Interlocking Interests and Collaboration with the Enemy: Corporate Behaviour in the Second World War

Abstract

The author presents a study of the functioning of Dutch industry, exemplified by the case of Philips, under German occupation during the Second World War. It is shown that economic collaboration with German economic institutions had its forerunners in peacetime arrangements, especially in patent pools with German enterprises and in cartels. The importance of patent pools as a vehicle for internationalization and their relative immunity from conflicts between nation-states is underlined. When German authors argue that up to 1943 the international economy was functioning'as if there was no war', then this is another way of saying that the international economy was an autonomous supersystem, for which no rules were effective other than the normal rules of economic behaviour under capitalism. But at the national level the exigencies of a totalitarian state do not allow much functional autonomy. Thus, one may conclude that whenever a state is labelled totalitarian, normal economic behaviour is, by definition, 'collaboration'. Therefore, multinational corporations during wartime encounter a special dilemma, in which the preservation of functional autonomy at the international level gives rise to specific forms of collaboration and collaborationism, but the pursuit of a more nationally oriented economic policy may lead to another set of collaborative actions. This case study reveals how a multinational company may try (in this case not very successfully) to resolve this dilemma by internal reorganization.