Economics for Peace: Contextualizing Neoliberal Federalism, September 1939 to April 1940

This article applies an archive-based contextualization to neoliberal federal theory, positioning it as an influential doctrine within the transnational networks of expertise aiming at shaping a postwar order in the 1930s. While neoliberalism developed throughout the 1930s, it had gained both nuance and focus—and its name—with the Walter Lippmann Colloquium of August 1938. As members of a network of experts, neoliberals were involved in national governments’ administrative and foreign policy circuits as well as in international organizations and committees. The article looks at two iterations during which neoliberals brought their economic perspective to the larger question of federalism: discussions at the Geneva Graduate School of International Studies in the fall of 1939 and in Paris in April 1940 during the Anglo-French Economists conference that took place within the larger framework of a Franco-British federation conceptualized as an “indissoluble union.” Almost all French and English (or England-based, like Friedrich Hayek) economists who were at the Lippmann Colloquium participated in 1940, too, revealing neoliberals as influential normative actors within and attached to global governance institutions. Not only did they believe that their economics would bring peace in theory, they were also engaged in discussions on bringing about a federation in wartime to help build peace in Europe after the fighting had stopped. Contextualizing early neoliberal federal thought through archival material and an illustration of broader historical context refocuses the methodological lens. It repositions studies of neoliberalism that have a tendency to look only at (mostly endogenously defined) neoliberals and only rarely at the social, institutional, and historical context. It also sobers assumptions on thinking in “schools” and repositions the role of individual thinkers and their published works as an entry to the study of neoliberalism. Neoliberal contributions to federal thought were commissioned, developed in context, and already influential in their time. Mainly, they insisted that any federation is first and foremost a political choice, not something automatically following economic integration. The central federal authorities should then oversee the policy fields of security, foreign policy, trade, finances, and migration, while designing the federation generally in ways that would allow for more members to join. These ideas were shared by others—non-neoliberals, too. The differences are in the detail about how the central authorities of a federation would operationalize its powers. Here, neoliberals insisted on building a common framework for market actors rather than coming up with plans. Importantly, it should also be noticed that not all neoliberals fully shared an enthusiasm for federalism. While this article looks at their approach to federalism, they were also thinking in other ways about creating larger markets.