4 - The Great Escape

Summary

Chapter 4 reconstruct how the zeitgeist, the political and economic practices, and the geopolitical and societal circumstances of the war times guided Western Europe to a path of deeper international and regional cooperation focused on free trade and valuta convertibility. During exile and occupation, European governments fleshed out plans and schemes for post-war cooperation, primordially in the domains of socio-economic and the financial-economic planning, in greater (practical) detail. Initially, however, the step from grand designs and lofty models for a post-war Western order that could ‘win the peace’ to the practices of policies of cooperation was taken via the institutional engineering in the Atlantic world, most prominently through the ‘system’ envisioned in Bretton Woods. However, the original ideas behind Bretton Woods soon proved a bridge too far in practice, which complicated global ambitions as well as the proper build-up of Atlantic-wide institutions—and pushed Western Europe to think and act ‘beyond Americanisation’.