2 - Protectionism over Competition: Europe, Australia, and Japan, 1930–1945

Summary

The Great Depression tested the strength of capitalist institutions in the world's industrial nations, fostering war. The economic policies that governments imposed reflected a divergent liberal and fascist public discourse. Government bureaucracies held capitalist enterprise accountable to conflicting images of national welfare. Each nation's bureaucracy possessed its own institutional culture and professional discourse shaping protectionist tariffs, currency restrictions, and cartel practices. The following discussion locates within political and cultural contexts the policies instituting protectionism over competition in German, British, Japanese, and Australian capitalism during the Great Depression and World War II. The argument is that each nation's bureaucrats and legal–economic experts implemented cartel and trade policies which held U.S. multinational corporations accountable to either liberal-democratic or fascist images of capitalism. In all four nations, the dominant policy enforced protectionism over competitive markets; within each nation, however, individuals possessing greater or lesser influence contested this triumph, thereby offering the image of a different capitalist order in the future.

Section I considers the liberal-democratic and fascist policy discourse – reflecting not only the rejection of American style antitrust but also images of national identity – that British and German officials and economic experts applied to international cartels and U.S. multinational corporations. Focusing on British expert opinion toward international cartel regulation and Australia, Section II briefly explores the impact the British imperial system of trade preference had on promoting the latter's cartelized market capitalism and radical egalitarian social consensus between Conservative and Labor parties.