ABSTRACT
This world order included a system for promoting free trade, currency-exchange mechanisms, financial architecture to regulate the movement of capital, means to resolve temporary imbalances in international payments, and a funding mechanism for the economic reconstruction and development of Europe first, and then the new nations liberated from colonial rule and vulnerable to the lure of communism. At the national political level, the “system” included social contracts between capital and labour whereby the latter might participate in productivity gains, and the state was committed to ensuring employment, social welfare and health and education. At the international level, the United Nations, with its General Assembly, Security Council and agencies, and NATO, a military alliance of nations committed to “freedom, democracy and free enterprise” (to cite the national security report presented by George W.Bush to the US Congress in September 2002), were set up to ensure that no nation would dream of world domination or act unilaterally to bend the world to its political will and national interests. This was in the early 1950s, in the context of an emerging east-west ideological and military divide, when the US was not as secure in its own power and did not have hegemony over the system.
