Planning Peace: The European Roots of the Post-war Global Development Challenge

This article, based on previously untapped archival material, explores the European roots of the post-war development discourse. Specifically, it shows how British hegemonic plans for post-war reconstruction of Eastern and Central Europe became central elements of post-war development economics. The Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe made those plans obsolete, but their theoretical insights remained valuable. Indeed, they were applied to plans for the development of the Italian South, in a Cold War, anti-Communist framework, with the support of the US government and the World Bank. During the 1950s-60s the Italian case was internationally recognized as a development laboratory, and social scientists and development scholars studied it at length. This article discusses the emergence of visions of development in Europe, which occurred not in some intellectual vacuum, but rather through the pressures of political imperatives and the Cold War, the emergence of post-war international institutions, and the practice of technical missions. Because of their global relevance, the ideas and concepts that formed the backbone and the common vocabulary of development studies were soon abstracted from geographical specificity. Analyses and theories whose origins had been contextual and geographically localized became universal, rising to global relevance.