Economic Responses to Nazi Aggression in Europe: Albert Hirschman and Paul Rosenstein-Rodan on the Economic Sovereignty of Central and Eastern Europe

Germany's expansion in Central and Eastern Europe was not just one among many aggressive moves by the Third Reich but the central strategy of the Nazi imperial project on the continent. Prominent economists, politicians, and think tanks agreed that crucial to this project was Germany's economic domination of the area, and they committed to developing a new vision for a postwar international order that avoided the instability and turmoil of the interwar years. This article discusses the analyses of the crisis of Central and Eastern Europe and solutions to it that Albert Hirschman and Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, then both virtually unknown and working independently one from the other, produced during World War II—Hirschman with a focus on the international dimension and Rosenstein-Rodan with a focus on the domestic one. This article offers a synthetic discussion of how the war deeply affected their economic thinking and how, in turn, their analyses became foundational elements of new and important disciplinary fields in the postwar decades, such as international political economy and development economics.