ABSTRACT
Nevertheless, the inter-war experience had imposed distinct limitations in practice on the ease with which trade, people and capital could flow across national boundaries. The importance of such phenomena to the economies of even the smaller national units was not greatly different in 1947 from what it had been in 1913 and the mechanisms through which such flows had passed had been largely destroyed. Attempts after the First World War to recreate a multilateral framework for international trade and payments based on a commonly accepted set of practices in international payments and a stable pattern of currency exchange rates along the lines of the gold standard of the decades before 1914 had not been very successful. One reason, perhaps the most powerful one, had been the increasing variation in domestic economic policies between the different countries. New and powerful political interests were not prepared in many cases to accept changes in the external value of the currency as signals to change domestic economic policies. These ideas persisted into the reconstruction period. There was a constant tension in all Western European countries between, on the one hand, the widely accepted idea that in the long run prosperity depended on a return to more open economies with a relatively free multilateral system of trade and payments, and, on the other hand, the determination to reconstruct the economy and society in the way in which the purely national mandate for change demanded. Had these national mandates always led in similar directions the tensions
might more quickly and easily have been resolved, but although there were certain observable common trends the differences remained important.
