Summary: Ludwig von Mises, “How Can Europe Survive?”

This brief 1955 review essay by Ludwig von Mises assesses Hans F. Sennholz’s How Can Europe Survive? as a decisive case study against postwar interventionist economics. Its scope is narrow but pointed: Mises uses Sennholz’s analysis of European “unification” to attack the broader doctrine that capitalism produces poverty, unemployment, depression, and international disintegration, and that only planning or supranational authority can avert collapse.

Mises first reconstructs the doctrine he opposes, presenting it as the reigning assumption of economists and politicians:

The spurious doctrine, advanced by the majority of contemporary pseudo-economists and endorsed by almost all contemporary statesmen and politicians, runs this way: The operation of the market economy (capitalism, laissez faire) results in progressing poverty of the masses, in unemployment of an ever-increasing part of the potential labor force, in the regular recurrence of periods of economic depression.

The conceptual move is characteristic of Mises: he shifts the burden of explanation away from the market and toward intervention. What others interpret as capitalism’s failure, he treats as the predictable effect of policies that obstruct market coordination. This becomes especially important in the European case, where economic fragmentation is usually blamed on insufficient political integration.

The economic disintegration of Europe is not an outcome of the unhampered operation of the capitalist system.

For Mises, Sennholz’s central insight is that domestic interventionism and international disunity are linked. A government that regulates prices, production, wages, or trade conditions cannot leave foreign competition free to undermine those regulations. Protectionism and isolation therefore follow from planning, not from laissez-faire.

It is, on the contrary, the result of the various governments' interference with the business of their own countries.

The essay’s structure is simple: it states the interventionist fallacy, then condenses Sennholz’s argument into two principal claims. First, national regulation generates the need for trade barriers; second, conferences, conventions, and American subsidies cannot restore European unity while domestic intervention persists. Mises thus treats European unification projects as superficial if they do not address the underlying policy regime.

It must adopt a policy of national isolation and thereby contribute to the economic disintegration of Europe.

The second claim is more polemical. Mises denies that diplomatic architecture can repair what interventionist policy has broken. Economic unity is not primarily a matter of institutional design, but of removing the national controls that make open exchange politically impossible.

Mere talking and drafting of international conventions will never reestablish European economic unity.

The relevance of the review lies in its postwar setting. Mises is writing against plans for European integration and against American funding intended to promote it. His argument is not anti-European-unity; it is anti-interventionist. Unity, in his account, must arise through the free movement of goods, services, and capital, not through new layers of political management.

As long as there is domestic interventionism, the present unsatisfactory state will last.

Mises closes by emphasizing the political isolation of Sennholz’s thesis. He expects hostility from progressive opinion because the book challenges the assumptions guiding official policy. Yet he also presents the work as intellectually durable, a contribution whose force will outlast its immediate reception.

But its ideas will, sooner or later, bring about a change both in ideologies and policies.

The essay’s main thesis is therefore that Europe’s survival depends less on supranational schemes than on abandoning the interventionist policies that divide markets into protected national compartments. Mises’s praise of Sennholz rests on this causal reversal: capitalism is not the agent of European disintegration; government interference is.