America’s enormous competitive advantage in industrial technology was above all a function of ‘the size of’ America’s ‘internal market’ and its ‘wealth in purchasing power but also in raw materials’. It was the huge volume of ‘guarantee[d] . . . internal sales’ that enabled the American motor vehicle industry to adopt ‘methods of production that in Europe due to the lack of such internal sales would simply be impossible’.32 Fordism, in other words, required Lebensraum.
