Hagen Schulz-Forberg's project particularly focuses on the question of International Order, European Integration and National Political Economy in Germany, France and Italy since the 1930s by foregrounding the global imagination of economic thought and its tensions with and conceptualizations of the nation-state. Economists, almost unanimously, had a global vision as their economic theories encompassed the whole planet; if not explicitly, then at least implicitly by conceiving one's nation or region as one among equally valid others. Schulz-Forberg will follow French, German and Italian actors within the Mont Pèlerin Society’s network and hovering around it through relations to its members and follow those actors to their spaces of agency on the national and the international level. Following a general study on the nodal points of the liberal networks in Geneva (at the Institute for International Affairs and the League of Nations as well as the United Nations and the ILO), London (at the London School of Economics), Freiburg (Freiburg University), Paris (the Lippmann Colloquium and several research institutes), Cambridge (Keynes‟ habitat), Chicago (becoming the leading city for the new generation of liberals beside East Coast university towns and New York) and Vienna (both at the university and in von Mises salon, where he held, following the tradition of his teacher, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, his private seminars at which, e.g., Lionel Robbins and Friedrich August Hayek participated). Furthermore, Istanbul University has been a place of importance for the return of liberal thought. Atatürk invited many leading German academics to leave Hitler‟s Germany and to immigrate to his country in order to found a university following the German ideal type. It was in Istanbul that both Röpke (Röpke 1942; Röpke 1944; Röpke 1945) and Rüstow (Rüstow 1945; Rüstow 1950) wrote their fundamental books. Schulz-Forberg‟s points of departure are the works and relations of Luigi Einaudi, Wilhelm Röpke and Jacques Rueff. All three acted within national spaces as well as within international ones, both on the level of research and on the level of political institution building, especially the European institutions emerging after the Second World War. Through archives in Rome (Einaudi), Paris (Rueff), and Cologne (Röpke), the personal networks and intellectual development is followed.

Most economists were organized in a transnational way and easily moved between local, regional, national and international contexts. While some studies about the main economists in all three countries have recently been published, the question as to the relation The case of Germany, France and Italy is of particular interest because of European integration, in which all three countries played a leading role, inspiring economists to conceptualize a national and a supranational economic system simultaneously. Already during the inter-war period, economists conceptualized European federation and economic integration, either praising it, like Lionel Robbins, who saw no alternative to federation in the face of the World War (Robbins 1941), or dismissing it as just another unit that would erect disturbing tariff walls, like Ludwig von Mises (Von Mises 1927).

This tradition continued after the war. Einaudi, through his very biography, represents the national normative actor embedded in a European, indeed global network. Rueff continuously thought globally and was the economic mastermind behind the French „trente glorieuse‟, but also behind French president Charles de Gaulle‟s constant threat to the US to exchange all his dollars for gold. Rueff was convinced that the old gold standard was a more adequate system for the world economy and not its Keynesian, Bretton Woods derivative. Röpke coined the German version of neo-liberalism – social market economy – together with Alfred Müller-Armack – but simultaneously positioned his national analyses in a global order (Röpke 1945; Röpke 1945; Röpke 1948; Röpke 1962; Röpke 1963). German, French and Italian liberals were well connected since at least the 1930s (Denord 2007), but they had very different semantic histories of liberalism established in the Milanese and Neapolitan schools, the French universalism and the Austrian-German philosophical traditions (Leonhard 2001). The networks and works of Luigi Einaudi, Wilhelm Röpke and Jacques Rueff serve as the main starting point through which the complex history of national and transnational networks and agency unfolds. They were already involved in the liberal networks of the 1930s; they were European activists as well as highly influential national actors. In addition to their personal archives, the archive of the Mont Pèlerin Society in Ghent and Stanford, the archive of the Institut Universitaire des Hautes Etudes Internationales, where von Mises and Röpke were located from the 1930s to the 1960s, and the London School of Economics will be visited. Furthermore, the national archives in Berlin, Paris, and Rome will be visited as well, with a special interest in the strategic departments of the economic ministries and the foreign ministries.