ECONOMICS: Cooperation, Competition, and Conflict: Economic Relations Between the United States and Germany, 1968-1990

Summary

Germany and the United States were closely linked in the Cold War era through the strategic alliance, but also through many economic ties. The depth of the ties is visible in the close correlation of German and American business cycles. Their economic policy orientation followed a broadly similar path, from applied Keynesianism in the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s to a sustained anti-inflationary policy in the 1980s and 1990s. The new orientation toward stability marked the beginning of a return to traditional economic liberalism - deregulation and privatization - but to a markedly different extent in the two national settings.

These countries were political and economic systems that viewed themselves in different ways. Domestically, each at different points saw itself as a model: Germany of managed corporatism or organized capitalism, the United States of the free market.

Internationally, the United States persistently believed that it could and even should mold the rest of the world politically and economically. In consequence, there was no pressing need, from both the public and also from the government point of view, to make internal adjustments; it was the rest of the world that should do the adjusting. It often appeared that the evolution of the Federal Republic since 1949, together with the Japanese recovery, had been the most striking testimony to the success of American internationalism. Christoph Buchheim's article has demonstrated the extent to which the institutional restructuring that enabled the postwar Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) meant a break with many German social and organizational traditions and the acceptance of reform imposed from the outside, largely from the United States.