Bretton Woods Conference

Bretton Woods Conference (1944).The breakdown of the world economic system during the 1930s Great Depression convinced American and British planners of the need for a new international economic framework as part of the postwar settlement. Anglo‐American discussions led by U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White and the British Treasury representative John Maynard Keynes began in 1942. These talks as well as intragovernmental planning in both countries led to an international conference held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944. Attended by representatives of forty‐five nations, the conclave produced the blueprints for two new institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (or World Bank), as well as discussions of a third, the International Trade Organization.

The underlying principles of the Bretton Woods agreements followed American, not British preferences, hardly surprising since the United States at the end of World War II owned half of the world's supply of monetary gold and produced half of global gross national product. Embracing the capitalist ethos of the United States, the Bretton Woods system assumed that prosperity brought peace and that the best guarantee of prosperity was an international economic system based on the freest possible flow of money and goods.

American planners had hoped that the wartime participation of the Soviet Union in the Grand Alliance with the United States and Great Britain would convince the Soviet government to join the new international economic order. Soviet attendance at the Bretton Woods conference seemed to augur well, but the following year the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin vetoed Soviet participation in the Bretton Woods organizations. Although operational arrangements of the Bretton Woods institutions evolved in the decades after 1944, the agreements nonetheless provided the basic framework for the capitalist economic system during the Cold War and after.
See also Capitalism; Depressions, Economic; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Europe; Foreign Trade, U.S.; General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; Tariffs.

Bibliography

Richard Gardner , Sterling‐Dollar Diplomacy: The Origins and the Prospects of Our International Economic Order, 1969.
Randall Bennett Woods , A Changing of the Guard: Anglo‐American Relations 1941–1947, 1990.

Diane B. Kunz