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In April 2026, the Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever announced an unexpected economic measure: his government would begin negotiations with ENGIE to reclaim ownership of the seven nuclear reactors operated by the French energy company on its two Belgian sites, Doel and Tihange. These plants had supplied up to 45% of Belgium’s electricity production over the past decade.
In a context marked by energy price shocks and living-cost crises, state control of nuclear energy would provide cheap and reliable electricity to consumers. A nationalisation of nuclear power production would also be financially advantageous, as once built and commissioned, nuclear plants are profitable. The seven reactors had generated for ENGIE a stable annual profit between 1.5 and 2 billion euros. This explains why a right-wing, pro-market government like De Wever’s, which has also been critical of high Walloon social budgets and has proposed lifting sanctions on Russia, would take such an interventionist step in Belgium’s economy.
Since 2016, it has become evident that the sacred nature of private property, and the consensus that had formed around free trade and laissez-faire economics, has collapsed.
Nicholas Mulder
What Belgium is undertaking is far from novel: it is the latest Western democracy to embark on the path of nationalisation. Under Keir Starmer’s government, Britain began renationalising its railways in 2024, and then took effective control of the last active steelworks on English soil, at Scunthorpe, in 2025 — a plant that is currently being forcibly acquired from its Chinese owner, Jingye. The future prime minister, Andy Burnham, is expected to take control of Thames Water, which is financially troubled, and extend this nationalisation campaign to other water utilities, as well as essential public services such as electricity and gas.
In France, the National Assembly voted, both in November 2025 and in June 2026, to nationalise ArcelorMittal’s French activities. This decision followed a sequence of strategic state takeovers, including the 2017 purchase of Chantiers de l’Atlantique and the 2022 acquisition of private shares in EDF. Likewise, Dutch authorities are contemplating a state stake in their main shipbuilder, Damen, and have been pursuing for years a buy-out program aimed at regaining control of cattle farming operations responsible for excessive nitrogen emissions.
The point of these expropriation policies is not so much their actual application but their incitative character: state ownership pushes private owners to devote more resources to investment, lest they lose their property.
Nicholas Mulder
Beyond Europe, nationalisation has also spread across different parties, across the political spectrum. Across the Atlantic, the second Trump administration seeks to assert the state’s power not only over rare earths but also over Big Tech, chip manufacturers, steel producers, and AI companies. In 2025, it acquired a controlling stake in MP Materials, the United States’ sole rare-earth mine; it forced the sale of TikTok’s American operations to a consortium of American investors, in what was one of the largest technological expropriations of the century; it maintained a “golden share” in US Steel to outmaneuver its Japanese owners; and it took a 10% stake in Intel. Trump has recently even alluded to expanding the state’s stake in AI companies.
At the beginning of summer 2026, a real national debate emerged over public ownership of AI companies. OpenAI has already proposed a 5% stake in its capital to the White House. The most ambitious proposal, however, comes from law professors Jeremy Bearer-Friend and Sarah Polcz, published in the Columbia Journal of Tax Law: to impose a one-time tax of 50% on the capital of systemically important AI companies, payable in stock.
This political idea, which would transfer 50% of the capital of major AI firms to the public sector, has recently been endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders and other leaders on the left wing of the Democratic Party. It now represents the vanguard of progressive policy on AI.
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have little in common ideologically, except perhaps the sense that late-20th-century American liberalism failed the American people.
Nicholas Mulder
Apart from the West, there are also numerous instances of nationalisation across continents. Mexico and Chile launched state takeover operations of their lithium supply chains in 2018 and 2023. Gold mines and uranium production sites have been nationalised in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger since juntas came to power in the early 2020s. In Indonesia, Prabowo Subiato’s government launched a broad program of asset confiscation against foreign firms in the palm oil and nickel sectors. The proceeds from these actions have been used to strengthen public services and to fund Jakarta’s new sovereign wealth fund, Danantara.
The rise in inequality, partly driven by an ever-higher cost of living, is fueling social tensions that are a significant explanatory factor behind this growing wave of nationalisations and the increased state control over private property. In Berlin, a 2021 popular referendum approved the expropriation of Deutsche Wohnen & Co., the city’s largest private real estate company. This move is authorised by Article 14 of Germany’s Grundgesetz, which allows authorities to seize real estate to promote the welfare of the population. The guarantee of affordable housing is a key element. Calls for nationalising railways, water, and other public services in the United Kingdom find their roots in this same concern for social welfare.
Municipally, Paris and Barcelona have both pursued policies in recent years to acquire private land to expand public infrastructure. In New York, the new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, unveiled a strategy he dubbed “Block by Block,” enabling the city to expropriate dilapidated residential buildings or those with only a portion of units rented. In many cases, the point of these expropriation policies is not their immediate implementation but their signaling effect: state ownership prompts private owners to devote more resources to investment and to modernising essential infrastructure, for fear of losing their property.
A New Global Wave of Nationalisations
What we are witnessing through these measures to strengthen public control and ownership of major industries—as disparate as they may appear at first glance—is the emergence of a global wave of nationalisation. This is not a new phenomenon: we have observed it before. Historically, nationalisations tend to occur in waves. They have often served as political signals in a variety of contexts, from war to clear ideological shifts, to depressions and price shocks.
That is why nationalisations often cluster in short, intense periods. Yet there are also imitation effects and displays of power: once powerful states begin nationalising assets, other countries are implicitly pushed to follow suit. Since 2016, the sacred status of private property and the consensus around free trade and laissez-faire economics have crumbled. From 2021, the use of industrial policy, tariffs, and sanctions as toolkit-of-pressure has become widespread around the world. High-intensity armed conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East have triggered new interventionist tendencies in international and national economies: the goal is to stabilise markets, prevent offshoring, guarantee essential good supplies, but also to sanction enemies and confiscate rivals’ resources.
What we are witnessing through these initiatives to strengthen the public control and ownership of major industries is the emergence of a global wave of nationalisations.
Nicholas Mulder
In this sense, the current wave of nationalisations is, as Althusser would have said, over-determined by multiple causal factors. But every over-determination is traversed by contradictions and can be described as a particular blend of dominant and subordinate trends. Among the various drivers of the present wave of nationalisations (geopolitics, the ecologic-infrastructural crisis, and social conflict), the dominant structure is the first factor: the radicalisation of geoeconomic policies led by the United States, and increasingly followed by countries such as China, Iran, Russia, Indonesia, and EU member states.
There are several ways to characterize this process: one can say, with Adam Tooze, that we are witnessing the emergence of an American post-hegemonic “hyper-agency”; Eric Helleiner, for his part, speaks of a “neo-mercantilist world”; and Arnaud Orain talks about a return to a new phase of “capitalism of finitude.” Whatever terms are used, this change is structural and ideologically heterogeneous: democratic socialists, Make America Great Again supporters, Parliamentary Labour Party apparatchiks, Flemish nationalists, Chilean and Mexican populists, Sahelian juntas, and former Indonesian generals—all are pursuing programmes that contribute to this global trend, that of resorting to nationalisation.
Once this is established, how should we evaluate this wave of nationalisations from a historical perspective? In an article published recently in the IMF’s Finance and Development journal, I revisited three waves of nationalisation that marked the 20th century. The first was the rise of nationalisation in the name of fighting a crisis. It was statist in character and began during the Great Depression, when the world economy collapsed and national flagship industries were renationalised after more than half a century of growing globalisation. This wave included protagonists from across the political spectrum—from progressive Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt and Blum’s Popular Front in France to populists in Mexico, to fascist regimes led by Hitler and Mussolini, to Latin American generals and the Stalinist state-party in the Soviet Union.
By 1975, developing countries were nationalising a foreign-owned company every four days.
Nicholas Mulder
A second wave occurred in the late 1940s, when European states nationalised a large portion of their public infrastructure, housing stock, energy systems, and a substantial share of their industrial activity. These reforms fit a more structured ideological consensus, based on postwar reconstruction and a new social contract advocating equity and a larger state role.
This commitment cut across left-right divides, and involved Christian democrats, social democrats, conservatives, and liberals alike, all explicitly aimed at undoing the effects of fascism and democratizing the economy. However, the Cold War and the inequalities stemming from imperial domination forced so-called developing countries, as Alfred Sauvy described them, to face limits in pursuing the same type of policy. Balance-of-payments constraints, alongside violent interventions and subversion by the West, hampered nationalisations, though Latin American, African, and Asian states repeatedly sought to appropriate foreign assets. This was notably the case in Iran (1951–1953), Guatemala (1954), and Egypt (1956).
That unequal confiscation order, which facilitated nationalisations for the North and rendered them nearly impossible for the South, evolved in the 1970s as the chaos of the international monetary system, after the end of the Bretton Woods agreement, allowed greater flexibility in expropriations. Unity also mattered: OPEC states used their oil revenues to seize control of hydrocarbon resources, while the G77 nations campaigned at the United Nations to increase their share of global income. In 1975, developing countries nationalised a foreign company (primarily American, British, German, and French) every four days. The 1979–1981 Volcker shock and the ensuing global debt crisis abruptly ended that process. Yet this remains the longest period of nationalisation observed to date.
The wave of nationalisations in the 2020s recalls the 1930s, as it coincides with the collapse of an old international economic order.
Nicholas Mulder
The tripartite classification of the 20th-century waves of nationalisation, as laid out below, is not exhaustive. If we look further back than the 1920s, other periods of this sort can be identified: the long secularisation of Church property and the removal of ecclesiastical privileges from 1760 to 1870; the nationalisation of railway companies from 1860 to 1900, when more than a quarter of the world’s railway network was nationalised; and the massive wave of enemy-property confiscations during World War I, when hostile states seized substantial rival assets, paving the way for the 1917 October Revolution. This watershed event produced some of the largest expropriations the world has ever known.
Whether one regards the current wave as the fourth in a century or the seventh across the last two centuries, it remains true that it is aided by a number of easily identifiable factors. It is a broadly political-economic phenomenon, widespread across regions and asset classes. Now that it is well identified, we must interpret it. Comparing it with previous waves helps distinguish its newer aspects, but also those it shares with earlier episodes.
Nationalising in the Era of Globalized Capital, the Unprecedented Conjuncture of Our 2020s
The wave of nationalisations in the 2020s recalls the 1930s because it coincides with the collapse of an old international economic order: the liberal world economy founded on the gold standard, created in the 1870s for its time, and the neoliberal free-trade world and the reign of global capital flows that emerged in the 1970s for today’s era. The current trend also echoes the inter‑war period in that nationalisation serves as the instrument for a very broad range of states occupying both dominant and subordinate positions in the global economy.
In the 1930s, nationalisations occurred in the United States, Bolivia, France, the Soviet Union, Britain, and Romania. Today, we face a landscape of nationalisations across both the wealthiest country in the world, the United States, and some of the poorest, like Niger. This situation clearly distinguishes the current wave from the two mid‑century waves, which privileged either the strongest economies (in the 1940s) or the weakest states (in the 1970s).
At present, everyone is contesting a privileged place in the global economy, using all tools at their disposal. While the long-standing mechanisms of discipline by the Global North and creditor power remain powerful, the attention given to controlling the norms of international economic life is far weaker than before. A relatively permissive normative environment, in which many developing states can carry out nationalisations, is likely to persist as long as neo-mercantilism endures.
To paraphrase Marx, countries can nationalise as they see fit, but they cannot expropriate on their own terms.
Nicholas Mulder
Yet, as the G77 countries discovered in the 1970s, this does not mean that developing economies enjoy total freedom. Heavy economic constraints persist: can foreign possessions be repurchased? Can the state withstand the inevitable recoil from investors and adversarial governments? Is a new modus vivendi possible between nationalising states and multinational firms? To paraphrase Marx, countries can nationalise as they see fit, but they cannot expropriate on their own terms.
A final important similarity between the 2020s and the 1930s lies in the ideological plurality of nationalisation supporters. In both periods, the sense of urgency is so strong and the social and economic pressures so powerful that taboos and conventional political orientations yield to circumstantial force. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have very little in common ideologically, except perhaps the feeling that late‑20th‑century American liberalism failed the American people; Trump is a regressive redistributor with authoritarian leanings, while Sanders is a progressive redistributor committed to democratic values.
The wave of nationalisations in the 2020s recalls the 1930s because it coincides with the collapse of an old international economic order.
Nicholas Mulder
The policy of extending public ownership of AI companies will have very different effects depending on who implements it. Trump’s enthusiasm here clearly expresses his broader obsession with stock market performance, his sharp interest in personal enrichment, and his tendency to treat the state as a private enterprise.
For Sanders, however, there is a deeper philosophical argument behind his advocacy for public ownership: since AI firms have already seized a large portion of our lives, our data, and our culture without compensating the owners and creators who enabled the emergence of large language models, it is fair, in his view, to allow those who have been dispossessed to reclaim some of the money generated from their own resources.
To understand this new era of nationalisation, it will be essential to pay attention to these differences in motivation and structure: behind appears to be the same policy on the surface, but it hides very distinct political agendas, economic interests, and visions of society. Structural analogies at the level of policy cannot and should not excuse us from political interpretation and action to address, contest, support, and adapt these nationalisation policies.
We have never lived in a world where the state has extended its power over property and, at the same time, the globalization of capital and finance remained as intense as it is today.
Nicholas Mulder
What the current wave confronts us with is the inexorable character of this policy in a moment marked by the structural transformation of the world economic order, geopolitical rivalries, and climate and energy crises. We must delve into the history of forced transfers of property, adapt its lessons to our era, and exercise lucidity about what it can and cannot achieve. This goes beyond what its fiercest critics claim, but does not go as far as what its most enthusiastic proponents advocate.
Placing the present in a historical perspective helps us grasp what is new and unprecedented in what we are living through. If there is one thing of this kind, it is the specific juxtaposition of a generalized nationalisation across states, ideologies, and sectors of the economy, and the persistence of historically high levels of capital mobility across borders. We are not facing another Great Depression or any other de-globalisation crisis on the horizon. We have never before experienced a world in which the state extends its power over property and, at the same time, the globalization of capital and finance remains as intense as it is today. It is in this striking reality that the novelty of our conjuncture resides.