The purpose of this article is to describe international order designed by French neoliberalism through European integration and Atlanticism and its effects on the French government’s external policies.

French neoliberalism was born in the late 1930s in the struggle to retrieve the credibility of liberal economy and fight against fascism and communism by searching for a third way. In most of the literature, the birth of new economic norms and new economic policy in the 1930s is explained by the emergence of Keynesian economics and economic policies, and ‘neo-liberalism’ is often placed as a contrasting concept to Keynesian policies. However, the original neoliberalism was, like Keynesian ideas, more socially oriented. After the Second World war, French neoliberals gradually lost common ground regarding economic principles, dividing between the left (neoliberals seeking a way to reconcile liberalism and socialists) and the right (trying to return to orthodox liberal economics). However, the two groups were still united as long as it concerned European integration and Atlanticism. These two ideas on the international order maintained the unity of the French neoliberalism from its birth to after the Second World War.

With regard to the European integration, its support was based on the expectation that European integration become a framework to establish an ‘institutional market’ in which liberal competition was coordinated by the rules and interventions by the international institutions.

The institutional market come to reality when the EEC was established in 1957 by the initiatives of the neoliberals. Not only did they develop a campaign for the Rome Treaty, they also desired for the French economy to really participate in the liberalisation processes in Europe with financial reform to contain inflation – which was finally achieved in the Rueff Plan in 1958.

The influence of the Atlanticism of the neoliberals to the French external policy was limited. In 1936, when the Popular Front government adopted the devaluation of the franc as suggested by the neoliberals in the Tripatite Agreement between France, United States, and United Kingdom, this situation represented as a French decision to unite with liberal countries, denying fascism. However it was too late and the changing international circumstances made it meaningless.

In the 1960s, the neoliberal’s Atlanticism was reflected in their critiques to the international monetary system centered on US dollars. Their critical attitude to the dollar did not mean their support for Atlanticism was lost, rather, they tried to consolidate the economic basis of the Atlantic cooperation by reforming the international monetary system. However, when their call for return to the gold standard was adopted by the General de Gaulle, it was used as a tool to attack Atlanticism.