10 - Planning for International Financial Order

Summary

Economic debates at the Paris Peace Conference were dominated by the principal question of who should meet the costs of war and reconstruction. While the need to re-establish a functioning and stable global financial and economic order was recognised, addressing that need was secondary to the more immediate questions of reparations and indemnities; this hierarchy has carried forth into the historiography as well, which, for better or worse, has tended to focus on the post-war reparations burden in an attempt to understand the rise of National Socialism in Germany. However, this emphasis on reparations obscures the very deliberate and determined work undertaken at the conference to restore stability and construct a functioning international financial order, however scarred the system might be by the burdens of inter-allied indebtedness, the effects of wartime destruction, and the exclusion of a considerable portion of the pre-war system by the revolutionary upheaval in Russia, to name just of a few of the challenges faced. This chapter offers a correction in emphasis on the reparations question as just one of an intricate nexus of stratagems proposed and implemented with the goal of engendering financial reconstruction and stability in the post-war period