Vol. 23 No. 1 1956 - page 121

BOO KS
121
Iantic Community and for the planned industrialization of the unde–
veloped countries. The free world's historic European base has disinte–
grated with the collapse of the international free market economy of the
nineteenth century and the concomitant breakdown of the division of
labor between Europe and the rest of the world. The rise of the United
States, the slowdown of industrial growth in Britain, the modernization
of India, China, and Japan, the frantic search of clashing imperialisms
for markets and territories, and the emergence of industrialism as a
worldwide phenomenon signaled the breakdown of the old system by the
end of the nineteenth century. The exhaustion of European capital re–
sources in two world wars concluded its demise.
No exclusively Europeans solutions, he argues, can now reconstruct
a viable system. America's enormous industrial base, productive capacity,
and capital resources are the core of any solution. An Atlantic system
must be devised which envisages some merging of sovereignty, common
military and economic planning, and massive capital investment by the
United States. The Marshall Plan is the proper point of departure for
such a system. H e pertinently observes that only American "offshore
procurement" (the purchase overseas of military goods) masks the
chronic dollar gap and serves in a sense as a gigantic pump-priming de–
vice for Europe as the entire military budget does for the domestic
economy.
A program of this kind differs markedly from the post-1945 ex–
periments, which combined universalist paper schemes with strictly re–
gional planning for defense.....
It
is the special curse of the post-war
world that the utopianism of the peacemakers has driven it into an unreal
choice between an emp ty universalism and a purely military regionalism
unsupported by any wider considerations, indifferent to public support,
and not based on genuine political or economic foundations: a choice
between the UN and NATO. The choice lies midway between these
extremes.. .. ."Functional cooperation" has had its day, and so has the
pretense that western Europe is full of great powers able and willing to
cooperate on an equal footing with the United States.
There is not likely to be any serious dissent to these proposals. An
Atlantic Community in some more coherent form is almost certain to
take shape over the next decade even though it meets stubborn opposi–
tion here and abroad.
Arnold's thesis concerning the need for planning the rapid indus–
trialization of the undeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin
America, is essentially a plea for national governments in these regions
to assume through various modes of "state capitalism" the entrepreneur–
ial function traditionally exercised in Western Europe and the United
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