The New World Disorder: Towards Managed Trade and Economic Partnership for the Next Century

Abstract

The hope that the fragmentation of the Soviet subsystem would lead to the emergence of a ‘new world order’ appears increasingly remote. The high-consumption countries continue to face problems of weak growth, increasing unemployment, mounting public deficits and public debt, environmental decay, large trade imbalances and a continuing stand-off over the rules that will govern international trading relationships. For the low-consumption countries, the fragmentation of the old bipolar world has done nothing to resolve the debt crisis, the pressure for structural adjustment and the general stagnation of their economies. Ethnic tensions are rising not only within the old Soviet subsystem and in several low-consumption countries but also in the high-consumption countries with racist attacks on Turkish guest workers and immigrants in Germany, and on North African immigrants in France (see Chapter 5 below), and a new growth of racism in North America. The peace dividend is nowhere to be seen.