New Variations on Old Themes
1 w h e n one reads today about the crises and problems facing NATO, it is worth realizing that they are essentially new variations on very old themes. Indeed, when one looks back at the thirty years of NATO, one finds barely a moment when the Alliance was not said to be in a crisis-and very often it was. The Alliance began at the time of the first Berlin crisis, and its signature came shortly before the end of the Soviet blockade, in spring, 1949. As soon as the ink was dry on the treaty’s paper, a battle began over German rearmament, and intensified after what was seen as the Soviet offensive in Korea. That battle lasted several years. As soon as a formula had been found for rearming the West Germans, the Suez crisis racked the Alliance; and as soon as that episode had been liquidated, Mr. Khrushchev began to bang shoes, threaten to bury us, and provoke another set of Berlin crises. That in turn led to another protracted intra-Alliance dispute over the famous-or infamousMulti-Lateral Force (MLF), which fostered not only discord among the allies but also an intellectual civil war among the academic members of the U.S. strategic community. That crisis more or less coincided with another long battle over General de Gaulle’s idiosyncracies and his decision to withdraw France from the military organization of the Alliance. The latest shock was the crisis of 1973-74 over the Middle East and the oil embargo. Even the present dilemmas pale by comparison. On the other hand, during the few periods that did not have any major crisis, the Europeans usually charged that they were being neglected by the Americans. That was the case during the exceptional period from 1969-the year of de Gaulle’s disappearance from the political scene-to Mr. Kissinger’s bizarre desire to christen 1973 the Year of the Continent, thus mixing the categories of time and space. (There was, during those quiet years, a crisis that agitated American-European relations, but not in NATO itself: the monetary crisis that began when President Nixon and Secretary of the Treasury Connally put an end to the convertibility of the dollar.)
Technology Transfer and East-West Trade: A Reappraisal
currently in one of those brief periods in history I T h e United States is during which there is an opportunity for critical reappraisal and change in its control of exports to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Recent Soviet actions have ended the euphoria of the detente era, and the temporary embargo of selected commercial products to the Soviet Union provided a break in the momentum of East-West trade over the past decade. Some may feel that the recent revision of the Export Administration Act, which emphasizes the control of critical technologies and assigns to the Department of Defense the responsibility for defining these critical technologies, has completed the process of export control review and that a new policy will automatically follow this mandate. Much work remains to be done to implement this policy, however, and the task before the administrators is urgent. If policy changes are not effected during this brief opportunity, a forthcoming Soviet peace initiative will reinforce the inertia of the past, and the U.S. will be committed to repeating the mistakes of the 1970s. The present strain in U.S.-Soviet relations has occurred against the background of a long-term trend toward increasing East-West trade, and it is likely that pressure from both sides for increasing East-West trade will continue and intensify in the decade ahead. The economies of the Soviet Union and its Comecon allies will be increasingly affected by the low capital and labor productivity of the last decade, and an impending labor shortage will create continued pressure for importing Western products and technology. Further, Eastern Europe's deficiencies in hard currencies will require that more and more of their trade involve a form of "barter" or "buy-back'' compensation. On the other hand, some Western firms, as a result of their experiences in the past decade with technology contracts, are beginning to question the long-term implications of a continuing flow of Western technology to Eastern Europe. *
Evangelical Law Firms and the Translation of Arguments: A study of the Evangelical Movement s Influence through National and International Courts
................................................................................................VII Acknowledgements......................................................................................IX Abbreviations............................................................................................XI Central Legal Terms .................................................................................XII