The recent movements toward integration are often regarded as an entirely new development which has been envisioned and proposed by many but has never before made headway on a significant scale. I submit that this is true only in a formal and narrow sense. Looking over the evolution of the world economy during the last two hundred years or so, we can clearly discern three big waves of integration-preceding and dwarfing the regional integration movements of the last ten years. The secular trend toward integration and growth of the world economy was interrupted by one period of sharp decline and disintegration...
The first wave was the internal integration of the economies of the nation states which we find today on the map of the world. The economy of Great Britain was the first to be unified and integrated, the French and American followed soon after. Later came other Continental European and overseas countries.
The second wave overlapping or, if you prefer, superimposed upon the first was the free trade movement that reached its high point at the end of the 1870's. The movement towards freer trade was reversed in 1878, but despite the fact that in most countries tariffs became higher and higher, world trade continued to grow rapidly up to World War I. For the underlying forces of rapid technological progress in transport and mass production, as well as massive migration of labor and capital toward the regions of "recent settlement" in the Western Hemisphere, Oceania, and South Africa, still dominated over increasingly protectionist commercial policies in many parts of the world...The third wave of world-wide integration and growth started soon after the end of World War II, gathered momentum after 1948, and is still in progress. It has been centered on and propelled by the spectacular recovery and rapid growth of all industrial countries, including the United States and United Kingdom, notwithstanding their recent troubles and their lower growth rates compared with the Continent of Europe and Japan. Contrary to what is often said, the prosperity of the "industrial centers" of the world economy did spread, though not as rapidly and fully as one would wish, to the "periphery" of the less developed countries, to use Raul Prebisch's picturesque designation of the two areas. This wave of world-wide integration has had more powerful and beneficial effects than the much more advertised and talked-about series of regional integrations.--Gottfried Haberler Integration and Growth of the World Economy in Historical Perspective, The American Economic Review, Vol. 54, No. 2, Part 1 (Mar., 1964), 2-3
One of the really great features of (recall) Quinn Slobodian's (2018) Globalists : The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, is his recovery and insistence on the significance of people associated with so-called Geneva school of neoliberalism. A central figure in his narrative and, this school, is Haberler (who spent most of his professional life at Harvard--the quoted lecture is a Presidential address of the AEA.) A key point Slobodian makes is that by working through international institutions, the guided development of international law became a means to constitute a neoliberal order. I think this is right, and also helps explain much about the contemporary global order and the European Union.
Now, if we turn to the quoted passage Haberler, he offers a stylized historical account of three waves of world integration.* Haberler thinks such world integration is a good thing. In the first, the mercantile state creates national markets with freedom of movement of people and goods. In the second, such (partially liberal) states create (relatively) free, globalizing trade regime as part of their imperial projects. There is much to be said about the role of illiberal agents producing liberal outcomes.
Crucially, for my present purposes, Haberler thinks he is (ca 1964) living through the third such wave of world integration. As my students noted, this entails that he views the Bretton Woods regime as a positive era of world integration. Since they associate Bretton Woods with the age of Keynesianism, they were surprised by this because they tend to see neoliberalism and keynesianism in contrasting terms.
But upon reflection Haberler's on balance positive evaluation of the Bretton Woods regime is not surprising because it has many characteristics that neoliberals pined for during the disintegrating age between 1914-1945. In particular, Bretton Woods operates under a (modified) gold standard and is committed to free trade with the lowering of barriers that prevent it). Haberler plays a crucial role in developing the GATT framework that facilitates this latter point.
As an important aside, I do not mean to suggest only neoliberals could endorse this. After all, Haberler's famous (1958) report, Trends in International Trade, was co-authored with Jan Tinbergen (later the first Nobel laureate in economics), who was no neoliberal (but social democrat) and James Meade (another Nobel laureate) also no neoliberal. (The fourth co-author Roberto de Oliveira Campos is harder to classify, but I am willing to grant he may be thought neoliberal.)
That is to say, it makes sense to see the Bretton Woods system as, in part, a neoliberal project because that is how people like Haberler see it. But one that also fit the aspirations of cosmopolitan social democrats and neo-Keynesians in many ways. (I don't mean to suggest all neoliberals would agree with all elements of Bretton Woods.) When Bretton Woods collapsed, neoliberalism had to reinvent itself or at least it opened the door to more radical policies (now associated with names like Milton Friedman and even Hayek). But if we see Bretton Woods as neoliberal, then we can discern how over time the EU became a kind of mini Bretton Woods. But about that some other time more.
One final observation (connected to the thought I just left hanging): the polemical point lurking in Haberler's ideal-type history is worth mentioning: he thinks regional integration -- such as the one associated with European Union -- risks undermining world integration. And his lecture can be understood as a plea for sticking with the global multilateral project as distinct from both nationalist protection, which he thinks is a recurring temptation Stateside, and regional integration, which he thinks risks protectionism at the expense of exports of the developing world.
*It is notable he ignores the great societies of the ancient world, China, and Islam--many of which can be characterized by such world integration.
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