Preliminary Programme

This paper evaluates the relationship between British and Belgian interests in the copper multinational Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK), a company that was set up in 1906 to valorise the rich mineral ores in Katanga, the southern province of Congo. Following previous enquiries into the relationship between British and Dutch interests in multinationals such as Unilever and Royal Dutch Shell, the issue of ‘nationality’ in the managing of UMHK is scrutinized.

From the start, the British company Tanganyika Concessions Limited gained an important stake in UMHK next to the Belgian holding company Société Générale, because of a lack of expertise among Belgian capitalists in setting up a mining economy. British management initially outweighed the Belgian input in UMHK. British directors took the main decisions and devised the initial programs of labour recruitment and mining planning based on their previous experiences with gold mining in South Africa. Because of this, Union Minière had two principal offices: one general office in Brussels and one technical committee in London.

According to historian Bruce Fetter, this assignment of tasks did not please Belgian capitalists and even the Belgian King Albert I feared a ‘British invasion of Katanga’. This resulted in a gradual push aside of the British influence in UMHK. First, the technical committee was moved from London to Brussels in 1912. In 1918 a series of accusations of mismanagement led to the replacement of the British director in Congo, P.K. Horner by a Belgian, Edgar Sengier. And finally, the ties with the South-African economic network were loosened by replacing the South-African labour force in Katanga by Belgians. From 1920 on, the Belgian interests prevailed and the influence of the Belgian holding company Société Générale outstripped that of Tanganyaka Concessions Limited. From that point on, the Belgian direction could organize the copper business by itself.

Despite the noticed ‘national’ shifts in management, we can ask ourselves if these shifts really reflect national power struggles over the company? UMHK was indeed a company founded under Belgian law, but it was also a multinational that operated within the world market for non-ferrous metals. It faced huge technological challenges and a perennial labour shortage. The question remains whether the changes in management and the letting go of a South-African scheme of mining development had so much to do with ‘nationality’, rather than being based on business considerations? To what extent was there a feeling of national rivalry within the management of UMHK?

To answer these questions, we look at the archival records of Union Minière du Haut-Katanga and specifically at the functioning of the technical committee. The committee existed from 1906 to 1929, encompassing the very period in which Fetter notes the power shift in management. Prominent figures of both Tanganyika Concessions Limited and the Belgian executives of UMHK were members of the committee, discussing the managerial and technological development of the company. This source provides an excellent starting point to address the problem of nationality within this multinational company. (Show less)

The paper aims to show the reciprocal relationship of private enterprises’ global interconnections and their strategies to cope with national institutional frameworks in the 1930s.
The primary assumption is that marketing strategies were used efficiently to overcome some of the consequences of economic nationalism. The analysis will focus on the broadly defined marketing strategies of two Hungarian enterprises by their entry in and operating on foreign markets. As because of the consequences of the First World War Hungarian enterprises had to face strong national resentments in their neighbouring region, enterprises from Hungary provide a good example to analyse private business’ response on the changed political and economic environment of the interwar years. In the paper, special emphasis will be put on cartels and other forms of transnational business cooperation as sources of information, channels of financial means and knowledge transfer (management methods, technological data etc.), organization of coordinated lobby etc.
The paper will show how, on the one hand, knowledge transfer, market positioning, financial transactions etc. in global business networks eluded national borders, and on the other hand, they consciously used and benefited from national institutions and conceptions and doing so reinforced these institutions.
The analysis will primarily be based on archive materials of United Incandescent and Electrical Ltd., Ujpest (Tungsram) and Ganz & Co. Electrical, Machine-, Waggon and Shipyard- Co. Ltd. (Show less)

In the process of globalization, representations of far-away regions became more and more important for national societies in the effort to locate themselves in an increasingly interconnected world. This paper examines representations of the non-European world in a rapidly modernizing Czech society as a means for understanding the changing self-perception of the Czechs during the crucial period of “high modernity” between 1900 and the 1930s. It focuses on discourses on alterity and is based on the assumption, that the reflection and representation of “the Other” always mirrors the self image of a society. The main emphasis is put on the aspect of how “the Other” is constituted in cultural encounters with the non-European world, and how it is communicated and transformed in the Czech national society. Albeit embedded prevailingly in a Central European political and cultural context, the Czech development cannot be evaluated irrespective of the “rest” of the world after 1900.
This paper focuses on the analysis of Czech travel reports on Africa and the Orient. The confrontation with the oriental “Other” did not only evoke reflections on Czech cultural and mental patterns as well as on the social, political or economic situation. It also stimulated discourses on world order, as mainly the Czech debates on the colonial question demonstrate, showing a great difference between the arguments brought up as a nation that partly viewed itself as “colonized” before 1918, and a nation with full political powers after 1918. Representations, values and strategies become visible through the confrontation with the non-European world and reveal notions little explored. (Show less)

Panel: East Central Europe in a Transnational Perspective (Organizers: Matthias Middell, Frank Hadler)

Ever since Poland’s reestablishment as a sovereign nation state in 1918, Polish actors have considered the several millions of migrant Poles abroad a potential political, economic and cultural resource for the country’s positioning in the world. In order to benefit from this resource, bonds between the according communities and the homeland had to be reinforced or established. While often successful, such efforts to construct a globalised imagined community also led to conflicts on several levels: First, many a “Polish community” simply rejected to be addressed as “Polish”, while others intervened into domestic politics and codes of representation in ways unwelcome to the national elites − a phenomenon of particular significance during the Cold War. Last not least discussions of the Polonia, or Poles abroad, ignited fierce arguments over the essence of “Polishness” (polskość) as such.
The paper deals with the according discourse on the Polonia within Poland as attempts to generate and channel solidarity among homeland and diaspora Poles, or to counteract interference of an ideologically unwelcome kind, as well as with Polonia interventions into these efforts. Topics to be dealt with include the orientation towards certain diaspora communities (US; France) and neglect of others (Germany, Israel), change in this, arguments for and against the according ties, agencies of exchange and of the formation / reaffirmation of bonds (esp. academic, ecclesiastic), competing definitions of “solidarity” vs. “illegitimate interference”, and, as a result, the interrelation of national imagination and transnational community building. (Show less)