Preliminary Programme

The history of the Reich’s Ministry of Finance (RMF) has not been written yet. Established in 1919 with the aim of organizing a sound national system of public finance and charged with solving the financial problems caused by the First World War the ministry developed rapidly in the following decades. The economic depression of the interwar period made extended state intervention into social and economic affairs appear inevitable. The RMF could no longer simply remain the guardian of the budget but was forced to take active part in discussions about competing political aims and claims on national resources. While most of its leading civil servants held up the primacy of a balanced budget, they now also had to take into consideration the economic impact of public finance, which in effect meant a re-interpretation of the national budget as an instrument of macroeconomic policy. Under the Nazi regime, these developments were both reinforced and transformed when public debt and deficit spending were used to prepare the German economy (and German society) for a destructive war.

The proposed contribution will analyze the process of transformation sketched above through the lens of structuration and focus on the interaction of the historical experience of German society from the Weimar Republic to National Socialism, the institutional context of the ministry and the profile of its leading personnel. The meaning of institutional rules and resources for decision-making processes at moments of change in financial politics and, after 1933, under the premises of a social system marked by the ambivalence of a rigid autocratic doctrine and a dynamic polycracy of ruling institutions will be scrutinized. Special attention will be paid to strategies of legitimizing, to the semantics of decision-making and to instances of misunderstanding or deviance within the ministry in order to analyse the interpretation of structures by individual agents. In doing so, the contribution will try to answer the question whether the Reich’s Ministry of Finance, as an institution, actively shaped the structuration of the German war society. (Show less)

Which political, socio-economic, cultural and institutional structures bring actors to recognize property rights and how is the performance of a company affected by those decisions? The history of the Simson Company in Thuringia, Germany, offers a promising basis for inquiring into the nexus between property right decisions, institutional frameworks and structural constraints or freedoms.

Between 1856 and 1993, the Simson Company was headed by at least different owners, and it survived five different political systems. The company’s business structures were affected by the personnel and political changes, yet the decision-making processes on the local level did not necessarily mirror the new organizational patterns installed above.

This contribution will analyze how the different actors involved (businessmen, military and state officials, legal institutions, etc.) competed for or reversed property rights and how existing or newly created structures presented hurdles or opportunities for particular interests related to property rights. In doing so, the role of corporate traditions, local loyalties and regional particularities will be given due attention. (Show less)

For a long time, development has been studied as an international activity of national governments. More recently, historians have turned to international institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations to study those actors’ development approaches. Relatively little attention has been paid so far to private actors in the development arena. The structural conditions under which private development politics took place and which private aid helped to establish have been largely ignored. Therefore this contribution will scrutinize the internal decision-making processes of the foundations and relate them to the overarching framework of international development aid in the postwar era.

American philanthropic foundations committed to international development, while working within a densely knit, highly competitive set of political, institutional and social structures, managed to secure a degree of political influence and institutional independence disproportionate to their size and position. The reason for their success, I would argue, lay in their ability to simultaneously use and challenge the existing structures they were part of. In funding development projects abroad the foundations stayed very close to Washington’s foreign policy interests and decision-makers; yet they did not hesitate to formulate and implement alternative development approaches. Hence it could be argued that the foundations from within the existing system established a parallel set of institutions which served as the basis of their increasingly global activities. (Show less)