DEVELOPMENT OF THIRD WORLD 17 wage legislation, and full employment. The swing away from the automatic adjustment process of the Gold Standard meant that European states were breaking up into isolated economic entities managing their own economies, with exchange controls, import quotas and import substitution. Such an international system would give a blow to\the U.S. whose trade and investment potential after the end of the Second World War was at its peak. The world system established under U.S. hegemony after the Second World War was not free-tradist as that under British hegemony in the nineteenth century. Trade liberalisation was through bilateral and multilateral negotiations rather than through unilateral means. The main objective of U.S. imperial domination was a guarantee of an "open door" jiot primarily to trade but to free enterprise, particularly against threats of nationalisation and protection. Hence the need to devise a system which would harness to its maximum U.S. investment interests, safeguarding trade interests as well, and pursuing U.S. hegemonic influence in the post-War international scene, whilst at the same time reconciling individual economic interests of the nation-states of Europe. The Bretton Woods institutional structure was the answer—the IMF and the World Bank being fashioned for the purpose of identifying the tools for a world economy open to U.S. investment and trade. As Eugene Black, a former President of the World Bank, stated in drumming up support for aid in the fifties, "Our Foreign Aid Programme constitutes a distinct benefit to American business." The safeguard worked into the IMF conditions for the purpose of creating guarantees for foreign investment as the primary objective was that the Fund frowned upon any distortions to free market forces such as government interventionist policies, protectionism, rationing and subsidies. For safeguarding U.S. trade interests, the Fund's ideology maintained tha't liberalised imports must be encouraged, and also discouraged discriminatory trade and currency practices suc^h/as multiple exchange rates which were seen as barriers to trade expansion. The U.S. was to be the final arbiter of exchange rates by subjecting nations to exchange rate adjustment with U.S. approval. The Fund's pool of resources totalling 29 billion was to serve as an incentive in favour of multilateral trade practices and against national and bilateral solutions to payments problems. For almost 12 years after the Second Worl<^ War, the U.S. remained the sole disbursor offoieign aid. In moving from the status of a U.S. dominated world economy to a world system in which newcomers such as Germahy and Japan were moving into core statijis, the U.S. found that it could still maintain the centre of gravity of an increasingly integrated world economy by forming a consortium of European aid-givers. The consortium \yas formed with the aim of 'sharing the burden' but, in effect, as business partners in a transnational expansion of capital overseas. As a memorandum from the Confederation of British Indsutryto the House of Commons put it in 1969, "for British Industry, help to the Third World is in a sense an investment in the development of markets and soutces of supply of raw materials," (Teresa