Word: nation
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Europe's six-nation Common Market went into business last New7 Year's Day amid acclaim as the harbinger of European unity, some of Europe's most vigorous and ubiquitous traders-notably the British-were conspicuously and wistfully left outside. Preferring its Commonwealth and U.S. customers, traditionally hesitant to subordinate its own island independence in any Continental supranational scheme, Britain had failed to persuade the Common Market to adopt a free-trade system that would have more loosely linked 17 European nations...
...political rapprochement ever arrives. For it is politics, not economics, that led to the bifurcation of Western Europe's trade, particularly politics between England and France, part of their centuries-old struggle for hegemony in modern Europe. It was France, with its history of narrow economic nationalism, that vetoed Britain's hopes for a free-trade area with the Common Market, and it was Britain's reluctance to give up its freedom of action that kept it from joining the Common Market as a full member. Economically, West Germany prefers the British free-trade area; politically...
...Britain's tight little island, the congestion of people, the spreading of the Welfare State (with its regulations as well as its benefits) and the inherent petty tyranny of multiplying bureaucrats add up to a frustrating experience for a determinedly individualistic nation. Even so doctrinaire a Socialist as the New Statesman's Editor Kingsley Martin grumbled last week: "Because there are too many people, regimentation becomes unavoidable, and so Socialism's basic idea of substituting cooperation for jungle fighting is lost; it becomes merely the demand for equal regimentation...
...from its past includes rich Roman ruins, live German land mines, and a fierce resentment among Libya's predominantly Arab 1,130,000 population against all things foreign. All things, that is, except foreign money, particularly U.S. dollars. Libya gets more foreign aid per capita than any other nation in the world...
...arid rock and sand; 99% of its people are illiterate, tending sheep, camels and goats to eke out a per capita income of less than $100 a year. More than $85 million in U.S. aid has poured into Libya in the past eight years to help the young nation to its feet. There is a special reason for U.S. generosity: Libya's government, headed by its near-absolute monarch, King Idris I, permits the U.S. Air Force to operate Wheelus field outside Tripoli, the largest U.S. airbase outside the U.S., where 12,000 Americans are stationed...