ABSTRACT
The interwar economic climate provided fertile ideological and material ground for 'embedding' liberalism. This chapter describes developments on three fronts. It provides a very broad overview of the complex international environment to show how changes adopted by Norway were not uncommon. Norway had to respond to a world that was increasingly nationalist-oriented and isolationist. The chapter also describes the nature of the Norwegian economic context at the time. It is the nature of Norway's interwar economic crises that help to explain the rise of new political and institutional coalitions at the end of the period. Economic calamity spread across and within global capital, trade and labor markets. In response to the contagion, countries began to erect protectionist barriers to global trade, capital, and migration flows in an escalating sequence of tit-for-tat, beggar-thy-neighbor policies that spread rapidly around the world. The chapter also presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book.
