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The Atlantic Community and the Emerging Countries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Rupert Emerson
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Extract

The Atlantic Community regards itself as the core of the free world and, at least in aspiration, as the leader of all the peoples which have not fallen under the communist spell. The major barriers to the successful assertion of that leadership are the suspicion and hostility generated by the era of Western imperial overlordship of most of the world and the radical divergence in view as to what constitutes the major problem of our times. Although there are marked differences of emphasis within it, the Atlantic Community arms and guards against the threat of communist imperialism, while much of Asia and Africa still see the colonialism of the West as the gravest and most immediate menace to their own freedom and the peace of the world. For the most part they want to abstain from what seems to them the sterile and unrewarding task of holding back communism in order to be able to concentrate on their own immense problems of stabilization, integration, and development. Aware of their pressing needs, and of what the West has to offer, they look to the Atlantic Community for economic and other assistance, even though they may also be ready to accept assistance from the communist states as well. It is probable that most of those in responsible positions in the Atlantic Community have a greater degree of understanding and sympathetic appreciation of the position of the underdeveloped countries than the leaders of the latter have of the West's concern with communism.

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Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , Summer 1963 , pp. 628 - 648
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1963

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References

1 Nehru is stated to have been convinced that the Russians saw the Suez expedition as the calculated prelude to world war, finding it impossible to believe that it could have been undertaken without American support and approval. Sheean, Vincent, Nehru(New York: Random House, 1960), p. 160Google Scholar.

2 Speech before Supreme Lodge of B'nai B'rith, The New York Times, May 9, 1956.

3 NATO Letter, 01 1, 1957 (Vol. 5, Special Supplement to No. 1), p. 5Google Scholar.

4 “Reflections on American Diplomacy,” Daedalus, Fall 1962, p. 728.

5 See The Strasbourg Plan, published by the Secretariat General, Council of Europe, Strasbourg, 1952Google Scholar.

6 Although the decision was questioned in some quarters, the Council of Ministers of EEC decided that colonies becoming independent could retain their associated status if they so desired. Only Guinea, achieving independence from France with mutual bad feeling in 1958, has failed to opt for continued association. See Rivkin, Arnold, “EEC and Africa,” West Africa, 02 25, 1961 (No. 2282), p. 203Google Scholar.

7 President Sékou Touré has warned that the leaders of EEC “make no secret of their desire to achieve a political community of Europe which cannot be reconciled with Africa's desire for political independence; Africa remains as grimly hostile as ever to the division of Africa which began with the Congress of Berlin in 1885.” (“Africa's Future and the World,” Foreign Affairs, 10 1962 [Vol. 41, No. 1], pp. 149–150)Google Scholar.

For the dangers involved in placing the ex-French territories in a special and privileged position, see Jackson, Barbara Ward, “Free Africa and the Common Market,” Foreign Affairs, 04 1962 (Vol. 40, No. 3), pp. 419–430CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 For an analysis of the problems involving GATT, see Allen, James Jay, The European Common Market and the GATT(Washington, D.C.: University Press of Washington, D.C., 1960)Google Scholar, particularly Part V dealing with the overseas territories.

9 Pravda, August 26, 1962. The Third Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Conference, meeting in Tanganyika in February 1963, warned of the neo-colonialism of a united imperialist front which “manifests itself in economic ententes like the Common Market which seeks to facilitate the penetration of foreign capital for political subversion through an economic stranglehold on developing countries.” (New Times [Moscow], 03 6, 1963, p. 36.)Google Scholar

10 The associated states now number eighteen: all the former French territories south of the Sahara with the exception of Guinea but including Togo, Cameroun, and Madagascar; the Congo (Leopoldville), Rwanda, Burundi, and Somalia. An additional sum of $70 million was also to be made available to French and Dutch territories which remained dependent.

Although he warned against the divisive elements contained in it, Philippe de Seynes, UN Undersecretary for Economic and Social Affairs, warmly praised the new agreement in speaking to the ECA meeting in Leopoldville in February 1963:

This agreement constitutes in some respects a remarkable expression of what might be described as a new economic solidarity between industrial and under-developed countries. It is an instrument in which, as has been so often recommended in the United Nations, problems of trade and problems of aid are dealt with within the same agreement and treated as intimately inter-related; it is an arrangement which covers a sufficiently long period to give the participants the minimum security necessary for their planning. It leaves the African countries free to fix their tariff rates, in order to protect their nascent industries. It is, in short, a type of comprehensive agreement that we should like to see applied to the world as a whole, or at least to the continent as a whole. (UN Document E/CN.14/L.144, February 20, 1963, p. 9.)

11 This speech was published as a supplement to Ghana Today, June 20, 1962. In his Sessional Address to the Ghana National Assembly on October 2, 1962, he attacked the Common Market as an attempt on the part of rich Europe to consolidate its strength against the poorer nations of the world and saw the latter receiving less and less for their raw materials while the industrialized nations were getting more and more for their exports of manufactures. No doubt inspired by his President's position, Macneill Stewart burst into poetry in the Evening News(Accra) on 09 15, 1962Google Scholar:

What price freedom is the questionaire

The former Colonies are asking here?

The iron hand in the kid gloves appears,

With the same terrors, and with the same fears.

The Common Market brings us face to face

With many factors that disturb our race,

And all colonial people with a dread

That freedom must be sacrificed for bread!

Let every market in the world be free,

With every nation, the full liberty

To expand its trade with nations far and wide,

That good relations may with each abide!

Away with NATO and its strategy!

Let there be peace; and let all trades be free!

12 West Africa, after canvassing the possible economic benefits, concluded editorially that Ghana and Nigeria “see the Common Market as essentially a political organization, and they want nothing to do with it, whatever the economic arguments in favour of association.” (September 8, 1962 [No. 2362]), p. 981. In order, however, to maintain close contact, Nigeria, like India and other countries, has appointed an ambassador to the EEC.

A number of aspects of the problem are dealt with by Balogh, T., “Africa and the Common Market,” Journal of Common Market Studies (Vol. 1, No. 1), pp. 79–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and by Mazrui, Ali A., “African Attitudes to the European Common Market,” International Affairs, 01 1963 (Vol. 41, No. 2), pp. 24–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 India News(issued by the Indian Embassy, Washington), 09 24, 1962, p. 4Google Scholar. For estimates of the likely effects on India's economy of Britain's entry into the Common Market, see India News, October 8, 1962, p. 8; and Far Eastern Economic Review, July 5, 1962, pp. 17–25, and September 20, 1962, pp. 539–545. Lall, K. B., India's Ambassador to the EEC, examined his country's relation to the EEC in India News, 04 19, 1963, p. 6Google Scholar.

14 EFTA Reporter, February 5, 1963. Barbara Ward, a champion of British entry into the Common Market, has spoken of the negotiations between Britain and EEC as constantly revealing glimpses of a tantalizing vision in which the new world of young, poor, needy states could be brought in to redress the balance of the old, satiated markets of the West:

In this way—just as the workers of the West were drawn at last into the mass consumer economy—the millions of marginal peasants and unskilled urban migrants of Africa and Asia and Latin America would be brought across the threshold of the modern economy: their human needs would be satisfied and they would thus become a permanent factor in sustaining world economy. (Observer [London], 03 31, 1963.)Google Scholar

15 This “Declaration of Developing Countries” was reproduced in UN Document E/3682, July 27, 1962.

16 The Christian Science Monitor, February 8, 1963.

17 See France, Aid and Cooperation(Ambassade de France, Service de Presse et d'Information, New York, 1962)Google Scholar.

18 OECD, Development Assistance Efforts and Policies in 1961(Paris, 1962)Google Scholar. See also the corresponding report for 1960, and OEEC's The Flow of Financial Resources to Countries in Course of Economic Development, 1956–1959(Paris, 1961)Google Scholar.

19 Sessional address by Kwame Nkrumah, October 2, 1962.

20 It would appear that

over the past sixty years the less developed areas have gained more from the upward fluctuations than they have lost in periods of declining prices. In other words, if at any time in that period— except in the 1930's and the late 1950's—a bargain had been worked out to stabilize commodity prices at their average relationship to industrial prices, the less developed areas would have been the losers. (Butler, William, “Trade and the Less Developed Areas,” Foreign Affairs, 01 1963 [Vol. 41, No. 2 ], p. 377.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

There still remains, of course, the problem of achieving enough stability and control over basic elements in the economy to make planned development feasible.

21 Speech by Sukarno in the United Nations General Assembly, September 30, 1960. General Assembly Official Records(15th session), p. 281.

22 The National Observer(Washington, D.C.), 12 10, 1962Google Scholar.