"Interdependence": The Reality, the Concept, and the Policy

Abstract

During the entire postwar period, the term "interdependence" has figured repeatedly in statements by American governmental figures and in the writings of bourgeois political scientists. In the past two or three years, it has acquired a new ring. Whereas previously American expressions regarding "interdependence" applied to relationships within the framework of NATO, today they have to do with a considerably broader sphere of foreign policy relationships of the United States, including those involving the entire capitalist world and the developing countries. In a number of cases, American writers working on the "interdependence" problem have also included certain aspects of the relation between capitalist and socialist states. They undertake to analyze, from the standpoint of bourgeois political science, various aspects of "interdependence" — economic, physical-geographical (deriving from mankind's ever more intensive joint utilization of the atmosphere, the waters and floor of the world ocean, near outer space, solar and subsurface energy, etc.), military-political (having to do with the threat of destruction of world civilization should a nuclear war occur), cultural, and so on.