ABSTRACT
After a decade of economic depression, the production of aluminium stagnated in those countries in which no political programmes were carried out to support the expansion of this metal. The global conflict sharpened this trend and reshaped the global aluminium industry, pushing many countries to become new producers and increasing the output of the old producing countries. Compared with the output of about 400,000 tons recorded in 1938, the global aluminium output skyrocketed to the peak of about 2,000,000 tons in 1943. This dramatic increase was not the same in all countries. Yet war investments showed that many countries arrived unprepared for the war (such as the US and France). The old mismatch between private strategies and public policies was sharpened during the first months of the war. In some other countries, the war programmes launched during the 1930s granted an optimal output, such as in Germany, which became the world leading country to produce aluminium in 1939, or in Japan whose production spurted during the conflict. Not only did the aluminium industry emerge from the war totally changed from a quantitative standpoint, but also it was modified in its institutional background. If Alliance proved already during the last phase of the 1930s not to be able to conjugate private and public policies, neither its end was still decreed nor a substitute for the cartels was ready to take over the international governance of this industry. As we will see in this chapter, Alliance did not survive the war and some particular governmental policies, in particular those of the United States, hampered its resurgence after the conflict.1 In this chapter, the process that led to the end of Alliance will be described. Its collapse was not the mere outcome of antitrust policies, which had already affected the evolution of the relationships between Americans and Europeans during the last decade. The emergence of new governance and strategic, read military, issues in the US had an international impact over the cartel, leading to its conclusion in 1945. Cartel regulation and strategic material governance flow together in the administration of the aluminium industry, which was definitively changed by the Second World War. The issues of industrial governance behind a strategic material such as aluminium are evident looking at the French and American cases at the eve of the conflict. In 1939, both countries had a theoretical maximum output equal to that of ten years before. In the specific case of France, the Great Depression, before, and Alliance’s policies after, had delayed key investments in the early 1930s, ending
up with severely slowing the growth of production in this country.2 Only in 1938 did the problem of military needs of aluminium in case of war start to attract the interest of the French government. In particular, the formulation of a plan for the production of military planes showed a possible scarcity in raw materials needed to support it. In 1938 AF had had an installed production capacity of 45,000 tons per year of which only 28,000 tonnes had outlets in the domestic market. The French war ministry asked AF to maintain production at full capacity to be able to easily start military production in wartime. Even if the government could neither guarantee to stockpile the metal nor to provide other aids to find additional outlets, the French companies planned expansion of production capacity up to 60,000 tons per year to follow military demands.3
