A global New Deal

This chapter shows how technocratic internationalism survived the crisis of world order utopias in the 1940s and gained influence on the negotiation of the post-war order. The first section discusses the critique of modern rationalism in the war and post-war years. In the field of international thought, that critique came in the guise of a ‘realist’ backlash against the ‘idealism’ of the interwar period. The second section documents the enduring prominence of technocratic ideas during the Second World War. David Mitrany re-proposed his functional approach in his Working Peace System, a pamphlet that addressed policy-makers rather than academics. Regardless, this wartime version of Mitrany’s functionalism became the point of reference for subsequent generations of scholars. Technocratic thought gained political influence when American policy-makers projected the New Deal and its institutions onto the international plane in the founding of the United Nations system. The final section studies the co-existence of realist and technocratic figures of thought. Realist Hans J. Morgenthau came to advocate international cooperation in the field of low politics, but also multilateral control over nuclear technology. In doing so, he drew directly on Mitrany’s functionalism. E. H. Carr, the eminent British critic of utopianism, in the 1940s suggested a technocratic European planning authority and a bank of Europe to unite the continent.