5 ms·
How F.A. Hayek influenced the making of the European Union [pdf]
- ggm 4y agoHe undoubtedly had influence, but it would have been of two kinds: people who agreed with him, and tried to shape the EEC accordingly, and people who disagreed with him, and also tried to shape the EEC accordingly. Almost anyone of an age to take a role in emerging pan-european political process in the early days of the EEC had experienced either the input conditions to the recent war, and then the war, or the war and immediate post-war period, or just the immediate post-war period (which included a significant series of economic booms) And so the whole tenor of "his lived experience in 1930s informed this" feels to me like special pleading for a general case: Pretty much anyone of his generation experienced this, and not everyone became a Hayek. Hayek is contentious in the UK both because of his looming presence in the LSE school and the downstream consequences, but also because of his influence on Thatcher. Having sat in on one session of the OECD in Paris, I got told some stories by old hands of the tensions around the immediate post-war steel and coal industry which lie in the roots of why the OECD and the EEC emerged. It cannot be a coincidence that a post-war economic reconstruction concerned itself with heavy industry which underpins defence, as well as reconstruction and provision of utility services in the wide. the EEC was the glue to making a viable european industry in steel, in goods and services, in electricty bootstrap itself from the ashes of the bombing. The Marshall plan pointed the way.