Transnational planning

This chapter is dedicated to non-liberal varieties of technocratic internationalism. The focus is on two largely forgotten authors who represent technocratic internationalism in the fascist and socialist context. I first consider the international theory of Giuseppe De Michelis, a Geneva-based Italian diplomat who developed a fascist approach to international cooperation. What he proposed in the early 1930s was a system of global economic governance coordinated by a powerful international organization. Projecting Italian corporativism to the international level, De Michelis envisaged a global scheme to allocate capital, labour, and raw materials, with a united ‘Eurafrica’ as avant-garde. The second part of the chapter considers the work of Francis Delaisi, a French political economist and journalist of the same generation. Delaisi was a syndicalist who late in his life came to sympathize with the way the Nazis re-organized the German economy. He was the author of the so-called ‘Delaisi plan’, a scheme of transnational public works intended to unite the European continent. The idea behind this plan, presented in 1931, was to bring together the ‘two Europes’ that he found to co-exist on the same continent: the industrial core in the North-West on the one hand and the far less developed areas in Eastern and Southern Europe on the other.