Chapter 4 reconstruct how the zeitgeist, the political and economic practices, and the geopolitical and societal circumstances of the war times guided Western Europe to a path of deeper international and regional cooperation focused on free trade and valuta convertibility. During exile and occupation, European governments fleshed out plans and schemes for post-war cooperation, primordially in the domains of socio-economic and the financial-economic planning, in greater (practical) detail. Initially, however, the step from grand designs and lofty models for a post-war Western order that could ‘win the peace’ to the practices of policies of cooperation was taken via the institutional engineering in the Atlantic world, most prominently through the ‘system’ envisioned in Bretton Woods. However, the original ideas behind Bretton Woods soon proved a bridge too far in practice, which complicated global ambitions as well as the proper build-up of Atlantic-wide institutions—and pushed Western Europe to think and act ‘beyond Americanisation’.

Chapter 7 is one of three chapters that reflects on the rise of economic expertise during the twentieth century. It places the development of Tinbergen’s econometric techniques within a broader political context in which political parties during the middle of the twentieth century moved away from ideological and class-based foundations and toward general interest parties, known as people’s parties (or in German Volksparteien). This generated a demand from within politics for a new type of economic expert, who served no longer as party ideologues, but rather as policy experts. This was most visible in the social-democratic parties, such as the Dutch SDAP, which transformed in the PvdA (Labor Party). During the same period economists presented themselves increasingly as experts to the state, who could scientifically pursue the general interest. These developments run counter to the more widely known story about economics becoming a value-free science as proclaimed by Lionel Robbins. The chapter argues that Tinbergen’s contributions are best understood as a continuation of the German tradition of Staatswissenschaften, which pursued economics in service of the state.