Commonly considered the heart of a century dominated by American power, values, and innovation (an “American Century,” according to American publicist Henry Luce), the latter twentieth century is, from the perspective of Japan, less an American age than one of intimate global exchange. The model of state management of the economy and “superdirect” industrial financing perfected by Japan after 1945 grounded not simply an East Asian “economic miracle” but a “Golden Age of Capitalism” (1945-1973). American pundits like Thomas Friedman celebrated the new global prosperity as the apotheosis of a unique American spirit of enterprise. But the term used to describe the phenomenon – “globalization” – was initially popularized in the 1980s to capture the incredible global reach of Japanese manufacturing, banking, and shipping.

The introductory Chapter 1 sketches an outline of the book’s object of study: the gray literature produced by American and European intellectuals during World War II in the study of Nazi Germany. I point to two unexpected protagonists, who rose to the challenge of the moment during World War II: Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish and cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. I describe the improvised intellectual networks, funded by government institutions, universities, as well as philanthropies and point to Hans Kohn’s career to spell out some of the complexities one encounters while studying the European-American encounter during World War II. The second part of the introductory chapter approaches the memorandum through its fictional rendering in Sinclair Lewis’ Gideon Planish, before diving into the making of one of its most famous texts, the “American Century” by Henry Luce.

The prologue to this book zooms in on the inherent tensions and harmonies in the transatlantic relations that evolved in the first half of the twentieth century and laid the practical, ideational, and emotional foundations for the take-off of European integration as of 1950. In doing so, the prologue, in a more essayistic way, critically reflects upon the reconstruction of the history of the origins of European integration as presented in this book and the history of European integration in general, and the deeper meaning of both for our understanding of present-day Europe and the unique phenomenon of European integration. The prologue also introduces some key concepts and figures in the historical reconstruction that follows in the chapters, such as the the policies and politics of planning, the functionalism of David Mitrany, and the analysis of the vicissitudes of transatlantic relations by Isaiah Berlin.