Converging or Competing Interests? 1945–47

Abstract

Before 1939 Britain’s relations with the Scandinavian countries had rested ‘on a combination of economic strength, naval power and political goodwill’. Britain had been accustomed to the dual role as ‘clientin- chief and banker’, thereby considering the region primarily in economic terms. The level of Scandinavia’s economic dependence on Britain had led Ashton Gwatkin, an economic specialist in the Foreign Office (FO) to go as far as to describe Scandinavia ‘as a kind of unacknowledged economic empire of which London is the metropolis’. The only power capable of challenging Britain’s economic primacy in Scandinavia had been Germany.