The Roots of Global Cooperation
On the evening of May 30, 1962, the first performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem took place. It was commissioned to the British composer to celebrate the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral. The building, designed in the immediate postwar period, was being built alongside the ruins of St Michael’s magnificent medieval dome devastated by a Luftwaffe bombing ironically code-named “Moonlight Sonata” on November 14, 1940. The city council had decided that the destroyed structure should not be restored to its previous shape. Next to the ruins, which remained as a testament to war sufferings and the ferocity of the bombing that claimed the lives of 568 people, something entirely new would represent a new beginning.
So the decision was to build from scratch, not to restore the previous architecture. That was the philosophy that informed another major project, which had begun a few months before the end of the war, bringing together economic delegates from 44 Allied nations at the Bretton Woods Conference, in a secluded resort in New Hampshire.
The goal was ambitious: to rebuild a brand-new global economic system, which had imploded over the previous two decades due to two devastating conflicts, a great depression, and the autarchic policies implemented by totalitarian regimes.
The 1944 agreements laid the foundation for the reconstruction of the whole global economy. The mechanisms aimed at the progressive rebirth of economic integration were initially regulated by two institutions that played a strategic and fundamental role. First, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which began its operations in 1947. Its mission was the promotion of international monetary cooperation through a fixed exchange rate system pegged to the dollar, in order to support the expansion of international trade, thus promoting growth and development. The second pillar was the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). Funded by all the Allied nations, it was initially conceived as a tool for financing the reconstruction of the Old Continent. With the launch of the European Recovery Program (or Marshall Plan), it soon transformed into the first true example of a development bank, engaged in supporting development projects and providing technical assistance. The role of the IBRD – the first nucleus of what would later become the World Bank – led it in 1947 to take on the role of an agency at the service of the United Nations.
In short, the Bretton Woods Conference represented the institutional premise on which the reconstruction and, later, the progressive integration of the global economy unfolded in the decades following the end of the conflict. Alongside the spread to civilian sectors of the technological innovations generated during the years of the war, destined to act as a driving force for a new wave of globalization, the so-called "Bretton Woods system" triggered a process of sustained growth that continues to this day.
On July 22, 1944, the President and the US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. delivered the closing address of the Conference. A brief excerpt helps to understand its spirit and, in many ways, its prophetic innovativeness.
“There is a curious notion that the protection of national interests and the development of international cooperation are conflicting philosophies… we have found on the contrary that the only genuine safeguard for our national interests lies in international cooperation... This has been the great lesson taught by the war and is, I think, the great lesson of contemporary life — that the peoples of the earth are inseparably linked to one another by a deep, underlying community of purpose.
We are at a crossroads, and we must go one way or the other. The Conference at Bretton Woods has erected a signpost — a signpost pointing down a highway broad enough for all men to walk in step and side by side. If they will set out together, there is nothing on earth that need stop them”.