ABSTRACT
From the first years of the war the English-speaking powers considered planning for a new postwar world economy. The purpose was twofold. First, Europe, which everyone guessed would be destroyed by a lengthy struggle without quarter, would have to be rebuilt. The second point was to avoid the prewar situation, the Great Depression, an unacceptable economic disaster which had been one of the main causes for the conflict. As long as the war lasted, there would be no concrete information concerning the state of the world and, specifically, the state of Europe, the battlefield; both goals, therefore, were pursued simultaneously in trying to reconstruct the international economy. The idea was to come up with a plan which would allow international trade to reach levels well above those of the previous decade. Since it was impossible to return either to the 1939 situation or to that of
1913, the objective required a considerable imaginative and creative economic effort. We have just indicated why revisiting 1939 was out of the question and attempts in the 1920s to go back to the 1913 circumstances had produced the economic cataclysm of the 1930s. New economic principles and procedures had to be found. The best minds in London and Washington concentrated on finding a system of international payments which would replace the gold standard and avoid monetary chaos and an international trade system which would not mean a return to protectionism and to the commercial “beggar my neighbor” mentality of the 1930s. The solution was to conceive of mechanisms and institutions of international cooperation which would allow reconstruction and eliminate obstacles to trade.
