This book discusses arguments about international order that took shape in interwar Europe, using the history of economic ideas as a privileged analytical perspective. Many of the disputes examined in the following pages, however, also touched upon another underlying topic: the history of European integration. The book itself is the result of a research project that articulates the history of economic ideas with the history of European integration, as detailed in the preface.1 Directly or indirectly, the European integration process is thus one of the important questions motivating this volume, even if the circumstances prevailing during the interwar period meant we could only capture these longer-term trends by placing them within a broader framework. More concretely, we could say our analysis concerns the conditions of possibility underlying the process that resulted in the progressive integration of a subset of European countries in the post-World War II era.
Critical readings on the historiography of European integration have pointed to the difficulties associated with works, still rather limited in number, which trace the subject back to the interwar years, especially the 1930s. Studies often refer to the period but usually without moving beyond the same basic topics, such as Aristide Briand’s proposals for a “European Union” in the League of Nations or the federalist schemes advocated by Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-Europa Movement. The interwar era, however, offers a much broader palette of relevant issues for scholarly inquiry. Developments in the history of economic ideas and political economy, for instance, can illuminate some of the key issues that sustained arguments about the reconstruction of international order, which in turn point to the more specific subject of regional integration in the European continent.
The 1920s and 1930s saw the gestation of fruitful ideas about international order, broadly considered, and the possibilities of cooperation between European nations, more specifically, without which the institutions of European integration could hardly have emerged in the immediate postwar period. To say this, however, is not to postulate the existence of a direct line of descent connecting certain visionary ideas and future institutional designs. A well-contextualized analysis of the interwar era helps us envision the multiplicity of perspectives in dispute at the time. Moreover, it illustrates how certain intellectual trends can be variously appropriated for different political and ideological purposes, serving both conservative and progressive agendas depending on the prevailing circumstances. Such questions provide the raw material for the chapters collected in this book.
1 International Order and European Integration
An important new trend in the historiography of European integration proposes a change in denomination for the field, to avoid the teleological implications—the notion of a manifest destiny—which the term “integration” carries. As sustained by Laurent Warlouzet (2014, xviii), it would be preferable to describe the field as the history of European cooperation, since “this expression refers to all interactions between European states and non-state actors since 1919, by giving value to both their diversity and intensity.” “It would also make it possible,” Warlouzet continues, “to restore their specificity in an overall comparison between various types of regional cooperation, or with cooperation at a global level.” At least for the interwar period, the idea of cooperation certainly seems much more suited to capture the issues at stake than the alternative concept of integration.
Mark Gilbert (2008, 642) was one of the scholars responsible for motivating a debate on historiographical trends in the field of European integration studies, criticizing the pervasive notion of a progressive history, which imparts to much of the literature a belief that “integration represents a trend from which there will be no receding.”2 In an argument echoing points previously raised by Timothy Garton Ash (1996), Gilbert shows how the European Commission used its institutional weight to influence the dissemination of a history of European integration that tended to reinforce orthodox readings of this process, thus producing a “Whig history in its purest form” (Gilbert 2008, 646; see also Gilbert 2003). In this meta-narrative, the past is understood almost exclusively in terms of direct connections to present events. The current form of European integration—featuring a democratic structure of voluntary membership, the rule of law, and economic liberalism —thus becomes the primary focus of analysis, and the past is filtered through this specific and restricted set of questions.
Gilbert also identifies another problematic historiographical trend, to which political scientists contributed directly: a tendency to excessively theorize the integration process. In the hands of historians, such theoretical frameworks resulted in detailed accounts that reinforced the perception of European integration as a progressive history. Using the “institutionalist” and “structuralist” frameworks identified by Craig Parsons (2002) as an example, Gilbert (2008, 653) shows how “such interpretations are commonplace in historiography and, insofar as they provoke debate and reassessment are useful scholarly tools, but they should not be confused with comprehensive interpretations.”
This serves as an important warning. The very nature of a book like this one, which aims to encourage diversity in methods, approaches, and themes, can create some expectation for a more comprehensive and unifying approach in the opening and closing chapters. This is not our ambition, however. What draws together the different analyses and results contained in each of the chapters is their attention to historical detail and context, moving away from broad theoretical frameworks that could indirectly reinforce the narrative of progressive history. Both in this introduction and in the postscript, our goal is to reinforce precisely the diversity, the various open questions, the inconsistencies found in the objects of analysis themselves and, fundamentally, the multiple paths that link past to present, including the still untrodden routes of many possible futures.
An illustration of how the interwar period offers abundant elements for tracing these untrodden routes is the proliferation of references to various ideas of Europe, declarations of common Europeanness, and multiple schemes for unification or cooperation that differed from the liberal platform that would guide the integration process after 1945. Conflicting ideas of Europe and experiences of Europeanization based on non-liberal or anti-liberal perspectives, which have only recently begun to receive their due attention, are the subject of a collective volume edited by Dieter Gosewinkel, Anti-Liberal Europe: A Neglected Story of Europeanization (2015). In his introduction, Gosewinkel (2015, 6) develops an argument that closely resembles our own concerns with the need for careful treatment of terms within their proper historical context: “any synchronous comparison that assumes the usage of the terms ‘liberal’, ‘anti-liberal’ and ‘Europe’ is semantically equivalent or even largely similar in the various European countries in, say, 1940 must fail due to profound national particularities and diversity of political semantics in intellectual history.”
The very origins of neoliberalism in the interwar period offer a case in point, with direct implications for arguments about international order at the time. Investigating the dawn of the movement in France, François Denord (2001, 24–25; see also 2007) shows how many principles that contrasted with traditional liberalism informed the discussions held during the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, which converged toward a consensus recognizing several aspects in which state intervention was required to ensure the well-functioning of society. More explicitly, Quinn Slobodian opens his recent book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018) with the following clarification: “self-described neo-liberals did not believe in self-regulating markets as autonomous entities. They did not see democracy and capitalism as synonymous. They did not see humans as motivated only by economic rationality. (…) In fact, the foundational neoliberal insight is comparable to that of John Maynard Keynes and Karl Polanyi: the market does not and cannot take care of itself” (Slobodian 2018, 2).
Another point that deserves attention is the remarkable coincidence of narratives about the history of European integration. As Gilbert (2008, 654) insists, “it happens only rarely that major historical developments (…) generate a broad interpretative consensus among historians in the short term.” At stake here are the dramas of a relatively new discipline, whose first major works date back to the 1960s, with strong institutional and political aspects working to reinforce an orthodox story. Nevertheless, as pointed out by Kiran Patel (2019, 328), the last ten years have witnessed the emergence of a significant body of scholarship attentive to these and other pitfalls, which have contributed decisively for the field to reach a new level of maturity. One of the challenges facing this renewal is to escape the trend, identified by Warlouzet (2014), which portrays the transformations in the political dynamics and institutional design of European integration—from the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951, through the European Economic Community (EEC) created by the Treaty of Rome of 1957, all the way to the European Union (EU) in 1992—as an alternating pattern of “crises” and “relaunches.” Such a pattern fits well with the type of progressive history identified by Gilbert, describing a linear progression in which a crisis that threatens to disrupt the integration process elicits instead a set of reactions and institutional responses that revitalize it, thus configuring a step forward in the construction of a communitarian Europe.
These features of historical scholarship tended to produce a deliberate optimism regarding the prospects for continuous development of the European integration process. In 2008, Gilbert felt the need to close his article clarifying that the criticism he directed to this exaggerated confidence was not “Euroscepticism,” but simply “common sense.” The different circumstances that have recently emerged, from the 2008 crisis to the Brexit process, indicate that these rosy interpretations of the EU’s historical significance must be largely requalified. The interwar period offers a privileged space where we can distance ourselves from the biases inherent in progressive histories of European integration, extending our gaze to the broad set of alternative perspectives on international order elaborated at the time. The renewed internationalism that gained momentum in Europe during the 1920s would eventually be wrecked by the economic and social crisis of the early 1930s and the escalation of tensions that finally led to a new war. Even though a different set of arguments about international order also developed during the 1930s, the image we retain from the interwar era evokes a Europe that was unable to conciliate its conflicting interests and construct a lasting peace. Economic crises, political and social tensions, aggressive conservative and nationalist rhetoric, and even authoritarian solutions are some of the defining elements of the 1930s that ...