ABSTRACT
Over 35 years ago, the American political scientist Peter J. Katzenstein noted that, in the context of major economic and commercial transformations, “small states” generally adapt by implementing or refining interventionist policies and “neo-corporatist” industrial strategies, allowing for significant cooperation between political, economic and social actors. In this chapter, we take up Katzenstein’s famous thesis by focusing on the case of Quebec through the prism of a particularly strategic sector: entrepreneurial finance. We first discuss the recent resurgence of “economic nationalism” in industrialised countries, as this allows us to better understand, in a second step, what characterises Quebec’s approach in this context, adapting to this new international environment due to its financial ecosystem and neo-corporatist economic model, in line with the logics identified by Katzenstein. We seek to explain why and how the strong intervention of the Quebec state in the entrepreneurial finance sector is linked to Quebec’s vulnerabilities as a “small nation” and, therefore, underpinned by an economic nationalism that induces strong preferences for the channelling of capital to strategic sectors, the safeguarding of national ownership over key firms and, more recently, the promotion of industrial autonomy.
