Searching for the Ordoliberal Origin of European Integration: Lessons from the Politics of the European Recovery Program

Ito, Takeshi (2011) Searching for the Ordoliberal Origin of European Integration: Lessons from the Politics of the European Recovery Program. UNSPECIFIED. (Submitted)

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Abstract

This paper aims to review the significance of the European Recovery Program (the ERP) or the so-called Marshall Plan as an origin of European integration and European mode of economic governance. Different from conventional approaches (IR and economic history), the paper analyses the political economies of European countries through controlled comparison of the ERP policy (the allocation of imports and credit) in Britain, France, Germany and Italy. The author affirms that (1) multi-sectoral nature of the ERP policy required non-partisan coordination among different actors with different economic ideas. Such configuration was to demand non-partisan coordination, especially by economic experts; (2) In order to strike a balance of competing demands for the ERP policy (reconstruction, development, security), the idea of ordoliberalism functioned as a focal point of consensus. The reasons was that the idea, originally developed in prewar Germany, stresses the need for the state ensure a balance between market liberalization, investment (civil and military) and balance of payments. The idea should be seen as an economic idea represented by a mixture of actual prescriptions than as a coherent ideology of a specific policy-maker; (3) The penetration of ordoliberalism over Western Europe through the ERP could explain an "ideational leap" from a German paradigm of political economy to a European paradigm of integration, in that it became one of the central thought for European integration at an early stage, such as in the ECSC, competition policy and etc. The argument of the paper is expected to pose another possibility of European institution, based on a idea different from market liberalism, Keynesianism, dirigisme, planism or socialism.

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