Preface

Summary

For many years, the decade following World War II existed in a no-man's land between economics and economic history. The period did not yet qualify as history for a generation of scholars who had lived through it and for whom access to the archives was barred by thirty-year rules and various and sundry bureaucratic obstacles. It was too remote to be of interest to economists whose forays were frustrated by the fact that organizations like the International Monetary Fund only began to generate consistent time series on economic performance in the 1950s.

Recently, however, this began to change. The end of the Cold War heightened interest in the origins of the conflict. The archives opened, due not just to the ineluctable forward march of the thirty-year rule but also because the fall of the Berlin Wall made available new materials. For economists, the Single Market Program and the Maastricht Treaty awakened interest in the post-war origins of European economic integration. The difficulties of economic adjustment in the formerly centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe led to a quest for precedents in Western Europe's successful post-World War II recovery. The 50th anniversary of the Bretton Woods institutions raised the question of whether the time was ripe for their reform and directed attention toward their post-war origins.

The essays collected in this volume speak to these issues. Most of all, however, they seek to clearly depict the contours of Europe's post-war recovery, expose the role of international institutions, and contrast the very different national experiences.