Yet one has to ask whether there was some intrinsic characteristic of planism that led so many French and Belgian planists, from 1940 onwards, almost inevitably towards co-operation in the European "New Order" created by the Nazis. It is of course important, in this context, to note that there were important exceptions to this: several planists were prominent in anti-Nazi activities during the war. Among the Belgians, Paul-Henri Spaak, Jef Rens and Paul Finet were members of the Belgian government in exile, in London. The Frenchman Pierre Viénot, a member of the Resistance, was arrested in 1942, escaped in 1943, and joined General de Gaulle in London, becoming the ambassador for the Free French to the British government. Other important members of the French Resistance included the planists Paul Ramadier, Robert Bothereau and Robert Lacoste. 

Can, therefore, the collaboration with the New Order by people like de Man and Déat merely have reflected their impatience with the inability of democratic government to deliver support for their policies, and a desire to put them into effect now, thanks to the opportunities presented by the new situation? Or was there in fact, at the core of planism, a series of anti-democratic assumptions? The later postwar careers of what we might call the "Resistant" planists, far as they were from any fascist sympathies, shows that this may indeed have been the case. 

Though Belgian and French planism was above all a movement of the Left, it was strongly based in the anti-parliamentary tradition of international socialism. One of the clearest expressions of de Man's aims is to be found in a 1934 document entitled the "Pontigny Theses". In these 14 theses, De Man put forward a very reasonable case for a "mixed economy (nationalised sector and private sector)", a "directed" economy which would "create the economic conditions for an adaptation of consumer capacity to productive capacity". Discussion of the methods by which this was to be achieved was, however, couched in often obscure phraseology which, by skilful use of the words "economic" and "political" — contrasting the former favourably with the latter — and also by the use of fudge words such as "deparliamentarisation", disguised the assignment of an authoritarian role to the state:

The new economic state will constitute itself under different forms from the old political state. There will be an autonomous corporative organisation, enterprises that are nationalised or controlled by the state, deparliamentarisation of control procedures, revision of the doctrine of division of powers, etc...To the classical doctrine of bourgeois democracy, which no longer corresponds to present-day reality, we must substitute a new doctrine based on a different concept of the separation of powers.

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