It’s a war. A health war against an enemy (the COVID-19 virus) that is “invisible and elusive,” as French President Emmanuel Macron described it. Sooner or later, it will be won. But when that moment comes, things will never be the same again. With the war still ongoing, between August and October 1944, in Dumbarton Oaks (a small village near Washington, D.C.), delegations from the four Allied powers against the Axis (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and China) gathered to define the post-war global political order. The discussion laid the groundwork for the San Francisco Conference (the following April), which established the United Nations (UN).

Dumbarton Oaks followed the conference held in Bretton Woods (a small town in New Hampshire) the previous July, where the foundations for the future international economic order were laid with the decision to create the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These were highly contentious conferences. At Dumbarton Oaks, the clash was between those who advocated a return to the old national-imperial system, those who wanted to freeze the emerging bipolar world, and those who proposed creating a multilateral international order. The latter strategy prevailed, even though many (at the time) considered it unrealistic. Indeed, utopian. Today, we are facing a similar debate. While the European Central Bank and the European institutions have finally decided to do “everything necessary and even more” to neutralize the economic disaster caused by the virus, we too are discussing the European political order in the post-virus era.

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