Interwar Plans for European Economic Integration: An Overview

This contribution which is also a review of the historiography presents the debate concerning the most appropriate scales of the organization of economic areas. A debate that began early in the 20th century and that is still running. Three actors take part in the debate, i.e. the States, the Community institutions whether existing of under development, and the economic actors. Around the 1930s, several committees within the League of Nations and the International Organization of Labour conducted extensive enquiries among governments in order to assess their needs in terms of modernization of their economies and infrastructures. At the same time, new international mechanisms of financial support were devised in order to respond these needs. The general financial and economic crises and the subsequent dramatic war events put an end to these innovative plans. The ideas were revamped during the 1950s within international organizations such as the Organization for European Economic Co-operation, OEEC (then Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD), the Council of Europe and the United Nations.. The solutions offered, however, differed from the ones developed twenty years before