Alfred C. Neal

In the Atlantic Policy Studies conducted during the past three years by the Council on Foreign Relations four books with a predominantly economic content are being published.[i] The authors and subjects of these books are, in order of publication: John O. Coppock on agriculture; John Pincus on less developed countries; Bela Balassa on trade liberalization among industrial countries; and Richard N. Cooper on international monetary affairs (to be published later this year). From these sources and from others, Harold Van B. Cleveland, in another volume in the series, has drawn conclusions about Atlantic economic relations in his "The Atlantic Idea and Its European Rivals." The purpose of this article is not to review these significant studies but to appraise their conclusions about whether the economic connections and conflicts in the Atlantic are, on balance, moving the nations of the area toward a coherent community in some sense of the word.