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The whole of this chapter is devoted to various aspects of de Gaulle's (and France's) challenge to US hegemony in the years 1962–1969. The account starts in 1962, rather than in 1958 when the general first came to power, because Washington was initially quite favourable towards de Gaulle. The first two sections of the chapter discuss this first period of transition, and examine the relationship between France and the US before 1962. The third section looks at the crisis years in the American–French relationship between 1962 and 1967, and includes discussion of the increased closeness of France and Germany and the Franco‐German treaty of 1963, and of de Gaulle's attitude to Britain's membership of the EEC—which was seen by the US as a very important element in strengthening the Atlantic framework. The fourth section discusses the US economy in relation to that of France, Germany, and the EEC, and the last one the final years of the de Gaulle regime.

This chapter and the next describe the fiscal war of attrition that fueled inflation in the 1920s. That war proved most intractable in Germany, where it was fought internationally as well as on the domestic front. The German hyperinflation that resulted from this deadlock is the subject of Ch. 5. The different sections of the chapter look at the background (the post World War I reparations tangle), the transition to hyperinflation, the impact of inflation on the German economy, the stabilization that followed the revaluation of government reserves and pegging of the exchange rate in November 1923, and the implications for international monetary relations.

This chapter focuses on the appointment of Albert Speer as dictator of the German economy and the Reich Minister of Economics Walther Funk as a member of the Central Planning Board. Both appointments were made by Adolf Hitler as part of a decree he issued on September 2, 1943, which put the Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions in control of total German production for the duration of the war, while the Reich Minister of Economics was to be responsible for the general economic policy, among other functions. The chapter first provides a background on the careers of Funk and Speer before discussing the relative position of Funk, Speer, Hermann Göring, and certain commissioners in the German war economy. It also considers the organizational meaning of Hitler's decree, along with the possibility that the new measure will deepen the antagonism between industry and the Nazi Party.

This chapter focuses on the different forms of anti-collectivist camps inside and outside Germany during Hilter's accession to power. Eucken and Böhm emphasized the need for a free-price mechanism and open competition protected by the state. Röpke and Rüstow stressed the advantages of small-scale producers and equal opportunities. Erhard considered credits for consumer industries, and Müller-Armack advocated government action to influence the market, even though the price mechanism as such was to operate freely. Neo-liberals emphasized that the key to a free society was the existence of the broadest possible class of people with economic independence. The overheating of the German economy caused by excessive public spending in the armed forces during World War II meant more and more direct interference by state authorities. Secure profits for entrepreneurs from lucrative government contracts seemed a more than adequate substitute for the uncertainties of a competitive market.

This chapter focuses on cartels and cartel-like organizations in Nazi Germany. The report explains German industrial organization is dominated by large vertical combines. Cartels and other associations of business, a common fixture of the German economy, have been used by the combines as means for the domination of industry and are in part a reflection of the degree of concentration of German industry. The prototypes of the combines are those within so-called heavy industry. The chapter first considers the role of cartels and cartel-like organizations in Germany before offering a number of recommendations relating to denazification, administration, cartels, Reichsvereinigungen, the Chambers of Industry and Commerce, and the main committees and rings.

This essay deals with the massive report chartered by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 to measure the effects of strategic bombing on Germany and Japan—the US Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS). Ascertaining the effects of air strikes was critical, and airmen took steps to ensure that data would be amassed and analyzed to determine if the strategic bombing campaign was successful and worth the effort. USSBS was a massive effort employing over 1,500 personnel that conducted a detailed examination of the evidence both in Europe and the Pacific. Its unimpeachable findings and answers were fairly clear-cut, as detailed in the statistical findings published in over 300 reports. This essay closely examines the bulk of the surveys and reveals what they actually said.

This chapter introduces Japan, and also takes up India and Indonesia, where the problems of securing consent to the authority of the state and democratic constitutional rules were potentially immense. Forty-four allied states met at Bretton Woods to discuss post-war monetary and exchange-rate matters, reaching an agreement that contained three central provisions. The inter-war experience in Europe had suggested that the internal authority of modern states did depend on governments. The West German economy had become the locomotive of west European growth. The internal authority of the French state and French democracy proved far less pliable to American power than the British. Indian democracy succeeded without American support, while Indonesian democracy owed its existence to American power. Where the state's internal authority was weak, low inflation proved politically impossible and democracy tended to fail.

This book explores the trajectory of Germany's industrial relations system in the years after World War II and relates it to the German economy. The story of industrial relations in postwar Germany is reflective of many broader economic, political, and social trends in the country during this period. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the postwar German industrial relations system flourished and served as an important component of an effective economy and a sound democracy. Trade unions and employers associations embraced “social partnership,” that is, they accepted each other as equal partners that work together constructively to advance the economic and social well-being of German citizens. Using historical institutionalism and statistical analysis, this book examines the two most prominent explanations for developments in German industrial relations: the “erosion” and “exhaustion” arguments. Part I discusses the framework of the German industrial relations system, while Part II looks at the principal role played by trade unions and employers associations in industrial relations.

This chapter examines Germany's distinctive system of codetermination (Mitbestimmung), which gives employees some say in management decision making, and the role it played in preserving the solidity and stability of the German industrial relations system throughout the postwar years. It begins with an overview of codetermination and its two components: works councils and employee representation on supervisory boards of large enterprises. It then explains how codetermination has made trade unions especially resilient and goes on to assess employers' attitudes toward codetermination, particularly with regards to various forms of parity representation on supervisory boards. It also considers the efforts of employers associations and trade unions to amend codetermination legislation over the years. The chapter concludes by discussing the larger significance of codetermination to German industrial relations and the German economy.

This chapter reviews the book The German Financial System edited by Jan Pieter Krahnen & Reinhard H. Schmidt. The book presents the German banking and securities sectors as they stood in early 2003, halfway through an extensive program of legislative reform. The collapse of the 1990s bull market left the sectors beset by self-doubt, triggering support for the reform movement. The book, focusing on the German banking and securities sectors' role in financing other sectors of the economy, asks whether the German economy really is bank dominated with underdeveloped capital markets. Finding the latter to be the case, the book asks whether it is a good to push toward a more market-oriented system.

This chapter examines how law and the state supported and sustained Germany's postwar industrial relations system. It first provides an overview of the German labor law before considering how the postwar German state has bolstered the social partners through the use of tripartite bodies to govern numerous aspects of German society, both economic and noneconomic. It then challenges two widely held assumptions about labor law and the role of the state in postwar industrial relations. First, the German economy was more successful in the immediate postwar era because losing World War II wiped the slate clean of prewar laws and deals between interest groups and the state that hindered growth. Second, labor and management practitioners commonly stress collective bargaining autonomy and underplay the important role of the state in providing the prerequisites for that autonomy. The chapter argues that the forces driving membership trends for German trade unions and employers associations differ and that state support of German industrial relations cannot be held responsible for change in the postwar era.

This chapter discusses the factors that affected the extent to which the deregulation drive, and the reassertion of the virtues of competition, have impacted both the prevalence of stable, mutual-obligation-loaded trading relations and the traditional ‘publicly coordinated’ character of the German political/social economy. It argues that compared with Japan, Germany — with its ordo-liberal background, greater degree of individualism, and much more internationally mobile businessmen — seems closer to contemporary Anglo-Saxon moods and values. But the institutions which make Germany different are much more formally entrenched in law than those in Japan. That is no guarantee that they will not be subverted by individual defection to the point at which the institutions themselves are formally changed. But legal entrenchment does slow down the process.

This book concludes by discussing the findings presented in the first five chapters and integrating them into a comprehensive picture of industrial relations in Germany. It shows that labor law and the German state have been resilient throughout the postwar years and effectively provide a framework that incorporates the actors constructively into the German economy. It argues that the industrial relations framework has remained effective and relevant, able to withstand threats and tumult such as German unification and European integration. It considers how the neocorporatist components of the German state, including the Bundesagentur für Arbeit (Federal Employment Agency), have helped to preserve the political influence of trade unions and employers associations. It compares these and other results with those in other countries and ends by reflecting on the future of the German industrial relations system.

This chapter describes the conceptual framework used by the book to study the economy of ancient Greece. It begins with a discussion of the debate between “primitivists,” represented by Karl Bücher, and “modernists,” represented by Eduard Meyer, over the nature of the ancient Greek economy. It considers Bücher's adherence to the so-called German Historical School of Political Economy and goes on to examine the views of Moses I. Finley and Max Weber regarding the ancient economy, Karl Polanyi's use of institutionalism as an approach to the study of the ancient economy, and the main assumptions of New Institutional Economics (NIE) with regard to the genesis and evolution of institutions. The chapter also analyzes the transaction costs theory and concludes with an assessment of criticisms against the classical economists' economic agent, the homo economicus, and the influence of constrained choices and limited rationality on economic performance.

This chapter discusses the political fallout from the Great Depression in central Europe. The German economy had slipped into recession even before the Wall Street crash, and the news from New York devastated the business climate even further. The Muller government was already drowning under the political burden of a burgeoning employment crisis that threatened to bankrupt the national unemployment insurance fund. Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann of the People's Party, who had negotiated the far-reaching Young Plan of 1929 refinancing the German reparation payments over the long term and including a pledge from the Allies to evacuate their troops from the Rhineland, died just weeks before the Wall Street crash, depriving the Cabinet of its most talented statesman. Stresemann's death laid bare the impotence of the Muller Cabinet, which few expected to survive the difficult winter months.

Aversion of the discipline of economics to things military, which Sovietology, its peripheral field, emulated, is shown to be a part of a more general pattern in the social sciences. A survey of articles about the German economy in 1934–1939 finds that the authors largely ignored another great peacetime military buildup of the twentieth century. It was seen as a peculiar and successful variant of employment policy, with potential lessons for other Depression-stricken economies. Archeologists and anthropologists bypassed the evidence of warfare in pre-literate societies, or gave it strained pacific interpretations. Academic historians marginalized their colleagues specializing in military history. Civilianizing tendencies in the study of other countries and in other disciplines support some of my arguments about Sovietology, and at the same time make its case all the more instructive.

This chapter analyzes the German economy in the late 1930s and explores the extent to which it was capitalist. The chapter begins by stating that it is essential to discuss certain economic aspects of the German system under the National-Socialists in order to understand some fundamental problems of that time. Only against an economic background can we understand why it was that the state in Germany was neither completely “prerogative” nor completely “normative” but rather “dual.” The kind and the degree of historical “necessity” involved in the emergence of the dual state in Germany needs to be analyzed and understood. For it is in the dual state that the starting point toward a solution of the much debated problem could hopefully be found. The chapter asks: was the German economic system capitalistic or non-capitalistic?