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FROM SOCIALIZATION TO CO-DETERMINATION: THE US, BRITAIN, GERMANY, AND PUBLIC OWNERSHIP IN THE RUHR, 1945–1951

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2002

JAMES C. VAN HOOK
JAMES C. VAN HOOK
Affiliation:
United States Department of State
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Abstract

The failure of the socialization of heavy industry in West Germany following the Second World War has often been ascribed to American reluctance to allow meaningful social reform in the face of an intensifying Cold War. But a closer look at the socialization issue during the latter half of the 1940s demonstrates the enormous complexity of transforming Germany's heavy industry. First, the British, who originally advocated socialization, i.e. the public ownership of heavy industry, had done so on security grounds. But when trying to reach out to ‘democratic’ Germans, such as social democrats and left wing members of the Christian democratic union, the British realized the difficulty of cultivating a meaningful consensus within western Germany concerning the fate of heavy industry. In the end, they therefore acceded to American arguments that socialization of such important industries should wait until the creation of a central German government. But once a central German government existed from 1949, socialization did not take place. The chief reason for this was that West German social democrats had already concluded in 1947 that American ‘domination’ of western Germany meant the stifling of social reform. They therefore ceded leadership over German affairs to a Christian democratic union decidedly more favourable to free enterprise. Instead, the social democrats and their trade union allies concentrated their efforts at social reform in the introduction and institutionalization of management–labour co-determination.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , March 2002 , pp. 153 - 178
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

In this article, ‘socialization’ means ‘nationalization’. I have elected to use this term, though it may at first cause some confusion, for two reasons. First, both the Americans and the British used the term socialization when they discussed the transfer of important industries in occupied Germany to public ownership. They used the term because the usual word, nationalization, did not make much sense when there existed no national government in Germany. But they also simply used the term socialization because the Germans did. The appropriate German term is Sozialisierung. Sozialisierung can mean both the specific process whereby a firm is taken into public ownership but can also entail the vague sense of ‘socialization’ of an institution, be it industrial relations or education, that is closer to the current English language use of the term. Thus, the German word Sozialisierung is both vague and specific, depending on the communicative intentions of the speaker.The views expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of the Department of State.