Rückkehr auf den Weltmarkt –: Zwei ungarische Unternehmen in der Weltelektroindustrie nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg

Abstract

Back to the world market – Two Hungarian companies in the electrical industry after the First World War

This paper describes how two Hungarian companies, leaders of the electrical industry in their home market, adjusted their strategies to the fundamental political and economic changes after the First World War. The transnational perspective sharpens attention to these small actors ability / efforts to balance between the transnational flows of capital, knowledge, people and states’ attempts to control them by extending their room to manoeuvre between economic policies in their home and host market, interest conflicts within the structure of multinational conglomerates so as international capital flows motivated by political as well as profit reasons. This study argues that international cartels could, under specific circumstances, offer a solution for the adjustment to the fundamental political and economic changes by extending their widely shrunken home market, especially circumventing economic nationalism, and by giving access to transnational knowledge circulation, too. Means of state industrial development in Hungary had to be adjusted to the new circumstances as well, like supporting the companies’ position for international cartel negotiations.