This chapter sets the scene for the history of plan-making in the Western hemisphere before, during, and after the Second World War. It delves into four great ideational projects of this period: (1) human rights, (2) the invention of a Christian-inspired liberalism, (3) solving the ‘social question’, and (4) the why and how of ‘mixed economies’. During the period 1937-47, these projects were gradually taken on by the leading politicians, policymakers, and intellectuals of the ‘free world’, as they were considered key for the creation of a more stable and just order, both in the national and in the international sphere. These four projects, moreover, were not only interlinked, but they also shared the overarching outlook of anti-totalitarianism and aimed for what could be called ‘ideational reconciliation’: the merging of the universal and the personal in the UDHR, a transatlantic-inspired ecumene, a combination of the ideologies and economic theories of socialism and liberalism. This produced a myriad of plans and counterplans for institutional structures, (federal) organisations, and policies for post-war Europe.

Chapter 3 reconstruct how the (collective) emotions, 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. These exercises were emotionally charged and driven by the lessons of the war against the Nazis and the post-war period after the First World War—a learning from history in which the churches played a leading role and co-prepared the political ground for the popularity of a new and hugely influential conservative political family in Western Europe: Christian Democracy.