American trade policy and the process of liberalization in Soviet society

Abstract

“The great extent and rapid increase in international trade, in being the principle guarantee of the peace of the world is the great permanent security for the uninterrupted progress of the ideas., institutions and the character of the human race”. The identification of trade as a major source of human progress has a long intellectual tradition of which John Stuart Mill was only one, though possibly its most distinguished propagator. In the U.S.A. the assumption of a positive association between free trade and, at the international level, peace and security, and, at the domestic level, democracy and the guarantee of individual liberty, has been most explicitly associated with the Secretary of State, Gordell Hull: “International commerce conducted on a fair basis … is the greatest civilizer in the experience of the world”. It was Hull in concert with a number of like-minded officials at the State Department just prior to and after the end of the Second World War who laid down the intellectual framework for American foreign economic policy which successive Presidents and Secretaries of State have consistently endorsed, though with differing degrees of emphasis.