Introduction: Understanding the International Crisis

Abstract

At the end of the Second World War the main concern of American policy was ‘to avoid drifting from the peace table into a period of chaotic competition, monetary disorders, depressions, political disruptions and finally new wars within as well as among nations’.¹ To avoid this the Americans could now see that conditions would have to be created after the war which would ensure that ‘the war-torn and impoverished nations’ in the rest of the world would not be driven back into ‘the pre-war pattern of every country for itself, of inevitable depression, of possible widespread economic chaos, with the weaker countries succumbing first under the law of the jungle that characterised international economic practices of the pre-war decade’.² International co-operation and the guarantee of a return to prosperity for the weak as well as the strong had finally been recognised as an essential precondition for the economic and physical survival of the capitalist world. In the words of Harry Dexter White, the American architect of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (more properly to be known as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), but here the more common usage will be preferred):

A breach must be made and widened in the outmoded and disastrous economic policy of each-country-for-itself-and-the-devil-take-the-weakest.