Description
This paper argues that everyday perceptions inform the design and stability of international orders. Studying the American approach to the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, it finds that everyday perceptions of economic inequality within the United States influenced the American elite policymakers’ strategies and positions before and during the conference itself. Adopting an everyday approach, the paper documents how both conscious and unconscious forms of everyday challenge were present in the years that led up to the conference, and that they partly were motivated by frustration over inequality as experienced and perceived by American everyday agents across racial, gendered, and economic divides. Doing so, the paper demonstrates how the historical experiences with everyday struggle throughout the interwar years as well as non-elite perceptions during World War II formed an important backdrop to the conference and ultimately played an important role in shaping the postwar international monetary order. Empirically, the paper relies on a range of primary sources held by multiple archives throughout the United States that provide unique insight into the everyday and elite politics of this period. More broadly, the paper showcases how non-elite, everyday perceptions of contemporary affairs influence and shape the stability of hegemony as well as international orders. This has important implications for the study of international dynamics. The field of International Relations has long been occupied with questions related to elite policymakers’ (mis)perceptions and how they inform foreign policy. The evidence I present in this paper demonstrates that non-elite, everyday perceptions are just as important.
