Cartel movement
The cartel movement was an industrial modernization movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was particularly pronounced in Germany and Austria. The cartel movement was seen as part of an overarching concentration movement , which also included the merger or trust movement . The latter was particularly strong in the US.
history
From the 1870s onwards, industrialization in Europe and North America led to an increased need for cooperation between companies in the same branch. In several waves well into the 1930s, cartelization increased in Germany. Thematically, these waves had a different omen: In the German Empire, production cartels and syndicates were popular, in the Weimar Republic specialization cartels and manufacturing associations, and in the beginning of the Third Reich, it was evidence of a socially useful economic system. The cartel movement was thus essentially a search for the most urgent or most suitable cartel forms.
In the Third Reich, the cartel movement was integrated into economic and specialist groups in the course of the association's harmonization of the German economy and made superfluous during the Second World War through a new superorganization of steering associations . Rationalizations were now made by the state, i. H. carried out in consultation with or by order of the central management.
After the Second World War, the cartel movement was severely dampened by the American anti- cartel policy and lost all creative power by the 1960s at the latest.
Institutionalization
In the decades up to the beginning of the 20th century, the cartel movement in Germany was still more or less informal. The Imperial Court ruled on February 4, 1897 that the formation of cartels is permitted and that compliance with them can be sued in court, which gave the cartel movement momentum.
From 1902, the Central Association of German Industrialists officially promoted the spread of the cartel principle through its main office for syndication - similar to how many state measures today aim to modernize the economy and other areas of society. For a successful cartel operation, both organizational and legal know-how were useful and necessary:
The "main activity [of the office for the syndicate system ...] consisted in advising and supporting the cartels in expanding and restructuring the statutes and in establishing new ones. [...] the [...] following years served [...] to further spread the cartel idea, its expansion to other areas, namely in the processing trades (textile industry) and its internal processing in the individual trades covered by it. "The general rationalization goals were to create "greater economic efficiency through appropriate internal facilities (better connection of raw material extraction and processing, saving of administrative costs, centralization of sales, division of labor, typification, mass transport, amalgamation of administrative offices, etc.)".
From 1903 the cartel movement also had its own specialist journal, the Kartell-Rundschau .
In the Third Reich, the private cartels were looked after by the state-controlled economic groups and increasingly patronized.
After the Second World War, the remaining cartel movement in Germany lost the support of the state. The organ Kartell-Rundschau had ceased publication in 1944 and did not resume its activities.
literature
- Fretz, Max: The interrelationships between the modern cartel movement and the prevailing protective tariff policy . Diss. Bern, Innsbruck 1923.
- Holzschuher, Veit: Social and economic backgrounds of the cartel movement . Dissertation Erlangen 1963.
- Holm A. Leonhardt: Cartel theory and international relations. Theory-historical studies , Hildesheim 2013.
Individual evidence
- ^ Holm A. Leonhardt: Cartel theory and international relations. Theory- historical studies , Hildesheim 2013, pp. 70–138.
- ^ Fritz Blaich: The beginnings of German anti-cartel policy between 1897 and 1914
- ^ Arnold Steinmann-Bucher : The imperative of order . Berlin 1934, pp. 19-20.
- ^ Arnold Steinmann-Bucher: The imperative of order . Berlin 1934, p. 20.