War Aims is a letter to the editor of The Spectator, originally published on November 17, 1939, and reproduced in the supplied 1997 version. Hayek responds to Sir Norman Angell’s proposal for federal unity between Britain and France, extending to their empires. His central move is to connect an ambitious programme of postwar reconstruction with the immediate economic requirements of winning the war. Political and economic union would demonstrate a willingness to overcome inherited divisions, but its urgency rests above all on the productive resources lost through maintaining barriers between allies.
Even more important at this moment, however, is the fact that real political and economic union with France is perhaps the most important step towards winning this war which could now be taken.
The qualification “perhaps” leaves the strategic assessment open, while the sentence redirects attention from declaring war aims to implementing them. A closer union need not wait for peace: removing obstacles to cooperation would itself strengthen the war effort. Hayek thus treats the proposed new order as something whose credibility and usefulness can be tested in present economic arrangements.
The letter develops this argument through rhetorical questions about the costs of treating an ally as an economically separate country. Britain and France continue buying expensive domestic goods when cheaper supplies are available from each other; they use inferior substitutes instead of their partner’s products; and each conserves the other’s currency as though allied resources were no more accessible than those of any foreign state. Hayek distinguishes the necessary husbanding of resources from restrictions that prevent those resources from being efficiently shared.
Can there be any doubt that this state of affairs must keep the productive capacity of each of the two countries considerably below what it might be?
The relevant measure is productive capacity, not simply the volume of trade. Customs and commercial controls become strategically objectionable when they reduce what the two countries can jointly produce. Hayek describes additional controls as sources of delay and disorganization that make their “common productive machine” less efficient. This formulation supplies the economic counterpart to federal unity: allied economies should be considered in terms of their combined possibilities rather than administered as mutually external trading partners.
His example of luxury goods makes the argument more discriminating than a blanket demand to divert every industry to military production. Provided luxuries remain affordable, British demand could support France’s luxury trades and French demand the corresponding British industries. These particularly hard-hit sectors possess resources largely unsuitable for war purposes; suppressing their reciprocal markets would therefore impose losses without necessarily releasing useful military capacity.
There will, inevitably, be increased difficulties of cross-channel transport.
This concession separates unavoidable wartime impediments from restrictions imposed by policy. Hayek concludes that transport difficulties offer no justification for adding barriers to Anglo-French trade and that existing prewar restrictions should also be removed. The letter moves from endorsement of federation to a concrete test of allied economic cooperation. Its relevance lies in that connection between institutional aspiration and practical coordination: a durable international order begins, here, with dismantling controls that weaken partners already fighting a common war. Hayek does not specify a federal constitution; he identifies an immediate economic requirement of taking unity seriously.
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