Neoliberal activists within business organizations helped defeat the postwar ITO treaty.

Evidence

The ICC opposition to the ITO was a surprise. The organ­ization had been close to the U.S. State Department during and immediately ­after the war. It stood ­behind Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s push for ­free trade, and the American Council of the ICC had been one of “the keystones of bipartisan support” for his program. When the Havana Charter came up for a resolution, the reflexive inclination of many ICC members was to follow their pattern of support for the U.S. State Department by signing it. Yet, as the official history of the ICC (written by a former member) recounts, Heilperin found a crucial ally for his opposition in Philip Cortney, an acquaintance of Mises who joined the MPS in 1953.56 Cortney led the opposition and managed to convince the ICC executive committee to oppose the State Department on a major issue for the first time. The scene repeated itself at the international meeting when Cortney again led the opposition to the ITO against the British committee, who ­were disposed to sign the agreement. The decisive moment came when the chairman of the committee, Ernest Mercier, a French industrialist who had attended the Walter Lipp­mann Colloquium and was also member of the MPS, said he would tender his resignation before accepting the resolution. The resolution died on the floor. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 443

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s existing interest in how elites constrain democratic economic governance — the MPS network operating inside the ICC is a concrete example of Slobodian’s thesis.
• SEED: An essay angle: how a small cross-national intellectual network (MPS) achieved outsized influence by embedding members inside major business associations, defeating a major multilateral treaty.