ABSTRACT
History is ordinarily told as the history of nations, as the working out over time of national identities, goals, and political projects. People spoke, instead, of world orders or of confrontations between rival ideologies and social systems, and national boundaries were less often explicitly debated than had been the case after the First World War. The logic of Cold War and superpower antagonism was the organizing framework for international relations and for the world economy by the late 1940s and early 1950s. By the early 1950s the system of international economic relations arising from the interaction between US plans and other people’s problems bore only a family resemblance to the arrangements supposedly agreed upon at Bretton Woods. The Cold War simultaneously structured the political settlements that defined the borders and the internal arrangements of states. Economic agonies provided merely the background within which the Marshall Plan emerged.
