ABSTRACT
Great Britain and Germany dominated the foreign trade of the Nordic countries between the wars. During the course of the world economic crisis, both powers employed bilateralist methods that strengthened their positions still further. But what did all this amount to? For what purposes did British and German governments intervene in the workings of the international economy, and with what degree of success? Did they aim to give their own industries advantages they could not have enjoyed under free-market conditions? To enhance their positions in a future war? Or to obtain political influence? Did either Britain or Germany seek to establish some kind of political-economic sphere of influence in the Scandinavian region? I started asking such questions near the beginning of my research career in the mid-1970s. Having studied the development of British-Scandinavian and German-Scandinavian trade in the years immediately before the Second World War, I had become interested in the ways in which state power was used to modify international economic relationships in an era of bilateralism. I was much struck by the statement of Wilhelm Röpke that ‘It goes without saying that the strong mutual dependence of countries bound by bilateral trading may easily develop into a one-sided dependence, which starts by being economic and ends as political’.1 I was struck too by a number of contemporary statements by British and German officials suggesting that this was precisely what they were trying to do in Scandinavia: to reduce their smaller trading partners to positions of dependence, or at least establish some kind of informal hegemony over them, as well as to counteract the influence of their chief rival. Having started to ask such questions, I was naturally influenced by a generation of German historians who had begun to explore the relationship between ‘national power and the structure of foreign trade’, to borrow the title of Albert O. Hirschman’s celebrated book from 1945.2 They included scholars such as Hans-Jürgen Schröder, Joachim Radkau and Dirk Stegmann, as well as East German historians like Dietrich Eichholz.3 The predominant focus, as in much of the literature dating back to the 1930s, was on Germany’s relations with SouthEastern Europe. By the early 1980s, this was becoming controversial, with ‘traditional’ views (as restated, for example, by Bernd-Jürgen Wendt) being challenged by those of, among others, Alan Milward and Larry Neal.4
