Germany’s Drang nach Südosten and the Marketing of Southeastern European Agricultural Products in the Interwar Period.

Abstract

The strengthening of economic and cultural ties between Germany and a number of southeastern European countries in the interwar period has been referred to as Drang nach Südosten (thrust towards the southeast). Driven by a German aim to boost its international standing after its defeat in World War I, and shaped by the constraints of the Great Depression (falling demand, clearing agreements, foreign exchange controls...), the Drang nach Südosten resulted in increased economic and diplomatic influence over the region. However, as Gross has shown in Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890–1945 (2015), this was far from a unidirectional process of power projection. Actors from southeastern Europe, both state and private, actively shaped these interactions and pursued their own goals. The purpose of this paper is to describe, and account for, the efforts that German, Greek, Bulgarian and Turkish actors made for the promotion of southeastern European agricultural products in Germany in the interwar period. More concretely, the paper focuses on the participation of Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey in the Leipzig Fair, and a number of initiatives undertaken for the marketing of one of the region’s main exports to Germany: Oriental-type tobacco. Such initiatives included the establishment of cooperative companies and industrial facilities, as well as new forms of state intervention in the market. The picture that emerges from this analysis is one of path dependence (different countries took different approaches to the same problem), and of an understanding of the legitimate scope of foreign economic policy that was in flux, at a time of great economic and social upheaval in southeastern Europe.