World War II was the culmination of the most violent and destructive period in modern European history. Over 30 million people died from the fighting and the Nazis' crimes. Motorized armies and strategic bombing flattened the continent's urban and industrial areas, and postwar inflation, migration, and shortages further ravaged already devastated economies. As the 1947 Report of the Committee of European Economic Cooperation declared, “The scale of destruction and disruption of European economic life was far greater than that which Europe had experienced in the First World War…. The devastated countries had to start again almost from the beginning.”

And indeed 1945 was a new beginning, as Europe struggled to rebuild economically while trying to head off the political and social instability that had led to ruin in the past. There was a widespread conviction that unchecked capitalism could threaten goals in all three spheres. One observer notes that, “If the war had shattered anything, it was the already damaged belief that capitalism, if left to its own devices, would be able to generate the ‘good society.’” The political chaos and social dislocation of the 1930s were held to have been caused by the Great Depression, which in turn was held to have been the consequence of unregulated markets – and so actors from across the European political spectrum agreed on the inadvisability of taking that path again.