International steel cartel

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The International Steel Cartel (more precisely: International Crude Steel Community or Continental Crude Steel Community 1926/31 and International Crude Steel Export Community 1933/39) was an economic cartel founded in 1926, initially for the continental European steel industry and later also for England and America . It existed (with a brief interruption in 1931/33) until the beginning of World War II in 1939 and then broke up.

Some traditions of this cartel lived on in German-occupied continental Europe between 1940 and 1944 (see also War Economy Germany (1939–1945) ).

history

On September 30, 1926, the steel industries of France , Belgium , Luxembourg , Saarland and Germany founded a market association under the name International Crude Steel Community , in order to be able to better compete with the British and American steel industries. The organization was formed under the leadership of Emil Mayrisch from Luxembourg and Fritz Thyssen from Germany and with the support of the governments of the cartel groups involved. Mayrisch had succeeded in loosening the previously stalled negotiations between the German and French steel associations and directing them towards an overall solution for Western Europe. Aloyse Meyer from Luxembourg became chairman of the association . On January 1, 1927, the steel industries of Austria , Hungary and Czechoslovakia joined. The German steel industry, in which the recently formed large concern Vereinigte Stahlwerke dominated, was granted a quota of 40% of the total steel production.

A few years after it was founded, the cartel disintegrated again. In May 1929 the German group resigned. During the global economic crisis , a ruinous dumping set in , which completely thwarted the regulation. No compensation payments have been made since 1930; In 1931, the last production ties were dropped and the 'Schweizer Treuhand' also ceased its services as a neutral controlling body.

In 1933 the cartel was re-established under the name Internationale Rohstahlexportgemeinschaft (IREG), d. H. only for export by the national cartel associations involved. British steel producers joined in 1935. In 1938, the cartel controlled 90% of international trade after joining the three largest American steelmakers United States Steel , Bethlehem Steel and Republic Steel . The US firms were just informal, unofficial members of the cartel.

With the outbreak of war in 1939, the cartel disintegrated. Due to the economic war between the Allies and the Axis powers and also due to the worldwide increase in demand for steel, agreed production limits had become pointless and superfluous.

From the summer of 1940 (after the Western campaign ), the cartel structures that had only just collapsed revived in German-occupied continental Europe, especially between the German, French and Belgian producer groups. Their cooperation now essentially served economic control through Berlin, i.e. through the warring Third Reich.

Cartel forms and cartel development

The International Steel Cartel was an umbrella cartel made up of national cartel groups.

The Internationale Rohstahlgemeinschaft (IRG) was an international production cartel in the variant of the quota cartel , which set the production quantities to be produced for its members individually. Export opportunities for producers from the Montandreieck Lorraine, Luxembourg and Saarland ( Saar-Lor-Lux ) to Germany were important.

The International Crude Steel Export Association (IREG) was a pure export cartel . When the steel cartel was re-established in 1933, the domestic sales of the individual cartel groups were not regulated and their home markets were left to them exclusively. For export, however, central sales points were set up for the individual product groups, so that the IREG represented an association of several international syndicates .

In the 1920s and 1930s, the German Ruhrstahl Syndicate had acted as a 'teacher' for the syndicate organization in the other European cartel groups. This explains why, from 1933 onwards, by taking over German “Kartelltechnik”, Internationale Stahlkartell had received a number of sales offices for certain product groups. The level of organization had increased significantly compared to the IRG. A complex syndicate cartel , which its members about the monopolization of sales controlled and held together, was created.

There were seven narrower ones, i.e. H. Export associations founded in connection with the IREG, namely for the "most important rolled products", namely " shaped iron, bar iron, heavy plate , center plate , universal iron, strip iron and tubular strip". The offices were located at the four founding members of the IREG: in Düsseldorf , Paris , Brussels , Liège and Luxembourg .

The international steel cartel as a precursor to European unification?

The international steel cartel, in particular the IRG of 1926, has been regarded as the forerunner of the European coal and steel union since the 1960s at the latest . This view arose even though the founders of the coal and steel union Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman had explicitly denied this connection early on.

After 2000, however, criticism of the model function of the cartels came from several sides:

  • In 2004, the German historian Clemens Wurm examined the analogy between the coal and steel union and the international steel cartels on the basis of three criteria. Only in one point - the aspect of the balance of interests and the resolution of the conflict - is there an extensive similarity between the first IRG steel cartel and the coal and steel union. This does not apply to the other two criteria. The coal and steel union is a political and intergovernmental project, not an entrepreneurial one. In addition, the coal and steel union was supposed to integrate the European iron and steel markets internationally, but the cartels didn't want this.
  • In 2007, the Luxembourg historian Charles Barthel largely denied - even more so than his colleague Wurm - that the 1926 steel cartel had a paradigmatic effect on the coal and steel industry. He archived evidence that the steel associations involved in the cartel oriented themselves towards their own economic interests and that idealistic “European ideas” had played no role. The blueprint for the cartel project itself was "transnational integration [...] far away"; on the contrary, it was a matter of acquisitions and as exclusive control as possible of claimed markets. The International Crude Steel Community was therefore only an "alleged" forerunner "of a united Europe", which is still "highly praised today".
  • In 2013, the cartel theorist HA Leonhardt demonstrated in a comparison of different organizational forms that the international steel cartels of the inter-war period represented only one of several roots of the construction plan of the coal and steel union . More important than these were the experiences that the initiator of the Schuman Plan, Jean Monnet , had brought with him from the Allied war economy, in which he had been active in intergovernmental procurement cartels for war-related needs in 1914/19 and 1939/40. The state cartel concept implemented there was the substrate for the coal and steel union, into which the necessary instruments of national economic policy on the one hand and entrepreneurial cartel technology on the other hand were incorporated. A further modification of the building plan took place in accordance with political demands by adding a democratic organ, the joint assembly . In the end, a cartel emerged between states and no longer one between companies: the states had booted their own entrepreneurship out of the control centers of the new community.

Attempts to found an international steel cartel in the later post-war period

In principle, the European Coal and Steel Union provided for a ban on corporate cartels . As soon as it was founded in 1952, the steel industries of the six participating states tried to test the limits of the agreed exception regulations. The European Coal and Steel Community approved 32 cartels in this way up to 1964. Some of them were cross-border, such as the Brussels Convention, an export cartel of the Belgian, Dutch and German steel industries from 1953 for exports to countries outside the Community. Another, larger project, on the other hand, clearly left the legally permissible framework. In the crisis situation in the steel industry from 1962 onwards, the steel contractors of the coal and steel union tried to enter into international agreements and also to win over the High Authority. In 1965/67 they tried to exploit the weakening of the High Authority due to the impending EC merger . In 1965 they founded a cross-community "supercartel" with u. a. Sales offices for the six most important rolled steel product groups. The High Authority had been offered patronage for this, but it behaved evasively. The new IREG-style steel cartel, but with thoroughly transnational integration, only lasted until 1967 because of the internal disputes among its members and the lack of support from the Council of Ministers and the Higher Authority of the Coal and Steel Community.

literature

  • Barthel, Charles, The Hour of Mr. Mayrisch. Charles Barthel, The Hour of Mr. Mayrisch. On the participation of the Luxembourg steel industrialist in the economic détente in Europe 1925/26 , in: Gallery. Revue culturelle et pedagogique 25 (2007), pp. 403-481.
  • Barthel, Charles, La Haute Autorité de la CECA et les cartels sidérurgiques. Une relation ambivalente (1950–1967), in: Schirmann, Sylvain (Ed.), L'Europe par l'economie? Des projets initiaux aux debats actuels, Brussels 2013, 39–58.
  • Gillingham, John: To the prehistory of the coal and steel union, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 34 (1986), pp. 381–405 ( PDF ).
  • Hexner, Ervin: The International Steel Cartel , Chapel Hill 1943.
  • Kiersch, Günther, International Iron and Steel Cartels , Essen 1954.
  • Leonhardt, Holm A .: Cartel theory and international relations. Theory-historical studies , Hildesheim 2013.
  • Reichert, Jakob Wilhelm, Die Festländische Rohstahlgemeinschaft, in: Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, 25 (1927), pp. 340–376.
  • Clemens A. Wurm:
    • Les Cartels internationaux de l'acier de L'entre-deux-guerres. Precurseurs du plan Schuman ?, in: Andreas Wilkens (ed.), Le plan Schuman dans l'histoire, Intérêts nationaux et projet européen, Bruxelles 2004, pp. 53–80.
    • Industrial interest politics and the state. International Cartels in British Foreign and Economic Policy in the Interwar Period. De Gruyter 1988. (Publication of the Historical Commission on Bsrlin, Volume 71)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Günther Kiersch, The international steel cartels between the two world wars, in: Ludwig Kastl (Ed.), Kartelle in derreality, Festschr. f. Max Metzner on his 75th birthday, Cologne, pp. 349–351.
  2. ↑ John Gillingham, On the prehistory of the coal and steel union, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 34 (1986), pp. 390–403.
  3. ↑ Charles Barthel, The Hour of Mr. Mayrisch. On the participation of the Luxembourg steel industrialist in the economic détente in Europe 1925/26, in: Gallery. Revue culturelle et pedagogique, 25 (2007), no. 3, pp. 416-477.
  4. ^ Günther Kiersch, International Iron and Steel Cartels, Essen 1954, p. 24
  5. ^ Günther Kiersch, International Iron and Steel Cartels, Essen 1954, p. 25
  6. ^ John Gillingham, On the prehistory of the Montanunion , in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 34 (1986), pp. 382–384.
  7. ^ Günther Kiersch, International Iron and Steel Cartels, Essen 1954, p. 70
  8. ^ Günther Kiersch, International Iron and Steel Cartels, Essen 1954, p. 71
  9. ^ Clemens A. Wurm, Les Cartels internationaux de l'acier de L'entre-deux-guerres. Precurseurs du plan Schuman ?, in: Andreas Wilkens (ed.), Le plan Schuman dans l'histoire, Intérêts nationaux et projet européen, Bruxelles 2004, p. 67.
  10. ^ Holm A. Leonhardt: Cartel theory and international relations. Theory-historical studies , Hildesheim 2013, p. 57.
  11. ^ Clemens A. Wurm, Les Cartels internationaux de l'acier de L'entre-deux-guerres. Precurseurs du plan Schuman ?, in: Andreas Wilkens (ed.), Le plan Schuman dans l'histoire, Intérêts nationaux et projet européen, Bruxelles 2004, p. 67.
  12. ^ Clemens A. Wurm, Les Cartels internationaux de l'acier de L'entre-deux-guerres. Precurseurs du plan Schuman ?, in: Andreas Wilkens (ed.), Le plan Schuman dans l'histoire, Intérêts nationaux et projet européen, Bruxelles 2004, pp. 70–71.
  13. ^ Clemens A. Wurm, Les Cartels internationaux de l'acier de L'entre-deux-guerres. Precurseurs du plan Schuman ?, in: Andreas Wilkens (ed.), Le plan Schuman dans l'histoire, Intérêts nationaux et projet européen, Bruxelles 2004, pp. 71-78.
  14. ↑ Charles Barthel, The Hour of Mr. Mayrisch. On the participation of the Luxembourg steel industrialist in the economic détente in Europe 1925/26, in: Gallery. Revue culturelle et pedagogique, 25th year (2007), no. 3., p. 478.
  15. ↑ Charles Barthel, The Hour of Mr. Mayrisch. On the participation of the Luxembourg steel industrialist in the economic détente in Europe 1925/26, in: Gallery. Revue culturelle et pedagogique, 25th year (2007), volume 3, p. 404.
  16. ↑ Charles Barthel, The Hour of Mr. Mayrisch. On the participation of the Luxembourg steel industrialist in the economic détente in Europe 1925/26, in: Gallery. Revue culturelle et pedagogique, 25th year (2007), no. 3., p. 478.
  17. ^ Holm A. Leonhardt: Cartel theory and international relations. Theory-historical studies , Hildesheim 2013, p. 633.
  18. ^ Holm A. Leonhardt: Cartel theory and international relations. Theory- historical studies , Hildesheim 2013, pp. 533–554, 568–574.
  19. ^ Holm A. Leonhardt: Cartel theory and international relations. Theory- historical studies , Hildesheim 2013, pp. 597-599, 634.
  20. ^ Holm A. Leonhardt: Cartel theory and international relations. Theory-historical studies , Hildesheim 2013, p. 324.
  21. ^ Charles Barthel, La Haute Autorité de la CECA et les cartels sidérurgiques. Une relation ambivalente (1950–1967), in: Sylvain Schirmann (Ed.), L'Europe par l'economie? Des projets initiaux aux debats actuels, Brussels 2013, p. 45.
  22. ^ Charles Barthel, La Haute Autorité de la CECA et les cartels sidérurgiques. Une relation ambivalente (1950–1967), in: Sylvain Schirmann (Ed.), L'Europe par l'economie? Des projets initiaux aux debats actuels, Brussels 2013, p. 47.
  23. ^ Charles Barthel, La Haute Autorité de la CECA et les cartels sidérurgiques. Une relation ambivalente (1950–1967), in: Sylvain Schirmann (Ed.), L'Europe par l'economie? Des projets initiaux aux debats actuels, Brussels 2013, p. 49.
  24. ^ Charles Barthel, La Haute Autorité de la CECA et les cartels sidérurgiques. Une relation ambivalente (1950–1967), in: Sylvain Schirmann (Ed.), L'Europe par l'economie? Des projets initiaux aux debats actuels, Brussels 2013, p. 56.
  25. ↑ Part I (pp. 1 - 342)