On 14 January, Jorrit Steehouder external linkdefends his thesis titled: Constructing Europe. Blueprints for a New Monetary Order, 1919-1950.

Postwar Cooperation

Postwar Europe was forged on the anvil of European exile governments in London, where fear, hope, trauma and frustration fueled the new architecture of Europe. To understand these emotionally charged roots of postwar European cooperation, we must look beyond the European Union and its institutional precursors.

This dissertation looks back to the period before 1950 and analyzes how Europe’s past of war and depression translated into hopeful visions for new European cooperation. How exactly, through which negotiations, new norms, rules and practical plans did these shared experiences translate into new institutions? Jorrit Steehouder charts the ideas and actors behind the first attempts at European monetary integration and sheds new light on the years of exile in London.

Marshallplan

During World War II, a “Europe in miniature” emerged in London, where, as a result of the collective effort of the exile governments, a fundamentally new idea of security emerged. Socio-economic securities were now viewed within a framework of regional European cooperation. To prevent war, it was thought, Europe had to cooperate economically.

After the war, the Marshall Plan formed the link between the interwar, World War II, and postwar periods by molding existing and new ideas for European monetary integration, their advocates, and emotional drivers into a new institutional structure of European economic cooperation: the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEES). Backed by U.S. money, European countries eventually created the European Payments Union (EPU) and ended a long period of unstable exchange rates and bilateral clearing of money flows among the major Western European countries.

Primary findings

By placing European cooperation in a longer perspective, this dissertation explicitly shows how emotions also played a role in the creation of what we now know as the European Union. The emotionally charged memory of the socio-economic chaos in the 1930s was collective, and was also brought up in the most technocratic discussions about new forms of monetary European cooperation. Thus, viewed in this way, these “emotions” formed an important building block of postwar Europe.