THE AFTERMATH OF WAR
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disintegration of the single all-embracing world market, Western
policy for some critical years pursued the phantom of a near-global
free trade system. It has taken repeated currency crises in Western
Europe, and the perpetuation of the "dollar gap," to convince the
policy-makers that even the "free world" is, economically speaking,
composed of two different halves which intersect but cannot be
merged. As a corollary of this discovery it is now beginning to be
appreciated that
planned
capital investment in the so-called back–
ward countries is required, not as a philanthropic operation, but to
establish an "international" division of labor outside the dollar area.
This is a considerable step forward from the over-simple solutions
popular in 1945. The road would no doubt have been traveled more
rapidly if utopianism had not had so powerful a hold upon Western
statesmen and "practical" men of affairs.
In looking back on the period it is not without interest to note
that the United Nations Charter, the Bretton Woods agreement on
removing economic barriers, and the initial proposals for controlling
atomic energy, were conceived more or less simultaneously in 1944-46,
to be acclaimed for a few months and then rapidly forgotten. The
time was doubtless favorable to the drafting of ambitious plans, but
a study of these documents discloses a family resemblance which has
not received sufficient notice. There is, on the one hand, the tradi–
tional emphasis on the elimination of barriers to peace and world
trade: a rational framework is to be constructed within which all
nations shall be free to pursue their legitimate aims. But the intro–
duction of such bodies as the Security Council, and the proposed,
if stillborn, international atomic control commission, strikes a new
note. Here the accent is on planning, intervention and a strong
central authority. The old and the new liberalism-both meeting
in the person of Keynes, who in some sense impressed his stamp
upon the whole era-share the belief in a rational solution of the
world's problems. But where the older school placed its trust in indi–
vidual and national self-interest, the new hard-bitten generation of
post-totalitarian liberals is distinguished by a reluctant acceptance of
the need for more centralized power. This new liberalism no longer
puts its entire faith in enlightened self-interest and the hidden hand:
it has become "managerial." Hence the fashionable talk about "put–
ting teeth into the Charter." Where its utopian character still shows is
