The more secure and enduring peace appears to be, the more difficult it becomes to imagine a better world.Footnote ¹ When freedom and stability have been won, the desire to escape reality inevitably wanes. This mental metamorphosis reflects the complex working of the human capacity for both oblivion and memory.Footnote ² Fairly soon after the experience of horror and despair – fairly soon after the war, in other words – collective feelings start to change below the surface of politics and rhetoric. Passionate programmes of action, conceived in the darkest moments of threat and violence, begin to fade. This goes hand in hand with the inevitable clouding over of the true history of war and terror. The urge to imagine a better world is extinguished and morphs into more easy-going and less radical ways of thinking. The 1940s, the strangest decade encapsulating both war and peace, was no exception.

The discarding of overly ambitious visions of a new and better world began as early as 1943, when the first signs appeared that a victory over Nazi Germany was within reach. When the time was ripe to transform grand designs and ideas into actual policies, directly after the Second World War, the ‘Atlantic imagination’ of a ‘better world’,Footnote ³ on which wartime hopes in the West had thrived, was already losing much of its power. After all, it is often when futures are least likely to be realised that ‘imagining a different world is an act of defiance, a rejection of the likely in the search for the necessary’.Footnote ⁴ Just as in 1919, the activist imaginative spirit, which thrived on ‘the wartime revulsion’ and led to political activism for a more peaceful and just international system, ‘soon eased itself back into the comforts of the years of peace’.Footnote ⁵ After the end of the Second World War, Europe’s statesmen rather swiftly regained their habitual fixation on the national interest and ‘economic nationalism’.Footnote ⁶ This tendency was further induced by the experience of ‘the inadequate settlement’ after the First World War and the depression and war that followed, which ‘had eroded the basis of international cooperation’. In other words, a recurrence of the inter-war years was not at all unthinkable in 1945.Footnote ⁷

This tendency of history to repeat itself did, however, have its counterforces. Indeed, the disruptive decade of the 1940s also stands out as a uniquely successful incubator period of new thinking, most notably concerning new world orders. From this perspective, the 1940s was a period in which politicians, intellectuals, men of business, and policymakers alike ‘sought to imagine the shape of the world to come’.Footnote ⁸ They did this within the practical, political, and moral framework of what became an unparalleled pan-Western exercise in planning aimed not merely at imagining a better world but actually creating it. The countless ideas and policies generated in this process of ‘imagination in action’ were increasingly channelled into institutions of the Western world as the Cold War started to unfold. Some of the ideas generated in this pan-Western exercise brought forth highly successful and durable policies of international cooperation that are still the principal foundations of today’s multilateral order.

The challenge these planners faced was to transform American ideas – on the promotion of liberal-capitalist international trade, for example – ‘into more tangible form’ through practical policies based on planning.Footnote ⁹ Initially, this conversion of American ideas into the practices of international cooperation, and the organisation of something like ‘planned capitalism’,Footnote ¹⁰ was achieved mainly in the fields of monetary policy, trade, and financial-economic affairs. The positive image of the planners’ work was soon boosted by a unique success story of growth, welfare, and general progress during the first two post-war decades in Western Europe, when ‘the material standard of living for most people improved uninterruptedly and often very rapidly’. Alan Milward even goes so far as to say that ‘nothing in the history of western Europe resembles its experience between 1945 and 1968’.Footnote ¹¹ This unique experience, which essentially centres around a transatlantic story of state intervention, sets apart the post-war period after 1945, especially its first three decades, the so-called trente glorieuses.Footnote ¹²

The societies on the continent’s Western rim together succeeded in blending and reconciling a myriad of highly rational and idealistic schemes for post-war national and international society. And in doing so, they were also able to translate this mix of ideas and ideals into feasible and coherent policies that buttressed the highly successful and stable welfare states of Western Europe. These international policies were conceived in numerous European, mainly transatlantic, networks through which the European diaspora remained involved in building the post-war future of the old continent. In concert, these often-overlapping networks, knitted together in a trans-Western Republic of Policy Letters (as a contemporary version of the Respublica literaria that flourished in the age of Enlightenment in Europe and the Americas). This ‘European Republic of Planning’ built a time and a space within which Europe managed to pull off something extraordinary.

The fact that this extraordinary historical experience occurred in parallel with the very visible work of the planners strongly suggested a causal relation between the two phenomena. It was as if the institutional products of planning had their own history, and as such, to certain extent, could single out post-war Western Europe from its own history. This simultaneity was intoxicating.

On a deeper, more metaphysical level, it may even have felt as if by this new simultaneity the old simultaneity of dogmatic ideology and apolitical rationalism, the simultaneity of horror and glory, the simultaneity of the vicissitudes of Romanticism and Enlightenment,Footnote ¹³ these unfathomable contradictions in European history had been overcome at last. It might have felt as if this very European ‘Skandal der Gleichzeitigkeit’, ‘scandal of simultaneity’, in the words of the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger,Footnote ¹⁴ which had set the century up to then in such wild and sinister shades, was finally countered. Indeed, it might have felt as if the confusion of the inter-war years was exchanged for the lucidness of planning, introducing a long overdue harmonisation of the endemic contradictions in European history through a new simultaneity (that of planning and prosperity), restoring hope and confidence on the continent. Given the profound uniqueness of this period in Western Europe, historiographers rank its planners as miracle makers, even in retrospect.Footnote ¹⁵

Against the mise en scène of the history of the second half of the twentieth century, the legacy of these leading planners acquired a mythical quality. As the post-war decades progressed, much of the miracle makers’ planning culminated in a series of political victories of freedom and democracy over totalitarianism and dictatorship that prefigured the fall of the Berlin Wall, the implosion of the Soviet Union, and triumph in the Cold War. It is no wonder, then, that the Western world became high on the buzz of the end of history.

According to the British historian Norman Davies, the First World War had marked the beginning of a period of 75 years in which Europe ‘was divided by the longest of its civil wars’.Footnote ¹⁶ This period of darkness only ended in 1990 with the signing of the peace treaty between Germany and the four victorious powers from the Second World War. It was this treaty that put an end to the order of Yalta and Potsdam and finally re-united Germany, laying the foundations for the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Europe. It was only then that Europe’s ‘longest civil war’ came to an end. The order of pan-European peace that replaced it explicitly built on the multilateral order of the post-war Western world and its ideals and policies of international cooperation and human rights, and vividly exists, albeit struggling, until this day–proving that there was no end to this history at all. This book is devoted to the effort to re-discover this history of the origins and beginnings of the present-day Europe of European integration. The re-discovery begins with entering the virtual European Republic of Planning that was so real and central in that pre-history of the European Union (EU) of today.

The progress made in the second half of the twentieth century in Western Europe – in particular the unprecedented stability and prosperity in the region – was neither evident in 1945 nor an automatic consequence of the horrors of the Second World War. While the Western Europe that was to emerge in the first post-war decades started to take shape in the mid-1940s, this ‘new Europe’ was not created during or after the Second World War. Instead, crucial pieces among the wreckage of the first decades of the twentieth century formed its central building blocks.Footnote ¹⁷

The post-war developments in Western Europe were strongly linked to the inter-war years, when processes of ‘de-globalisation’, ‘nationalisation’, and a transnational ‘turn to private corporatism’ shook up the societal and political order,Footnote ¹⁸ while possibilities for ‘one-worldism’ and lofty pacifism were being explored by ‘a new elite of policy experts’ inspired by American examples and their potential for global scale-up, most notably President Roosevelt’s New Deal.Footnote ¹⁹ The ordinary people of inter-war Europe, however, were not really interested in the grandiose blueprints of the elites. Matters of individual security, food, housing, and clothing simply took precedence.Footnote ²⁰ These were the evident priorities in the lives of many Europeans. This situation made European societies fundamentally insecure and uncertain and desperate for stability and security, a persistent collective feeling that had kicked in after the beginning of the Great War.

The uncertainty that accompanied the above-mentioned parallel developments – the increasingly nationalist focus of governments in parallel with transnational talk of a world government – did not arise in a historical vacuum. According to the Romanian–British policy expert and scholar David Mitrany – the father of functionalism and champion of post-war functionalist planning – it was during the nineteenth century that two political trends emerged that ‘moved on two and opposite lines’. The first line enhanced ‘the enfranchisement of the individual, the person becoming a citizen’ (anchored in the Renaissance, humanism, and anti-totalitarianism). The second line led to ‘the enfranchisement of national groups through states of their own’ – a process that would radically intensify during the first five decades of the twentieth century, when Europe’s nation-states became more ethnically homogeneous, often as a result of very violent politics.Footnote ²¹

Mitrany stressed that it was the task of post-war Europe ‘to reconcile these two trends’.Footnote ²² Indeed, this may have been the key challenge of the post-war era in Western Europe, given that the uncertainty mentioned above persisted into the first post-war years. It confronted the planners of the post-war West with the dilemma endemic to the multilateral management of interdependence. The ‘two trends’ identified by Mitrany continued unabated in a geopolitical and geocultural context marked by unremitting ambiguity. On the one hand, this context was characterised by nation-states that were increasingly becoming culturally homogeneous. On the other hand, it was coloured by the phenomenon of economic, political, and cultural ‘Americanisation’, especially in the Western Europe of Paris and Berlin.Footnote ²³ At the same time, segments of Western European societies increasingly became spellbound by the United States (US) and its films, its music, its automobiles, its stimulation of the senses, its money.Footnote ²⁴ This attraction was also increasingly exploited by American elites intent on ‘export[ing] the “American Dream” to the world’.Footnote ²⁵

This cultural-commercial trend was mirrored in new political visions. The backdrop of Americanisation allowed the idea of an ‘Atlantic Community’ to win relevance in Western Europe. This imagined Atlantic Community was conceived of as a vast transnational region in which ‘the rimlands of the Atlantic Ocean [were] sites of exchange’. This transatlantic region – both a geographical region and an intangible region encompassing shared values, ideas, etc. – even had the potential to enable the cultures of the West to transcend their national boundaries by interacting in this geographical and spiritual sphere.Footnote ²⁶

It was the outbreak of the war against Hitler’s Germany that allowed this idea to truly catch the mood of the time, as the concept of the Atlantic Community could be easily linked to Allied cooperation, in particular to the politics and policies that sprang from the strongly intensified Anglo-American partnership but also to the drafting of plans for post-war Europe by the European exile governments in wartime London.Footnote ²⁷ Nonetheless, the translation of this ‘easy link’ into a concrete and coherent grand design ultimately failed. As a result, the visionary concept of an Atlantic Community was put on the back burner and turned into a transatlantic politico-economic incubator space facilitating the international cooperation of open societies and promoting ‘liberalism as a pan-Western exercise’ but remaining ‘unguided by overall strategy’.Footnote ²⁸

Writing this history often entails describing how exigencies and utter chaos upstaged elaborately thought-out decision-making; unveiling the continuities between the post-war Western European order and its dark, pre-1945 history; shedding light on the endemic doubts and moral struggles lingering in the background of the political scenery; finding the blueprints and grand designs that never came to fruition, the plans that failed or that were merely erected as halfway houses, or the initiatives set in motion by largely unforeseen developments; and, last but not least, reconstructing the twists and turns that are often obscured by the Anglo-Saxon, pro-European glitter and glory added ex post facto that have coloured the scenery of the post-war West.

It is a historian’s duty to try to see beyond these blinding lights on that well-known, star-spangled historiographic main stage of the post-war West. These two elements of the scenery – the illuminated and the obscure – are two sides of the same history of European integration. Seen from this perspective, that history is not the history of a ‘surprising outcome of the Second World War’,Footnote ²⁹ but rather a more nuanced story that starts long before the Second World War.

This history is also the story of a nearly perfect match between the ‘Old World’ of Europe and the ‘New World’ as represented by the United States, a match that was based on the model of supply (from the US) and demand (from Europe). The United States supplied Europe with practical policies during the Second World War, geopolitical clout both during and after the war, and material needs in the immediate post-war years. More importantly, the Americans also fulfilled a deep craving among Europeans for fresh hope through their unabashed self-confidence based on their country’s economic abundance and geopolitical and military power. The United States portrayed itself as a beacon of hope for the world, a ‘City upon a Hill’ (this expression was originally cited by John Winthrop on 21 March 1630 at Holyrood Church in a speech to the first group of Massachusetts Bay colonists who embarked on the ship Arbella for Boston; on 9 January 1961, President-Elect John F. Kennedy quoted the expression during a speech).

The first glimmers of this hope were planted in Europe in the early 1940s, during the first years of the Second World War. By the time of the Allied campaign to liberate Italy in the autumn of 1943, many in Western Europe were utterly unable to go on without the hope supplied by the living example of optimism in the form of the United States.

Nonetheless, the false hope aroused in Europe by Woodrow Wilson during the First World War (see chapter 1) resurfaced in the Second World War in another form. By then, the rather desperate hope for and belief in the goodness of the Americans – deliberately reinforced by the Americans themselves – were so strong among Europeans that the Americans could be viewed as the lifesavers of Europe. These ‘open, vigorous, 2 x 2 = 4 sort of people, who want yes or no for an answer’, in the words of the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin,Footnote ³⁰ had a contagious can-do spirit. This was also the beginning of the phenomenon of the ‘Americanisation’ of the world. America was not only a dominant and victorious power in geopolitics, it also became ‘the suggestive image of a rich and democratic society, and ideal for many to emulate … a force of attraction’.Footnote ³¹ In spite of the repulsion inherent in any attraction, for Europe, the pull overpowered the push time and again, harking back as it did to the Old World’s earlier experiences forging a transatlantic community, most notably the failure to do so after the First World War.

This history, in essence – and like all histories – is a story about ‘a sign of a sign’, to use the wording of the Italian writer Umberto Eco: the common characteristic in the flood of the planner’s blueprints was an omen of hope, reflecting the search for ideas and the collective emotions of the time. In other words, that history has been a history of ideas and emotions that both harks back to earlier times and continues until today.

**

The present study synthesises research conducted as part of the ambitious ‘Blueprints of Hope’ research project funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO),Footnote ³² and is heavily indebted to the work of the larger research team of the ‘Blueprints of Hope’ project. It was a great joy and inspiration to co-direct and co-steer this interdisciplinary project together with Professor Beatrice de Graaf (PI) and Professor Peter-Ben Smit (who was a partner in setting up this interdisciplinary research project from the very beginning, within the framework of the Institutions for Open Society research programme of Utrecht University).

Thanks to our collaboration, we managed to bring together different relevant trends and perspectives in the study of contemporary European history and European integration history, such as: (1) the focus on the ideas and collective emotions, a recent trend in the historiography of international relations, as for example expressed in the work of De Graaf, concerning the mapping of collective security cultures in Europe and beyond, in the nineteenth century,Footnote ³³ (2) the role of ecclesiastical actors, especially within the ecumenical movement, in the history of European integration, as contributed to the project by Smit, and (3) the state of the art research in contemporary European history and European integration history (to which all three of us contributed from our respective specialisms and disciplines).Footnote ³⁴

In our supervisory tasks, the three of us were greatly helped and assisted by the Post-Doc of the team, Dr Trineke Palm, who played an essential role in much of the day-to-day coordination within the team, and was crucial in fleshing out concepts, methods, etc., for the project in general. Palm’s own pioneering research work and political science approach – on the role of emotions in the history of European integration (as an ‘affective glue’)Footnote ³⁵ – found its way into this book.

The wide-ranging and in-depth international research done by Jorrit Steehouder and Clemens van den Berg during their Ph.D. projects, which were at the core of the larger ‘Blueprints research project’, deserves special mention here. Their work in the international archives (from a transnational perspective) – among others in the archives of the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) and many of its members (Steehouder), relevant European private paper collections, such as those in the archives of the Fondation Jean Monnet in Lausanne (Steehouder), the Historical Archives of the EU in Florence (Steehouder), relevant British and American archives and private paper collections (Steehouder and Van den Berg), as well as in the archives of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Geneva (Van den Berg) – not only unearthed a wealth of new primary sources, but also enabled them to make truly new combinations of archival sources and draw new insights from these sources. The results of their archival work are reflected in two excellent Ph.D. theses.Footnote ³⁶ The results of the research of Van den Berg and Steehouder are reflected in this book, most notably in sections 2.2, 3.4, and 6.4 (Van den Berg), and sections 5.4 and 7.1 (Steehouder).