feeling resentment when they are the objects of other people's hypocrisy.
—"Noble Negatives", The Economist, 1944-12-30[8]
The result was a media sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. The Daily Telegraph had a headline article "British Frankness Has Good Effect in U.S.". The Daily Herald headlined with "So the British Have Dared to Hit Back". Other headline articles were "Anglo-American Back Chat" (in the New York Herald Tribune) "Cross Talk" (in the Daily Mail), and "U.S. Comment on British Touchiness" (in the Manchester Guardian).[8]
The Foreign Office agreed with the editorial, although secret reports from British security services in New York warned that in fact there was worse to come, with support for isolationism and nationalism growing in the U.S., a crumbling of pro-British factions, and an increase in anti-British views in official U.S. government circles. Both President Roosevelt and the Secretary of State Stettinius were besieged by U.S. press calling for an official reaction to the editorial.[8]
Stettinius himself wrote that "Unfortunately, other British papers had followed the Economist's lead. Even the London Times [had] demanded that America 'put its cards on the table'.". His view on the editorial, which he expressed in a memorandum to Roosevelt, was that "the British were undergoing a strain in adjusting to a secondary rôle after having always accepted a leading one".[8]
In 1989, the Economist editorialized that the cold fusion "affair" was "exactly what science should be about."[12] Science journalist Michael Brooks wrote:
It seems almost laughably naive in light of what followed, but the Economist was right: the research is what science is about, and has led us somewhere.—Michael Brooks[12]
The Economist summarily dismissed Brendan Simms' book, Unfinest Hour, on the Bosnian War for having no more than "the force of an inkpot thrown from a schooldesk" and for its criticism of government ministers for their "flaws of logic [and] failures of clairvoyance". Simms himself observed in response that The Economist's own attempts at clairvoyance had "backfired spectacularly". He pointed to the magazine's editorials through July 1991 and 1992, which predicted that European Community foreign policy would deal with the situation well and that there would not be all-out war in Bosnia.[13]
Simms characterizes The Economist as being "a longstanding opponent of military intervention" in Bosnia, pointing to its editorials of July 1995, when the 1995 NATO bombing campaign in Bosnia and Herzegovina was underway, and to Bill Emmott's own letter to the publication, which rejected "intervention in this three-cornered civil war, a war which all along has risked escalation into a far wider conflict with even ghastlier consequences", as evidence of this.[13]
Simms observed that the magazine's editorial stance changed at the end of September 1995, describing it as "finally conced[ing] what it had denied for so long".[13]
The Economist has long[14] argued for the legalisation of drugs, calling it the "least bad solution" in a 2009 issue.[15]
The Economist supports government action on global warming, declaring its view in a December editorial before the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference that the risk of catastrophic climate change and its effect on the economy outweighs the economic consequences of insuring against global warming now.[16] It also stated its preference of setting a carbon price through tax, rather than through a cap-and-trade system as a means of cutting emissions, and was generally scathing of government subsidies.
The Economist supports the ISAF/NATO operation in Afghanistan, and called on Barack Obama to fight the war "with conviction". It supported his escalation of the American presence there in late 2009, on the basis of security interests and that a withdrawal "would amount to a terrible betrayal of the Afghan people, some of whose troubles are the result of Western intervention".[17]
The Economist supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq,[18] but was unhappy in how it was handled.[19]
Like many newspapers, The Economist occasionally uses its pages to endorse candidates in upcoming major elections. In the past it has endorsed parties and candidates from across the political spectrum, including:
The Economist has endorsed a party at British general election since 1955, having remained neutral in the few before that, on the grounds that "A journal that is jealous of its reputation for independence would, in any event, be foolish to compromise it by openly taking sides in a general election."[20]
Some of these might not be considered official endorsements, but seem to obviously express The Economist's view on the matter.
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