Marriage of Convenience and Moral Economy of Favors?: Post-WWI Economic Nationalizing and Austro-Hungarian Capital in Romania and Czechoslovakia

• In Event: Habsburg Successor States as Nationalizing States: Between Ideology and Pragmatism

Abstract

Both contemporaneous and more recent narratives of the interwar history of Central and Eastern Europe emphasize economic nationalism and the resulting aggressive approach of the new states towards Austro-Hungarian business interest as a foundational aspect of their state-building. Furthermore, many accounts of banking history flag creating institutions – like the Czech Zivnostenska Banka or the Romanian Marmoros and Blanc – as flagbearers of this economic nationalism. This paper challenges this assumption with analyzing nostrification cases of Hungarian and Austrian affiliated companies and new business endeavors in these successor states. I will argue, that pre-1918 cooperation fostered a relationship between managers and business professionals that transcended utilitarian profit seeking and nationalism too. Building on a relationship of mutual obligations, a kind of moral economy, Viennese and Budapest capitalists could mobilize their pre-WWI relationships in Romania to assist their efforts to save their investment, often despite wartime conflicts. Thus, the transition to an allegedly fragmented system of national economies in which foreign assets were transformed into national property was rather a reconfiguration of control from formal to informal and a new division of profit between long-time partners.

Author

• Gábor Egry, Inst of Political History HAS (Hungary)