Constructing Europe: Blueprints for a New Monetary Order, 1919-1950

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to explain how Europe’s past of war and depression gave rise to hopeful new visions of future European cooperation. How exactly, by which actors, what means of negotiations, new norms, rules and practical plans did these shared experiences translate in new institutions like, for example, the European Payments Union? To answer this question central attention must be devoted to the ‘construction sites’ where European policymakers huddled together, such as wartime London and post-war Paris. Eventually it was in Paris, under the Marshall Plan, that Europeans found new ways to work together. In fact, the Marshall Plan served as a crucial link between the interwar, war, and post-war periods by channelling existing and new ideas for European monetary integration, their advocates, emotional driving forces, and new post-war political priorities into a pioneering institutional structure of European economic cooperation: the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC).