ABSTRACT
There is no history of the OEEC, only descriptions of its functions and juridical guides to its labyrinthine structures. This may seem entirely understandable. For what can there be to interest a historian in an international organization which annually repeated the same functions and, while on rare occasions it may have done something to influence the decisions of a particular government, for the most part existed only to record and reconcile those decisions and analyse their consequences? Its task for most of its life was merely to adjust to and then chronicle decisions made elsewhere. Yet this was not always so. It was called into being by the United States as the first stage in the political and economic integration of Western Europe, the embryonic hope for a Western European government. How, in spite of the power and influence of the United States, and of the fact that in the first five years of the OEEC’s foundation there was the most rapid move towards economic integration in modern European history, OEEC ended by being no such thing, is a central theme in Europe’s reconstruction.
