Harald Espeli

Protectionism, lobbying and innovation. perspectives on the development of the Norwegian textile industry, especially since 1940

Abstract Since the 1950s the Norwegian textile industry has experienced a prolonged decline that has been more marked than in other OECD countries. In trying to explain this decline the author emphasizes path dependence or the importance of history and political factors. Since the late 1890s the Norwegian textile industry seems to have worked more assiduosly to gain protection than to adjust and be innovative in relation to changing market conditions and production technologies. Political success as lobbyists and rent-seekers made many managers act as if the main responsibility for the industry sfuture lay with government and not among the textile firms, themselves.

Prelude to Extreme Protectionism? Norwegian Agricultural Protectionism in a West-European Context, 1850–1940

Abstract The topic of the article is to offer a new interpretation of the history of Norways agricultural protectionism in a West-European context. Agricultural protectionism was not deeply rooted economically, politically or institutionally prior to the Second World War. Before the First World War the most commercially oriented part of Norwegian agriculture – milk production and the dairy industry – was export-oriented. Norway was the last country to join the protectionist wave in the late nineteenth century and in practice it followed the most liberal trade policies in agricultural products next to Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands. It is argued that the 1920s were generally relatively more important and the 1930s relatively less important for later developments than assumed in the most of the literature on agricultural protectionism.

Economic consequences of the German occupation of Norway, 1940-1945

Since the liberation from the German occupation of 1940–1945, the dominant national narrative has been of the far-reaching exploitation and destruction of the Norwegian economy by the occupant forces. The scholarly basis for this narrative was a book written by Odd Aukrust and Petter Jacob Bjerke in 1945. The narrative formed an important basis for the Norwegian variant of economic reconstruction following liberation and has also dominated historiography. However, Aukrust and Bjerve’s presentation of the bleak situation in 1945 was exaggerated and is, historically speaking, untenable. Another conclusion is that the German occupation initiated a 20-year period in which the Norwegian economy was less open and exposed to internal and external competition than in any other period subsequent to Norway entering the liberal age of free trade and free international capital transactions in the middle of the 19th century.

Political Radicalisation and Social Movements in Liberated Norway (1945–1947)

In Norway, as in most western European countries, World War II and five years of German occupation led to a distinct political radicalisation. An obvious indicator was that in autumn 1945, the Norwegian Labour Party won a parliamentary majority for the first time in a general election. So began the ‘golden days’ of the Labour Party and the labour movement dominated by social democrats. The Labour party held a parliamentary majority until 1961 and was in power almost continually for 20 years. Moreover, the Norwegian Communist Party (NCP) received 11.9 per cent of the votes in the 1945 election, gaining parliamentary representation for the first time since the 1920s. Never before and never since did the so-called socialist parties hold such a large share of the votes—almost 53 per cent. The NCP had about 34,000 members in 1946 compared to Labour’s 170,000 members; about half of these were so-called collective party members through their local union membership. NCP’s principal daily, Friheten, had a daily circulation of 130,000, half of them among subscribers, making it the second largest paper in Norway, smaller only than the conservative paper Aftenposten, and probably the largest paper within all the Nordic countries’ labour movements at the time. Norway had 3.1 million inhabitants in 1945; half of them lived in sparsely populated areas and only a third in urban municipalities. A third of the labour force worked in manufacturing industries.

Incentive Structures and State Regulations of the Norwegian Economy

On 15 April 1940, six days after the German invasion of Norway, the Administrative Council (Administrasjonsradet) was set up in Oslo. After negotiations between the German authorities and self-appointed Norwegian representatives, the Council replaced Vidkun Quisling’s coup d’etat government from the evening of 9 April. The Nygaardsvold government and the royal family had fled from Oslo on the morning of 9 April and in June they went into exile in London, continuing the war as Britain’s ally. The Council’s future was dependent on close cooperation with the Germans on economic and administrative matters. On 24 April, the Council instructed Norges Bank (The Norwegian Central Bank) to give the Wehrmacht a blank cheque to finance its occupation costs in Norway. The Germans eventually withdrew around 11 billion NOK—nominally more than twice Norway’s GDP in 1938—on the Norges Bank’s occupation account until May 1945, of which 8 billion NOK was financed through note printing.

Introduction to special issue: Wars, states and economic change in the Scandinavian countries, 1600-2000

This is the authors’ accepted and refereed manuscript to the article. The journal is available online at www.tandfonline.comMost of the contributions in this special issue on ‘Wars, States and Economic Change in the Scandinavian Countries, 1600–2000’ were presented at a workshop with a similar title at the BI Norwegian Business School on 26 November 2010. The workshop was financed by the Norwegian Research Council (NRC) as a follow-up to its evaluation of Norwegian historical research headed by Professor Bo Stråth in 2008. The evaluation committee particularly criticized Norwegian historical research for its ‘methodological nationalism’ as well as insufficient transnational contacts.1 In reply, the Centre for Business History at the BI Norwegian Business School applied for and received funds from the NRC to create new networks and strengthen comparative perspectives through seminars and workshops. This special issue should be seen as one of many responses to the NRC’s initiative. The workshop in 2010 and the guest editors of the current issue were inspired by the session ‘On War and Economic History: a Global Perspective in the Centuries before World War I’ at the 15th World Economic History Congress in Utrecht in 2009, which was organized by Philip T. Hoffman. Hoffman (and Patrick O’Brien) raised questions of fundamental historical importance. In line with Charles Tilly’s classic thesis on the close interrelationship between warfare and state building, Hoffmann argued that by the end of the 19th century, the European countries had conquered large parts of the world due to a peculiar form of military competition, a kind of permanent tournament that induced European rulers to invest significantly and successfully in military innovations such as gunpowder weapons between 1500 and 1800. For various reasons, similar conditions for innovations in military technology, through continuous military competition based on repeated and relatively limited wars, were absent in Japan, India, the Ottoman Empire and China in this period. Thus the European countries achieved a significant advantage in military technology, especially in gunpowder weapons, which had originally been developed in China and utilized skilfully by the Ottomans. This advantage was underpinned by significant productivity improvements in weapons production, lowering their cost.2 The creation of fiscal-military states, with Britain as the most successful case, both in terms of economic growth and creation of a global empire, was an integrated element in the development of the European military superiority.3 Presenting a number of selected cases and putting the war-and-economy question to contemporary history as well, the ambitions of this special issue are more modest and more ambitious in some respects. The economic and political consequences of war and the relationship between wars and nation building are classical themes in the historiography and national narratives of the Nordic countries. We have attempted to combine a long-term perspective with contributions from all the Nordic countries, except Iceland.