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"The delay of color tv to Europe was totally political, based on a protectionist mentality to try and foster an industry for the manufacturer of color tv within Europe and the jobs that a European based color tv industry would create."
I HAVE to say that the European politicians were not exactly wrong on thinking that way. The use of protectionism was the tool that almost every nation that was able to develop it's own industries used to really be able to foster it's industrial development.
Japan did this. Europe did this. Here in South America, we, Brazilians, were only able to start our own Industrial Revolution AFTER 1930, when we began placing barriers to products made in the USA and in Europe. Argentina also did the same thing, and it's no coincidence that Brazil and Argentina are the two most industrialized countries in Latin America. Our never-ending social crisis only got worse after 1990, when our government started a free-trade policy that opened our borders to widespread imports of foreign goods; that broke some REALLY BIG and traditional Brazilian factories, leaving THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of Brazilian workers unemployed, and to this day is still flooding our shops with products that are REAL GARBAGE, when before 1990 we at least had Brazilian-good quality versions of those same products.
In reality, I strongly suspect that the no-protectionism attitude of the American governments in the last 50 years had to do with the needs of foreign policy: they NEEDED a strong Japan, and a strong South Koreia, and a strong Taiwan, and a strong West Germany, to be really able to counter the Soviet threat in Asia and in Europe; that's why America never really placed barriers to the vast imports that came from those countries, because, if they didn't sell to the USA, in reality there were no one else they could sell to. America was the only country that was rich enough to buy goods in the amount that was necessary to maintain social peace in those countries.And, if they were not able to export, a social crisis might have erupted in those countries, and then... the communists could have taken over.
I suspect that now that the communist threat is over, and that America is in economic crisis, but not only America, but also Europe and Asia are in economic crisis as well, the world might return to a pre-World War One state, in which the coutries were very protectionist of their own industrial assets and were all very competitive against each other.
I can only hope that communism and nazism will NOT be reborn as a result of all this.
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