Political Economy and Political Action

During the past two decades, historians have generated a rapidly growing literature on the major capitalist economies during the Depression decade. The international monetary system, the structure of foreign trade and trade patterns, the reparation issue and its impact upon both national and international fiscal policies, as well as an examination of specific economies such as the American, British, French and German, have all attracted scholarly attention. This surge in interest is also found in the Soviet field which now encompasses a considerable literature on the origins of the five-year plans and their execution during the Depression decade. This essay will examine the theoretical and policy response of the Dutch social democratic movement to the Depression crisis and in so doing will attempt to present a small contribution to a rapidly expanding literature. While the major capitalist economies have received varying degrees of scholarly attention, the same is not true of the Englishlanguage literature bearing on the minor powers in western Europe. The Belgian, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swiss and Swedish experiences during the Depression decade have been largely ignored in the Anglo-American literature. Within the context of this essay, we will be dealing with the programmatic response of the Dutch Social Democratic Workers' Party to the Depression crisis. Apart from a brief contextual discussion, we will not be concerned with the behaviour of the national economy during the 1929-39 crisis, nor will we be analysing government policy response. Throughout the period under discussion, the Social Democratic Workers' Party was an opposition party, entering into a coalition of national union only on 10 August 1939. Throughout the sweep of the Depression era, the Netherlands was governed by a series of clerical coalitions. The actual

Action (physics · Democracy · Depression (economics · Development economics · Economic system · Economics · Great Depression · Keynesian economics · Political action · Political crisis · Political economy · Political science · Politics · European and International Law Studies · Law