Panel presented at the international workshop
“RE/CONSTRUCTIONS: Histories, Politics, Futures,”
University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece,
17-19 October, 2025.
“RE/CONSTRUCTIONS: Histories, Politics, Futures,”
University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece,
17-19 October, 2025.
In July 1944, less than a month after the D-Day landing in Normandy, delegates from 44 nations gathered in an opulent neo-classical hotel at the base of Mount Washington in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The eponymous conference delivered not only a new monetary world order but also a set of institutions designed to maintain post-war economic stability. Among these was the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, a Bank famous for financing thousands of development projects in the Global South. The Bank’s original objective, however, was to finance post-war European reconstruction to jumpstart the continent’s economy.
As part of the Bank’s fifteenth anniversary in 1961, Richard Demuth looked back on the accomplishments of the World Bank in the pages of the Bank’s internal staff newsletter, International Bank Notes. (slide) He describes both the risk involved in the Bank’s first loan and the ultimate reward:
“In the winter of 1947, the prospects that Western Europe would achieve economic viability were bleak indeed. The financial requirements were immense, and the countries of Western Europe had practically no foreign exchange reserves to help meet them. Indeed, the threat loomed large that the Western European economies would come to a standstill for want of dollars to keep essential food, fuel and raw material imports flowing in. The Bank's reconstruction loans were an emergency measure to meet this situation. [...] It took a bit of stretching for the management to conclude that repayment prospects were reasonable; the economic report on France, for example, laid its stress, not on financial resources or specific export prospects, but on the French "collective will to recover." The Bank's gamble paid off handsomely, however, for it won the time necessary for the European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan) to be formulated and put into effect (with considerable help from the Bank's staff), with results that are now familiar history.”
This contribution addresses the Bank’s overlooked European construction projects and its role as a re-builder of post-war Europe. The emphasis on “reconstruction” reflected more than physical rebuilding. It represented a project of economic stabilisation and modernisation, grounded in technocratic principles of productivity, efficiency, and fiscal discipline.