WHILE ALLIED forces battled onwards into France from the D-Day landings, and on the Eastern front the Soviet Red Army bore the being laid in a secluded top-level conference thousands of miles from the battlefields.
In July 1944 the Bretton Woods conference, in leafy New Hampshire, marked the emergence of the USA as the dominant imperialist power, eclipsing a bankrupt Britain. The agreements drawn up at Bretton Woods set out an economic strategy for the From these agreements emerged the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, with the General Agreement on Tariffs and so-called 'Third World' have been plagued and exploited by them?
In October 1994, the general assembly of the World Bank and the World Bank will celebrate their 50th anniversary in Madrid. Environmental groups, pacifists and left organisations will be staging their own counter-summit in the same city a month earlier.
HARRY SLOAN reports.
ECOLOGY & ECONOM SELF-INTEREST was the driving force behind the efforts of the American bourgeoisie to reconstruct capitalism and expand world trade after the end of the war In 1943 a State Department report pointed out that:
"A great expansion in the volume of international trade after the war will be essential to the attainment of full and effective employment in the United States as elsewhere.' This could be safely proposed in the knowledge that US industry, booming with profitable munitions production, would emerge unscathed by war damage as the overwhelmingly dominant industrial and financial power.
The temptation was to drive home this advantage by holding back the post-war development of the USA's principal rivals - Germany, Britain and Japan. But this had to be balanced against the US fear that total economic collapse might trigger socialist and communist agitation.
Before the German surrender, US President Roosevelt had considered and even adopted for a period a plan of deindustrialising Germany and reducing it to little more than an agricultural economy. Instead, the USA opted for restricting the level of output from German industries and the break-up of industrial cartels.
In Japan, the US Occupation stepped in from 1945 to break up the Zaibatsu, the giant holding companies that dominated industrial production: the Mitsui group alone, employing 700,000 workers, was brunt of the military struggle against Hitler, far-reaching plans were consolidation and reconstruction of capitalism at the end of the war. Trade (GATT) taking shape a few years later. And the peoples of the More losers than winners in the USA's post-war world order broken into 170 separate companies. Only the banks were left intact. As far as Britain was concerned, the USA decided from 1942 to give enough aid to its floundering imperialist "ally' to keep British gold and dollar balances above $600m but below $1 billion, to ensure stability without real independence. Before the German surrender, US President Roosevelt had considered and even adopted for a period a plan of deindustrialising Germany and reducing it to little more than an agricultural economy. NORTH-SOUTH DIALOGUE...