ABSTRACT
The Second World War brought western Europe to a geopolitical-economic conjuncture that was in some fundamental respects strikingly new. With the end of the war, the practice of west European weight-making-consisting largely in quasi-proprietorial control over the rest of the world through the global colonial system, and backed up by the diplomatic management of intercolonizer relations within western Europe-came to a screeching halt, and a combination of features marking the new global structural set-up presented principal actors in western Europe with a serious geopolitical challenge.
