Subproject C06 — Foreign trade securitisation.
Economic security beyond the nation state
third funding stage (2022-2025)
The project aims to historicise economic security using the example of German companies in the course of European integration and decolonisation after the Second World War. While the first two stages of the SFB used export credit insurance to demonstrate the interplay between the nation state and the economy in coping with foreign economic uncertainty, the current project aims to open up a new perspective on the significance of security for entrepreneurial action and to further develop a synthesis of business history and security history.
We assume that economic actors (companies) initially based their expectations on a security heuristic that was still strongly influenced by the experiences of the two world wars and the economic shocks of the interwar period. From the 1950s until the end of the Cold War, economic internationalisation took hold, the consequences of which were perceived to include increasing competition and opportunities for opening up the world market. Additionally a new quality of insecurity was associated with these global developments, including a threat to entrepreneurial freedom of decision and autonomy of action (c. 1950 to 1990).
