• DOI:10.1111/j.1467-9248.1981.tb00497.x
• Corpus ID: 143554515

The Politics of Economic Decline

@article{Dahrendorf1981ThePO,
  title={The Politics of Economic Decline},
  author={Ralf. Dahrendorf},
  journal={Political Studies},
  year={1981},
  volume={29},
  pages={284 - 291}
}

• R. Dahrendorf
• Published 1 June 1981
• History, Economics
• Political Studies

S O M E day soon, Britain will be able to mark, though hardly celebrate, the remarkable jubilee of a century of economic decline. Keith Middlemas describes how as early as the 1890s, ‘awareness of Britain’s relative decline in export markets and technological innovation led the majority of employers and managers to look enviously at the process of cartel formation and amalgamation in the United States and in Germany’.’ Such observations have been made through the decades. There is thus nothing new in James Ah’s conclusion that, in the 1960s, ‘not only d o the British people see themselves as falling behind other countries, but they apparently (and perhaps accurately) single out the economy as the area in which the decline is taking place’.’ However, the ‘perhaps’ in Alt’s suggestion in brackets is surely unduly cautious. Middlemas may be right that ‘Britain’s century-long relative decline has encouraged a belief in her concomitant political d e ~ a d e n c e , ’ ~ but in fact the important point to make in a comparative perspective is that such decadence has not happened, a t least not for a long time, so that economic decline remained an insulated process. At first sight, the most interesting political concomitant of a century of economic decline is the unending return of the same. Even in 1980, there are those who discover the unfortunate fact that there are politically ‘two Englands’, the desirability, or not, of a ‘concordat’ or ‘contract’, indeed the need for a ‘centre party’ as if all these ideas were new-yet every one of them and many others were discussed in the 1920s and 1930s as in the 1950s. Economic decline seems to have remained unaffected by such ideas. More than that, in the years since 191 1 (with which Middlemas is concerned), Britain has had Liberal, Conservative and Labour governments, coalition and adversary governments, consensual and radical governments, and yet the process of economic decline seems to have continued unabated. There is a story here not only about the cause of economic decline, but also about the relevance of governments.