Comment

In his introduction to the conference on international economic stability Niels Thygesen said that the purpose of the conference was not to give deeper insight into the problems of which the present international economic crisis is composed, but to review these vast problems in their interrelated setting.

I think that the conference succeeded in doing so to a rather large extent. A number of cross-references easily can be made between the papers presented at the conference. Similar lines of reference could be drawn to other problems apart from those focused on by the organizers, some of those problems, however, being found in the periphery of the issue of the conference.

Nevertheless, I doubt whether the conference succeeded in clarifying for the participants the scope for action which might be open for the politicians in order to recreate economic stability internationally. I even doubt whether the participants got a sense of direction as to where such action is mostly needed.

Most, if not all the speakers approached the question at issue in the way in which we have been used to tackle any problem during the last generation. We have been brought up as problem-solvers; we have been told to define problems as scientifically as possible, and to suggest rational solutions to them. These possible solutions we have presented to the politicians and then asked them to choose.

It might be the economists who have suffered the most from this upbringing in the philosophical school of functionalism where the basic assumption is "the primacy of the social and the economic over the political aspects of man's life".¹ But it certainly has left its imprint on the political scientists who also reasoned as functionalists when they intervened in the discussions.

Therefore, the conference did not succeed in establishing a dialogue between these two groups. In my opinion it was because no attempt was made to analyse the political foundations of the international economic system and its present crisis.

Should I try to make such an attempt in a brief comment it only can take the form of an "outrageous proposition" like the following:

Our generation has been brought up in a political stable world. We have got used to consider this stability as natural or self-evident,and therefore not worth worrying about. But just because we did not care, we have surpassed the boundaries or the preconditionsof political stability and we thus now find ourselves in a world of instability.

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1. Robert Jackson: "Divergent Philosophical Approaches to Foreign Policy" in In Search of a New World Economic Order, edited by Hugh Corbet and Robert Jackson (London 1974). An excellent survey of the functionalist school is given in Charles Pentland: International Theory and European Integration (London 1973).

well as in the domestic situation in the rich
countries.

The international stable world I am referring to is the one established after the Second World War based on the supremacy of the United States in all fields, political and economical. The whole world outside the Soviet bloc had to rely on American power, and due to a major effort by the Truman administration the United States actively faced and shouldered this responsibility.

Based on the political consensus expressed in the Atlantic Charter the countries in Western Europe willingly let the U.S. become the primus inter pares in the so-called free world. On this basis a political-economic system embracing security, economic, monetary, trade and development policies was based. Due to the overall political stability of this world it was feasible to reach viable solutions to many problems through a functional

However, in all fields the functionalists have surpassed the boundaries of this world, either due to political blindness or to technological efficiency. The United States cannot and will not carry the burden any more. The only successor which can be found to the role of responsible political leadership is the Atlantic Alliance or the US-EC relationship, to use a more modem term.

Finn Gundelach expressed the same view quite explicitly, but in my opinion he did not go far enough into the problem by saying that "if the system does not work... it must be subscribed to lack of political will". How it will be possible to establish the political consensus-, on the basis of which a political will can be exercised, is hard to see. Henry Kissinger made a strong plea for it already in April 1973, but in vain. The failure of this attempt - the reason for which can be found on both sides of the Ocean - is in my opinion the main reason for the severe economic instability, which the world has suffered during the last three years.