The Conservation of a Cartel Paradise

Between 1890 and the start of World War II the United States developed a strong federal antitrust legislation with the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act. In Europe on the other hand cartels thrived and were even stimulated by national governments. World trade was dominated by Europe with a share of 70%, of this share a minimum of 40% was controlled by international cartels. Leading firms in those cartels were European, mostly German. Those cartels harmed US interests and impeded the US war effort in anticipation of World War II. After the war, the US used their gained influence to try spreading their view on antitrust to the rest of the World via the Havana Charter and the European Recovery Program (more commonly known as the Marshall Plan). The main question of this thesis is to what extend the US influenced antitrust legislation in the Netherlands between 1948 and 1958, the period from the start of the European Recovery Program and the implementation of the Dutch Economic Competition Act. The research is based on American archival sources from the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg about the Dutch ECA mission and the archives of the Dutch Economics- and Foreign Department available in at the Dutch National archives. This thesis shows that the American attempt to influence antitrust policy in the Netherlands was not a success at all. The reasons for this were twofold. First, although the implementation of a form of antitrust legislation by the Netherlands was a condition of the ERP, it never had any real priority for American officials. The emphasis of US policy in the Netherlands was on the recovery of Dutch economy after the war, increasing its economic efficiency and productivity, and building up a military apparatus. Second, the government of the Netherlands rejected the American vision on antitrust, believing that the benefits of cartels: distribution of unused production capacity among participating companies; stabilisation of prices on a reasonable level; levelling off cyclical fluctuations; distribution of technology and patents among participants; and not hindering innovation and efficiency were significantly greater than the disadvantages. With the creation of the Economic Competition Act in 1958 it looked like the Netherlands did fulfill the conditions of the ERP and the Havana Charter, but in fact the Netherlands remained a cartel paradise. This cartel paradise was conserved well into the 1990s, when the formation of the European Union began and antitrust was back on the agenda.