Even before the the months and months and months of work in the shadow of Mt. Washington, and in the shadowy halls of Washington and London, the Americans and the British had been discussing the terms of the postwar order. Much of the framework for operationalizing matters occurred even prior to U.S. direct entry into the conflict .
"The Atlantic Charter, drafted during President Roosevelt's August 1941 meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on a ship in the North Atlantic was the most notable precursor to the Bretton Woods Conference(BW). Like Woodrow Wilson before him, whose 'Fourteen Points' had outlined U.S. aims in the aftermath of the First World War, Roosevelt set forth a range of ambitious goals for the postwar world even before the U.S. had entered the Second World War.
The Atlantic Charter affirmed the right of all nations to equal access to trade and raw materials. Moreover, the charter called for freedom of the seas (a principal U.S. foreign policy aim since France and Britain had first threatened U.S. shipping in the 1790s), the disarmament of aggressors, and the 'establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security.'"
Here then, not only can discerning observers see both the United Nations in utero and the concomitant monetary arrangements that the war yielded, but they can also detect, at least in broad strokes, the entire economic interrelationship that has characterized the sixty-five years since 1945. One needn't create a Milo Minderbinder to recognize that ministrations and planning of tremendous savvy and strategic scope were in play .
Throughout the war, the United States envisaged a postwar economic order in which the U.S. could penetrate markets that had been previously closed to other currency trading blocs, as well as to open up opportunities for foreign investments for U.S. corporations by removing restrictions on the international flow of capital.
For nearly two years, much of the ongoing energy of this work centered on Bretton Woods, a little forested resort in New Hampshire's White Mountains. Part of the purpose of such get-togethers was to muse about the 'division of the spoils,' as Keynes named the process at Versailles a quarter century before. As well, and more crucially, the meetings outlined the parameters of what structures and processes might manage capital's conflicts more beneficently than fire-bombing and mass-immolation were doing while negotiators gathered.
Principals assembled together for a final signing ceremony in the Summer of 1944, where the U.S. plan propounded by H.D. White won out over the more 'Keynsian' proposals advanced by the master Keynsian himself.
Keynes, though suffering from the final stages of congestive heart disease, was among those attending the conference throughout, as the leader of the British delegation. Even as he was 'not long for this world,' acceding to his White-Russian wife's advice not to insist on his opposition to gold, Keynes vision again seems prescient, inasmuch as the world has operated, according to standards such as he advanced, since the original BW accords fell apart in the early 1970's.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
