The Changed Economic Position of Western Europe: Some Implications for United States Policy and International Organization

By the end of the 1950's Western Europe reached an economic position so different from that of a decade before that major new questions arose about the area's place in the world economy. It follows that the assumptions of United States economic policy toward Europe need to be re-examined in the new circumstances. Of central importance are questions about the degree and type of economic regionalism that the countries of Western Europe will pursue in the future. Their experience in the last decade and a half has provided unprecedented evidence of the compatibility of regionalism and globalism in some circumstances. As a result we are past the point at which the two tendencies can be thought of as necessarily sharply antithetical. American policy, which all along has sought to encourage a dual approach, has now to find ways of striking a new balance between regionalism and globalism, since the new circumstances have removed some of the important assumptions of the old policy.