Few Americans were as concerned with how to overcome the economic crisis and infrastructural fragmentation of East Central Europe as the US economist Leo Pasvolsky. Apart from his comprehensive studies of the impact of post-war economic disintegration (Economic Nationalism in the Danubian States, 1928; Bulgaria’s Economic Position, 1930), which he authored as part of his academic position at the Brookings Institution, Pasvolsky incessantly wrote as a journalist about the stuttering of European international cooperation. As a Russian émigré and graduate of the University of Geneva, Pasvolsky effortlessly navigated the world of economic conferences organised by the League of Nations and the International Labour Organisation (ILO). He was arguably the most important liaison expert between internationalist organisations and the United States, which had famously refused to join the League. Pasvolsky firmly believed that the protectionist tendencies of the Habsburg Empire’s successor states could be overcome, and that Europe could recover its pre-war prosperity. Yet at the same time, as a journalist, Pasvolsky gleefully revelled in the abounding narratives of interwar particularism, chaos and destitution, as in the case of his vignette on the 1922 Genoa Conference where delegates of the Great Powers gathered to stop the spiral of economic dislocation in Europe:
When the sessions were over … and the time arrived for paying the hotel bills, the heads of the various delegations lined up before the cashier’s desk. Mr. Lloyd George, the principal British delegate, paid his bill with a draft on the Bank of England, which the cashier accepted with utmost respect, first, however, consulting reports on the day’s rates of exchange and doing a good deal of figuring before the account was finally adjusted. M. Poincaré, the French Premier, offered in payment a sheaf of Bank of France notes, which the cashier accepted with a little less respect and after a somewhat more prolonged figuring on the basis of the exchange rates. The German delegate was accompanied by a man, pushing a wheelbarrow heaped with Reichsbank notes. With a sigh, the cashier ordered a porter to take the wheelbarrow, and turned to the Austrian delegate. This gentleman laid on the desk a bill of lading, fully endorsed and covering a carload of Austrian currency, which, he reported, was being detained at the Austro-Italian frontier owing to transit restrictions. By this time the cashier was almost prostrated. He greeted with an expression of utter helplessness the head of the Russian delegation, who jauntily threw on the desk a neat package, which gave forth a metallic clink. The cashier sat up hopefully, a vision of Tsarist gold flashing before him. But he fell back in a dead faint, when the elegant Mr. Chicherin said carelessly, “Engraved plates of the Russian State Bank; print as much as you like.”
