How could one have put back together that which World War I had broken up, the “delicate complicated mechanism … through which alone the European peoples can employ themselves and live”? Although John Maynard Keynes, who thus described the European economy, quite properly blamed the Allied heads of state for having done too little at the June 1919 Versailles peace conference to restore it to normal operation, neither they nor those who succeeded them on the diplomatic stage could have done this by themselves. The thing was broken, and no amount of patchwork could repair it. New mechanisms were needed as well as time to test them. Only then could the European economy work properly again.

Two serious attempts were made between the wars to mend the broken world, neither successful in the short run, both future contributors to the Schuman Plan settlement. The first, an important subcurrent in French diplomacy, aimed at fitting Germany into a framework of international economic agreements which, though initially tilted radically in France's favor, could eventually be reworked into a mechanism for the equitable adjustment of industrial and financial relationships between the two countries. Yet the French were then too weak, and German industry too bent on revenge, to have made a policy of even limited accommodation politically feasible. Abandoned in 1923 after the decision to occupy the Ruhr, the theme recurs in French policy after World War II.