90
PARTISAN REVIEW
The 1919-39 period had been distinguished by a sustained ef–
fort on the part of Western statesmanship to get back to 1914. The
outcome was the great depression, Hitler's rise, the Second World
War, and the spread of Soviet power to Central Europe. Since 1945
we have witnessed a comparable attempt to restore at least the condi–
tions prevalent in 1939. This tendency found an early expression in
the Bretton Woods agreement, which placed the burden of restoring
an international balance of payments not upon the creditor but
upon the debtor nations (principally Great Britain). As a sop to
them it provided an international monetary fund of $3 billion to
close a dollar gap which between 1946 and 1949 alone amounted to
no less than $20 billion. A further demonstration of the same state
of mind was provided by the terms of the 1945-46 U.S. loan to
Britain, which showed that a determined attempt was to be made
to revive the economic system of the late nineteenth century-a system
which depended for its functioning on the easy availability of sterling.
It is true that these exercises in neo-liberal utopianism were followed
by the Marshall Plan, hastily extemporized in 1947 to halt the disin–
tegration set in train by the inevitable breakdown of Britain's at–
tempt to make sterling freely convertible: an experiment undertaken
by the British Government, without the slightest chance of success,
in response to American pressure to help build "One World." But
the Marshall Plan, although a brilliant success as a rescue operation,
did not effect any major structural changes. The West European
coal-steel merger, planned by M. Monnet and blessed by M. Schu–
man, remained an isolated accomplishment. Above all, no sustained
effort was undertaken to integrate the West European economies
and merge them with the sterling bloc, so as to establish an interna–
tional economic system outside the dollar area and independent of
constant dollar support. On the contrary, tendencies making in this
direction were frowned upon, and it is only fairly recently that
realism has gained the upper hand on both sides of the Atlantic.
3
Thus, while the Soviet government drew the logical conclusion from
the collapse of the pre-1914 division of labor and the consequent
3 Cf.
The Economist,
January 30, 1954. "But if there is no excuse for a
policy of two Worlds, it is equally unrealistic to cling to the belief that the
One World of postwar dreams-the One World without quotas, excessive tariffs,
discriminations, or exchange controls-can be attained within measurable time."
