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dramatically accelerated military spending. In April 1936 Poland, the last
member of the gold bloc in Eastern Europe, initiated large-scale rearmament.
To ensure that this did not provoke a currency crisis Warsaw imposed
exchange controls, further exposing France
’s isolation.
In 1936 the turn toward a broad-based Popular Front strategy initiated by
the Comintern in Moscow changed the political complexion of Europe. In
Sweden and Spain the possibility came into view of progressive coalitions
with communist support taking power. In France, in May 1936 Léon Blum
’s
alliance of left parties won of
fice, campaigning on an economic programme
of work-creation and social insurance policies modelled on the American
New Deal.
9
From the summer of 1936 amidst a dramatic wave of strikes, the
Blum government would begin implementing a thoroughgoing programme
of domestic reform, including most notably paid vacations and the eight-hour
week. This expansive economic policy would put huge pressure on France
’s
precarious gold peg. As the socialists took of
fice, French conservatives feared
that Blum might try to accommodate the need for both defence and social
policy spending by adopting his own version of Schachtianism, a planned
economy based on exchange controls. It was this threat that
finally broke the
deadlock in French policy and opened the door to the obvious alternative,
which was a devaluation of the franc. To devalue the franc in an aggressive
beggar-thy-neighbour fashion as FDR had done the dollar in 1933 might
maximize France
’s competitive advantage but it risked a speculative crisis
and by alienating Britain and the USA it would only worsen France
’s security
situation. Instead, with the Spanish Civil War raging in the background,
Blum initiated a coordinated devaluation in cooperation with Britain and the
USA in an informal arrangement known as the Tripartite Agreement.
10
This
agreement was more a set of declarations of support for currency stability
and of democratic solidarity than any kind of formal partnership, but it
represented a milestone in international economic cooperation. It was the
first international economic agreement negotiated by Treasury officials and
not private central bankers, pre
figuring post-war financial diplomacy.
11
The impact of the French devaluation was to further increase competitive
pressure on the rest of the European economies. Italy
’s waning reserves had
9
Philip Nord, France
’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton University
Press, 2012).
10
Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression,
1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1986), pp. 255
–61.
11
Patricia Clavin, The Failure of Economic Diplomacy: Britain, Germany, France and the
United States,
1931–36 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 189.
a d a m t o o z e a n d j a m e s r . m a r t i n
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forced Mussolini to introduce exchange controls in 1934. And with the Italian
economy stretched hard by the expenses of his African campaigns he decided
to relieve pressure on the lira by nationalizing the Italian central bank and
carrying out a de facto 40 per cent devaluation in October 1936. Increasingly,
the regime resorted to both differentiated exchange rates and arti
ficially
controlled prices to contain the pressures within its domestic economy and
manage the balance of payments. Tourists were offered super-attractive
exchange rates. Exporters were incentivized through premia paid in lira.
Italian consumers of food and raw materials, for their part, found themselves
paying one-third more than world market prices. Meanwhile, new invest-
ment was channelled into autarchy and armaments-related projects by IRI
and IMI, the two agencies formed at the height of the crisis in 1931 to bail out
the ailing Italian banking system.
The crucial question in 1936 was which path Germany would choose at
this turning point in the world recovery. As the strategic debate within the
regime intensi
fied, Reichsbank President Schacht led a cluster of interests
calling for Germany
’s re-entry into a multilateral system of trade. This path
had signi
ficant support among the German business elite, who chafed at the
onerous controls on currency and exchange. At the Reichsbank there was
perpetual anxiety about the low level of German currency reserves that were
rarely enough to cover more than a few months of essential imports. In
August 1936, Schacht travelled to Paris in what appears to have been an
attempt to negotiate the devaluation of the Reichsmark in coordination with
the emerging Tripartite Agreement.
12
Perhaps Germany
’s worsening finan-
cial situation would offer an opportunity for a European settlement, in which
financial and colonial concessions could be bartered against a freeze in
German armaments.
13
But this was to misjudge Hitler
’s intentions. Faced
with a choice between Schacht
’s rebalancing proposal and the calls from
Goering and the army to accelerate spending, Hitler decided de
finitively in
favour of the latter. In his
‘Four-Year Plan’ memorandum, Hitler declared
that Germany must be ready for war within four years. Goering was placed
in charge of a central of
fice charged with ensuring self-sufficiency by means
of investment in the synthetic production of rubber, iron ore, petrol, textiles
and industrial fats.
14
12
Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
(London: Allen Lane, 2006), p. 223.
13
Zara Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark: European International History,
1933–1939 (Oxford
University Press, 2011), pp. 258
–9.
14
Tooze, Wages of Destruction, pp. 203
–24.
The economics of the war with Nazi Germany
35