Small wonder that Harold Nicolson, hearing that speech on the radio at a house in the US, should have said to his garrulous hostess, who kept talking during it: "Mrs Strachey, do you realise that your new President has just proclaimed that he will, if need be, institute a dictatorship?"

All this seems far from the concerns of Europe in our present time; but there is a more insidious influence, based in the anti-democratic mood of the Thirties, which has fed through directly into the assumptions of the European Community, and that is the belief in the political importance of an elite of economic "experts" or "technocrats", as expressed in the theories of "planism", a popular doctrine of the Thirties which was espoused by many who later went on to be founding fathers of the post-war Community.

"Planism" takes its name from the Plan du Travail of the Belgian economist Henri (or Hendrik) de Man, produced in the first years of the Thirties at the request of the Belgian Labour Party (the Parti Ouvrier Belge). The theories underlying this Plan were highly influential, particularly in European left-wing circles, throughout the Thirties, even though de Man (prominent at ministerial level in successive Belgian governments during that period) was prevented by the realities of coalition government from putting them into effect, and though his most prominent French follower, Marcel Déat, was similarly frustrated politically. Because de Man and Déat, and a good number of their associates, became collaborators during the German occupation of their countries in the Second World War, "planism" has tended to be associated by a number of historians with fascism. But it is true to say that, for most people associated with it in the Thirties, it had no such connotations. At the regular annual conferences devoted to it at the French conference centre at Pontigny, the participants represented a broad spectrum of the European Left, including French trade unionists from the Confédération Générale du Travail, Italian anti-fascists, prominent members of the Belgian government including Max Buset, Jef Rens and Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgian trade unionists like Paul Finet, and a young member of the British Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, representing his economic guru G. D. H. Cole (who in 1935 devoted an important Fabian pamphlet, Planned Socialism: The Plan du Travail of the Belgian Labour Party, to these theories).

It is also true to say that (despite the views of various historians of Fascism) neither de Man nor Déat showed much sign, before 1940, of being anything other than democratic politicians. De Man, Vice-President of the Belgian Labour Party, held several important ministerial posts in the period 1935-40, culminating in becoming Vice-Premier in 1939-40; and in France Déat's splinter party of the Left, the Union Socialiste Républicaine, was respectable enough to be included in Léon Blum's successful Front Populaire alliance at the 1936 elections, and provided three ministers in the resultant government (of  whom one, Paul Ramadier, was after the war to become the first prime minister of the Fourth Republic).