ABSTRACT
By the 1990s, a few states had indeed made remarkable economic strides, and the Leninist model for development had been almost completely discredited. During the 1980s, when many less developed nations were shunned by wary lending institutions, the United States became the greatest debtor nation in the world. For at least a century and a half after 1648, Westphalia served mainly to legitimize the development of separate, state-based economies. Although protectionist measures generally hindered economic recovery in the 1930s, the different and more complex cure of national economic planning seemed to many in industrialized societies to produce a positive alternative to renewed growth. Growing awareness of the limits to the kind and scale of growth characteristic of the industrial age can gradually build a bridge across the North-South gulf. In fact, its sketch is already being drawn from the increasingly complex facts of international economic life today.
