Barbara Ward Jackson
Essay
Oct
1962
What are programs of economic assistance for? After a dozen years of them, the question still has to be asked. Otherwise how can their effectiveness be judged? Clearly, there is no consensus. For some they are tools to stop Communism, for others to propagate Western ideas, for still others to defend Western interests. All these factors certainly enter in but they do not explain why or how such programs can have these effects. In fact, as critics are quick to point out, some assistance programs do not. Countries can swallow aid like blotting paper and at the end of the process are no more pro-Western, anti-Communist or secure and stable than they were at the start.
Essay
Apr
1962
It is already clear that the most serious obstacles to Britain's entry into the Common Market lie not so much in any direct clash of economic interest between Britain and Western Europe as in the difficulty of transforming and modifying the vast web of Britain's external trading commitments. A loose, worldwide, pragmatic association has to be shrunk, without too much damage, into a close, contractual relationship. For extra-European communities, the squeezing and pinching threaten economic disturbance and political resentment and nowhere perhaps do the problems seem more daunting than in independent Africa where, by a chance of history, the confrontation of Commonwealth and Common Market is physically most direct and potentially most disruptive.
