The Economic Idea of a European Union: An Intellectual History

The first question I would like to address with my research is how and why economic thought on European confederation has evolved over time? With each text, there is a lot to unpack. The thinker's personal and professional background, the historical social, economic, political and intellectual context of publication, and the interaction and linkages between these texts themselves are important. Hayek's ideas in The Economic Conditions of Interstate Federalism and Denationalisation of Money, for example, may be seen in part as a reaction to Saint-Simon's earlier contributions, given that the Saint-Simonian cult of organisation for a common and defined end has been deemed the ultimate target of Hayek's thought (Jones, 2002).
There is also the question of how far these ideas determined the eventual economic set-up of the Union, which implies a closer focus on the post-war period. Influencing the economic set-up of "new Europe" was an important aim of the Mont Pèlerin conference in 1947, which brought together a group of intellectuals, handpicked by Hayek, to establish an international organisation for the development and spread of neoliberal ideas (Innset, 2017). The conference even included a discussion on the possibility of European federation based on Hayek's 1939 essay. And indeed, a number of scholars have argued that the economic set-up of the European Union is Hayekian (Issing, 2000; Majone, 2011; Bellamy and Weale, 2015) or neoliberal (Streeck, 2011; Biebricher, 2015; Stiglitz, 2016).
Understanding the evolution of economic ideas on European unity is important not only as an academic exercise, but also for acknowledging that our Union could have taken many economic shapes. Turning to ideas from history may help us to think about how the Union could be improved in the future.