This autumn, expect to hear many invocations of 1944. That was the year when John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White — respectively British and American emissaries — co-created the Bretton Woods financial system. Eighty years later, as the world confronts rising nationalism, protectionism and war, there is a desperate need to relaunch that collaborative spirit.
Ahead of the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Washington next month, there will be tributes to the deal which gave birth to those institutions. At the same time, their top officials are mulling over how to tap into that 1944 zeitgeist once again.
This is welcome. However, to my mind there is another date that deserves even more attention right now: 1919.