ABSTRACT
The international economic order constructed by the West after World War II reflected a highly advantageous configuration of factors that produced a generation of sustained economic expansion. The world distribution of economic power favoured an open and non-discriminatory approach to organizing international economic relations. There was broad ideological consensus regarding the role of the state in ensuring domestic employment, price stability and social safety nets. A commensurate body of economic analysis and policy prescriptions existed that enabled the state to act on these preferences. The major corporate actors were national in scope and international economic relations largely comprised arms-length transactions among separate and distinct national economies. As a result, point-of-entry barriers to economic transactions constituted meaningful tools of economic policy. The prevailing form of nationalism was the civic not ethnic kind, which facilitated international economic cooperation and, in the case of western Europe, the process of supranational integration. A set of international organizations was put in place that expressed and supported the post-war compromise of embedded liberalism, as it has been called (Ruggie 1982), most importantly the Bretton Woods institutions, the GATT and the United Nations.
