Tuesday, June 25, 2013
2.21 (Binnengasthuis)
This paper investigates how the leadership positions in economy and administration changed in the Easternmost and Westernmost borderlands that the two major Central Powers lost after World War I. I will show how the dismantlement of a broadly conceived pre-1918 Central Europe (or Mitteleuropa) under the aegis of German capital affected businesses, banks and ordinary people in Alsace-Lorraine and Transylvania. I aim to illustrate how bankers and businessmen from former Entente states strove to turn territorial changes into their own financial advantage in both regions after World War I, and what specific difficulties this task encountered. Instead of assuming that ethnic differences (such as French-German, Romanian-Hungarian) translated automatically into business conflicts, I hope to highlight how business interests called for partnerships between various ethnic groups. Given that the political elite in Greater Romania looked at France as an example, I will point to cross-regional transfers of political, social and economic practices between the two regions.
