Description
Miriam Camps, a US economist and scholar, had a short but successful career in the State Department in the 1940s and early 1950s. As one of only a few female officers, she was part of a small group of economists who entered the State Department in the 1940s to work on the new challenges facing US diplomacy during and after the Second World War, particularly European reconstruction. When Camps left the State Department in 1954 following her marriage to a British national, she embarked on an alternative diplomatic career which saw her establishing herself as a well-known scholar on European integration and transatlantic relations, affiliated with elite think tanks.
First linked to Princeton University’s Centre of International Studies, in the early 1960s she became a senior fellow at two prestigious think tanks: the Council on Foreign Relations and Chatham House. This role allowed her to foster close collaboration between both think tanks and to maintain her networks on both sides of the Atlantic – networks that she had established during her career at the State Department. This paper focuses on how Camps, who had to leave her civil servant career, carved out an alternative trajectory as an IR scholar and how she explored alternative diplomatic paths to influence the US and UK policy discourse on European integration and transatlantic relations. The paper also retraces how and why, in her commentary and scholarship, her focus shifted from European integration in the 1960s to global issues of international trade and reforming the Western international trading framework in the 1970s and 1980s.
