East-West Trade: A European View

Giovanni Agnelli

From Foreign Affairs, Summer 1980

Article preview: first 500 of 6,937 words total.

Summary:  The United States and the whole West are facing particularly hard times. Détente between the superpowers has come to a standstill; world peace is in jeopardy, and mistakes now can be more hazardous than ever before. The time has come to speak as candidly as possible, to avoid dangerous misunderstandings among Western partners and allies.

Giovanni Agnelli is Chairman of the Board of Fiat, S.p.A., of IFI (Istituto Finanziario Industriale) and of the Agnelli Foundation. From 1974 to 1976, he was Chairman of Confindustria, the Italian Federation of Industry.

The United States and the whole West are facing particularly hard times. Détente between the superpowers has come to a standstill; world peace is in jeopardy, and mistakes now can be more hazardous than ever before. The time has come to speak as candidly as possible, to avoid dangerous misunderstandings among Western partners and allies.

I am a businessman, not a politician. And though I think business to be good in itself, I am fully aware that, at critical times in history, business may heavily depend on political decision-making. Today, indeed, the decision-making process involves, to an unprecedented degree, measures in the economic sphere. At all times it is necessary that this process-widened to include Japan as well as Western Europe-rest on hard fact-finding efforts, shared judgments, agreed principles and values, full consultation, and the greatest possible degree of policy coordination. But when the measures being considered are at the economic level, it is especially critical to take into account the mutual interests, structural diversities, domestic political concerns, and capacity to act and exert influence of each partner.

Thus, as a former Japanese Foreign Minister, Kiichi Miyazawa, recently put it, there is today a special "need for America to acknowledge the plurality of interests of the allies and accept its consequences. . . . The definition of the interests of the alliance on any issue has to become a collective exercise." The same is emphatically true for Europe: if the United States fails to take into account the variety of national interests and viewpoints, which are the result of economic structures and of historical realities, it will be led to misjudge the reactions of its allies. Some recent and sudden changes in American policies, as well as the inadequacy of consultations, may have made it increasingly difficult for the Europeans and Japanese to align themselves with America's strategies, especially when they often have little or no influence in defining and timing such strategies.

Today, the aggressive thrust of Soviet military power, the Mideast diplomatic and political turmoil, the skyrocketing prices and the scarcity of oil, the galloping worldwide inflation, and the strains on the international monetary system have drastically changed the global situation and made the economic and social position of Europe much more difficult. Yet all this is paralleled by a new widespread feeling of impotence on the part of the Western alliance in coping with the latest Mideast political events, which both Iranians and Soviets have overtly exploited to their own advantage: the former by viciously tearing down the basic principles of international relations, the latter by trying to widen, step by step, their geopolitical sphere of influence.

In part the situation involves the newly perceived importance of relations with nations once considered in the category of developing nations, a new predominance of North-South relations or, as some might say, an end of Eurocentrism. But it also involves a redefinition of the notion of détente in East-West relations-if indeed it was ever defined at all-in terms of ...

End of preview: first 500 of 6,937 words total.