journal of european integration history revue d'histoire de l ...

104
Juhana Aunesluoma
different international organisations was found difficult. The following article discusses
the potential and the ramifications of Anglo-Scandinavian co-operation in
the post-Second World War international economy and in the early years of European
integration, with particular attention to British policy-making.
Reconstruction and Restoration: Attempts to Re-establish Britain's
Economic Positions in Scandinavia after 1945
British economic thinking towards Scandinavia after the Second World War was
characterised by the persistence of traditional views, which posited Scandinavia
apart from the rest of Western Europe. Scandinavia was in many ways a special
case, culturally and politically different from the continent, and what was most
important, an enclave – in European standards – of unexceptionally high economic
interdependence with Britain.
Although neither the continental European economies nor Scandinavia could challenge
the primacy of the Dominions, the Commonwealth and the Sterling area in Britain's
overseas trade in the 1940s and 1950s, the three Scandinavian countries, Norway,
Denmark and Sweden, figured prominently in the economic geography of Europe as it
was interpreted at the time in London. In 1946-53, the three Scandinavian countries had
an average share of 7.4 per cent of Britain's overseas trade, while the area that would
later become the EEC amounted to no more than 11.1 per cent. 2
The close relationship between the Scandinavian economies with Britain and
the network of bilateral trade agreements and financial arrangements that were established
between the Sterling bloc and Scandinavia in the 1930s, made its position
in British eyes to resemble more that of the Commonwealth than of Europe. Scandinavia
could be seen in the vague terms of the “informal empire”, as was described
by Ashton Gwatkin of the Foreign Office when he interpreted it before the
war to have formed “a kind of unacknowledged economic empire of which London
is the metropolis”. 3 Intense competition with Adolf Hitler's economically expansive
Germany in the 1930s merely heightened long-held views that Britain's concerns
in the region were primarily economic, and that the essence of foreign policy,
when it came to Scandinavia, was about trade, finance and the maintenance of economic
spheres of influence. 4
2. Bulletins Statistiques de l'OECE, Commerce Exterieur, Série I, 1928, 1937-1953, Paris, 1954,
pp.62-67.
3. Quoted in P. LUDLOW, Britain and Northern Europe, 1940-1945, in: Scandinavian Journal of
History (SJH), 4/2(1979), pp.123-62. Ashton Gwatkin was an economic specialist in the Foreign
Office (FO).
4. A comprehensive account of economic and strategic competition between Britain and Germany in
Scandinavia before 1940 is found in P. SALMON, Scandinavia and the Great Powers 1890-1940,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997.