IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/entsoc/v14y2013i01p99-143_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Business as a Means of Foreign Policy or Politics as a Means of Production? The German Government and the Creation of Friedrich Flick’s Upper Silesian Industrial Empire (1921–1935)

Author

Listed:
  • Reckendrees, Alfred

Abstract

In the 1920s, the German government secretly supported private business activities across the German-Polish border due to revisionist political aims. Based on these aims, the (in-) famous industrialist Friedrich Flick was able to attract financial support for otherwise uneconomical activities in Upper Silesia to which the government provided “insurance.” Not even considering the possibility of moral hazard and holdup, the German government was captured in its secret cooperation with Flick, who could effectively exploit this “insurance.” Until 1931, Flick was able to gain high subsidies and to use them efficiently building up an industrial empire that comprehended the German, Polish, and Austrian iron and steel industry. The interplay of German foreign policy and private business activities in the inter-war years is analyzed as an agency problem in a specific “public-private partnership” that allowed for blackmailing the Government.

Suggested Citation

  • Reckendrees, Alfred, 2013. "Business as a Means of Foreign Policy or Politics as a Means of Production? The German Government and the Creation of Friedrich Flick’s Upper Silesian Industrial Empire (1921–1935)," Enterprise & Society, Cambridge University Press, vol. 14(1), pages 99-143, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:entsoc:v:14:y:2013:i:01:p:99-143_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1467222700001154/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Alfred Reckendrees, 2015. "Weimar Germany: The first open access order that failed?," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 26(1), pages 38-60, March.
    2. Bucheli, Marcelo & DeBerge, Thomas, 2024. "Multinational enterprises’ nonmarket strategies: Insights from History," International Business Review, Elsevier, vol. 33(2).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:entsoc:v:14:y:2013:i:01:p:99-143_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/eso .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.